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The Brave New World of Work
Beck has written a surprising and provocative book about how working is changing radically under our very noses with little serious discussion in our media or political communities. We see stories all the time about employment rates, but most people have little or no sense of the radical changes affecting the nature of work.
Work has become unstable throughout the modern world, writes Beck, a professor of sociology at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich. Skills can be suddenly devalued, jobs obliterated, social and welfare safety nets eroded. Companies merge, collapse, form and reform, often at the expense of their workers.
Fear and economic insecurity prevail among the middle-class majority as well as the underclass, writes Beck. "The United States is the only advanced country where productivity has constantly risen over the past twenty years, while the income of most of its citizens (eight out of ten) has either stagnated or declined. The average weekly earnings of 80 per cent of Americans in gainful employment dropped by roughly 18 per cent between l973 and l995, he reports, from $315 to $258 a week. At the same time, the real income of top managers soared by 19 per cent in just ten years between 1979 and 1989.
As entire industries rise or fall, as firms expand, shrink, separate, "downsize" and restructure, employees at all but the highest levels must go to work each day without knowing whether they will have their jobs or for how long. The newly unstable work society leads to the erosion of the middle-class and in our collective interest in civics. According to Beck, decline in civic participation and voting is directly tied to the decline of work society, which he says is closely linked to worker attitudes about democracy.
Is this all bleak? No, according to Beck. Although the loss of work security creates a temporary loss of security and social capital, he believes that down the road, this individuality and freedom -- much of it empowered by the same technology that has eroded work security -- will create a new kind of global citizen, one who is better informed, more communicative and civically-involved than before. He foresees a more inclusive kind of transnational society, with less nationalism and provincialism. The alternative facing the world is either collapse or political self-renewal, and he foresees the latter.
It's an interesting look at a subject that will affect almost every single American whose lives are being shaped by powerful technological forces they sense but don't quite understand. Work is a critical subject, and technology is changing it. In Brave New World of Work Beck helps us understand how and gives us some sense of how the new workplace might affect our futures.
You can purchase Brave New World of Work at Fatbrain.
... but until recently the majority of people doing IT jobs were insulated from them; I distinctly remeber a ./ discussion about the need for unions in the IT field. Most ppl seemed to think that since chances were good that the demand was higher that the workforce available unions didn't made any sense... after all, we were all part of the 'New Economy', we laught at principles made in the XIX century my a bearded german! Most ppl couldn't even graps the principle of conflict between workers and bosses... after all, if ppl want best conditions, why, the Company is going to suffer, and then they will be out of job! Crazy fools!.
Now the same thing that gave birth to this kind of distinctive thinking is coming back for revenge. With the demand/workforce balance changing, and since most ppl in IT were oh-so-damn-liberal in what regards to workers rights - after all, they didn't need to - they are suffering the *same thing* that most other workers in traditional fields have suffered for *centuries*.
It's all so new.... but only to the ones that had illusions about the true nature of the relations between a worker and the guys in charge.
It's so pitifull to see - and I know them first-hand - ppl that during the 90's laughed at other ppls problems and said that they were badly-paid, unemployed, etc, because they were lazy and unfit now being in the damn some situation they joked about then.
Transnacional society, better opportunities? You bet. Capital has no nacionality, never had, so it already know how to play that game. The mantra of "being able to work in what country I want" is not so great when there are thousands of ppl doing the exact thing you do for less money.
(oh, and yes, I'm marxist, just in case someone misses the point and 'acuses me' of such).
fsm
I will not diminish the wrenching horror of losing one's job. But this comment sounds exactly like ones from people who got laid off from factories in the 80s. "Whatever happened to hard work?..." "Used to be, a man could learn a trade, put in his 40 hours, and provide for his family...." What we discovered, with the advent of all these new technologies, as well as with the growth of practicing business across national borders, is that there are more efficient ways of doing things. Pidgeon-holing an individual into doing a single task for their entire working life is antithetical to the progress that capitalism values. And while, in that huge shift away from factories and manual trades in the US, many people lost their jobs, a lot of goods got cheaper for the rest of us because the labor required to make them wasn't so expensive anymore.
Assuming Katz got the point of the book right, I think the author hit the nail right on the head. We (meaning the post-industrialized nations) have seen a shift that requires everyone to be educated enough to learn whatever trade is needed at a given time. Technology now changes too fast for someone to spend 40 years fastening rivets or programming personal computers that run Windows. A society of citizens with sufficient education in science, technology and business will be flexible enough to keep up with the changing world and do exactly what our capitalist system says we should: keep getting more efficient and finding better uses of our time and resources. Until then, we will continue to experience the turmoil as seen by factory workers in the 80s and by the poster I'm replying to.
America leads the world in yearly work hours (1940 hours), with the except of Japan and Korea. Northern European countries have fallen from near 3000 at the beginning of the 20th century to 1500 or less now. This includes leaves and long vacations. In fact the number of American work hours have increased in the past couple decades due to more women working full time, and the overtime work ethic.
Why is this? One explanation is the Puritan morality that "work is good". This reappears in cycles- the 50s/60s Corporation Man, 80s Yuppie, 90s Dot.commer.
Another explanation is the tax and benefits structure. You dont get decent benefits until you work fulltime. To the employer, high employee overhead mans working existing employees more rather than hiring several to do the total work.
Drucker suggests it is happening already, and that some of the long term causes of it are the longer term aging of our society (with the attendent problems with SS), and the lack of long term prospects with a single employeer.
I think I'll have to pick up the book, since I really enjoyed Drucker's articles, and as I've indicated, I expect the conclusions to be similar, and likewise interesting.
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
Very true.
I rather like Ian Angell's take on it - in "The New Barbarian Manifesto", he says that yes, today's technological elite will remain mobile and today's middle class will vanish into the underclass.
The difference between Angell and Beck is that Angell (correctly, IMO) scoffs at the idea that the technological elite will be a "more communicative and civically-involved" citizen. Acting in their own (enlightened or otherwise) self-interest, such citizens may be more "global" and "better-informed", but they'll likely just relocate to wherever taxes are lowest and the underclass is kept at a safe distance.
The "hard problem" (if you're a government) will be retaining your knowledge workers (on whom your economy depends) while retaining the voting support of your service workers. Problem is, if your service workers vote themselves benefits to the point that it becomes more profitable for your global knowledge workers to leave, the knowledge workers will take off for more friendly markets, leaving your service workers with nothing to do, because nothing's being produced in your country anymore. Either way, the welfare state is toast.
Classic Angell essays: http://csrc.lse.ac.uk/angell.htm
Recommended Reading: PDFs of "The signs are clear: the future is inequality" and "Winners and Losers in the Information Age".
Representative quotation: "Democracy will degenerate to being the means of governing the immobile and dependent service workers."
I point out here that Angell doesn't see this as a "good thing" (as his admirers often do) or a "bad thing" (as do his detractors). His point, as an economist, is merely that such a change is inevitable, and that governments and individuals had better get ready for it.