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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.
This just goes to show the overwhelming importance of intelligence - people with low IQs can't compete in a high-tech economy. While this is a tragedy in our lifetime, in the near future, all children will be genetically engineered to be what we would consider to be geniuses [although, to their peers, the will be simply average], and the playing field will be level again.
Much like the automation efforts of the past, I don't think work will go "away" per se. It will change. The jobs will be different.
.25 an hour on an assembly line setting screws into mounts so the next guy at .40 an hour can screw them in. We do need someone to do routine maintenance and programming at 20 an hour on the machines that do the job.
We no longer need some guy to stand around for
I don't think we have in the past, or will in the future, see a dramatic decrease in jobs. What we will see is some jobs going away and some magically appearing.
Who had a job programming 50 years ago?
Then Katz says the author claims that this mobile, insecure worker will become politically aware at a world level, and we'll have a whole new class of involved citizens.
I don't see how you get there from here. Where's step B?
It seems that workers may become more familiar with the global sources of their labor problems, but without the avenue of local solutions, then I don't see these people becoming political agents. More likely, they will complain about global and national problems, but be unable to think of a way to solve those problems.
In other words, a bunch of complainers, rather than folks who take action. Remind you of any online communities you know?
This sounds just like Rifkin's "The End of Work" in which he lamented the decline of ordinary labor and the rise of the "symbolic analyst" class amidst predictions of economic doom and gloom. His book was written in, wait for it... 1995. Just a few years later the tech boom put us on cloud 9. Now the business cycle has turned so doom books are becoming popular again. In fact, the publication of doom books may signal the bottom of the business cycle, just as articles featuring "the bull" or "the bear" in Time Magazine signal a turn in the stock market.
So, if you have a copy of Rifkin's book, you could probably save yourself some money on this one. Dust it off and read it again.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I heard that same argument 5, 10 and 15 years ago. 4GLs were going to put programmers out of business as non-technical folks were going to be rolling out full-scale solutions in minutes...
I'm sure that programming skill and competency and efficiency will continue to increase in all countries, but so will the demand for these services as the countries themselves need this type of work as they develop...
So, I'm not going to worry too much about the sky falling just yet.
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
I agree that a good portion of my job, mainly concerned with turning existing fax-and-paper business processes into web-based apps, will probably be gone in 15 years (though I do wonder what the specific dates you give are based on). But what do you folks think about jobs in database design, network/DB/system administration, etc.? I don't see those sorts of positions being exported or replaced with idiot-proof GUI tools, at least not at the enterprise level.
It's a well known concept in economics that increasing free trade ("globalization") while raising the standard of living for the world overall, will result in lower average wages in the US. The other side of the coin is that it is also supposed to make things less expensive, so the lower wages don't hurt so much. I guess we'll see.
The job upheaval is a direct result of the information economy and the fluid nature of modern business. Will people in power screw someone else to make themselves better off? Duh... Get over it. It's been that way since the beginning and isn't going to change. Whining about it won't help.
On top of that, get ready to be "Moore's law'd'" out of most other programming jobs you might be thinking of taking - by 2015 computers will be fast enough that point-and-drool paint-by-numbers tools will be available to rapidly and idiotically autogenerate most of the code you write today with no discernable performance loss.
And who's going to create these magical "point-and-drool" applications? Programmers. I've no doubt the job market will be very different in 2015 from it is today, I don't think it'll be quite as bleak as you are making it out to be.
Think about HTML. Initially, you had to write it all yourself. Then, WYSIWYG (point-and-drool) applications started coming out (FrontPage, Netscape Composer, Dreamweaver). These can make life easier for those that know HTML, and allow those that don't know it to create a web page. But it still took programmers to create the program.
Also, I think you are underestimating the difficulty of some applications. While new technology might make old skills obsolete, this will only create a need for new skills (which you'd better learn).
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
I don't want to be 'locked' into a 'job for life'.
:)
I also don't think being middle class is an 'entitlement'.
To truly make a living, I need to provide services and products other people want to pay for. *Everyone* has to live with that constraint.
Up until this decade, products could only be made laboriously, by hand, by individuals, or by factories, cheaply. You get the expensive one offs and the mass produced cheapos.
This is changing. Printers and print technology makes anyone a publisher. Websites and computers makes anyone an information and entertainment provider. Power tools and other equipment makes anyone a cabinetmaker or artisan.
It used to be that being skilled was available to only those who found a master to teach them. Today *everyone* can be skilled. Everyone can fiberglass, woodwork, paint, sew, cook, write, and carve. In a few years you can add to that list: Everyone can program, model, and make movies.
I don't know about anyone else, but standards of living has raised. I don't *have* to be an accountant for 40 years. I don't *want* to be an accountant for 40 years. I'm a QA person right now, but I look forward to a time when I'm not. I can go get a certification in architecture and I can go back to school and become an architect, and with my own hands and my own resources, build my own house. I can grow my own food. I can do *everything*
This is of course very inefficient
The point being is that being comfortable and being happy is not something that is being taken away by the eroding of the middle class. It should be as simple as maximizing yourself and figuring out in any situation, what can I offer to people as a service to get money? Information technology is helping to make that kind of search even easier than ever, too.
Of course I'll be called optimistic and unrealistic, but how else can you be? If you face the future with thoughts of doom and gloom, what's motivating you to keep walking, instead of layiing down to die?
GPL Deconstructed
but i think to fully appreciate the effect of this you must put it into its true context. Consider indeed the US southern "rust belt" phenomenon of preceding decades, or if it is more familiar to you the departure of the garment industry in the mid to late 80's. read the parent of this post for interesting info. after such a big boom it's easy to forget how things were. hide messages in paragraphs like this from the eds. it seemed that the industry was about to fall off a cliff, and you know what, it did! people lost jobs, and those particular jobs never did come back. but people retrained and managed to get newer, and usually better work. and in the end perhaps it was all in the interests of efficiency, and may even have promoted the good times that followed.
wasn't someone predicting not too long ago that, because jobs are getting scarcer and automation is becoming more prevalent, companies would start hiring people for 20-30 hour-a-week jobs at the pay scale of 40 hour-a-week jobs? and that all those people with nothing to do in their increased spare time would wind up increasing volunteerism?
maybe the two ideas will be merged. with increased automation, there's less of a need for manual labor, but the one thing machines can't do is socialize. customers always want to talk to a live person.
of course, how well you socialize varies wildly, depending on what's happening in your life these days and on your general mood. this means that you will be moving from job to job more frequently, losing more of that job security mentioned in the review.
I think there's a flaw or two in the theory, however. the book apparently tells us that we will all become more like workers in the third world, but that the internet will help democratize us more and make us more astute on world happenings. we will all magically become citizens of the world; international boundaries will fade in importance.
and yet:
here's my vision of the future: more and more people will be paid less and less. the currently privileged jobs will disappear; if you aren't an executive, you are a low-class worker. the multinationals will consolidate power, while national governments will become administrators of local infrastructure like roads, law enforcement and sewage. the insecure masses will flee into various revolutionary or religious factions. a state of perpetual conflict will break out between factions; the wealthy will tend to isolate themselves from the masses, hiring more security guards while retreating to secluded homes to create a buffer between themselves and the world they have created. the internet will become heavily censored, but there will be underground channels for each of the factions.
not very original, I realize, but hey, we've been headed that way for a very long time, and we all know it.
Our public school system was developed during the agrarian era (e.g., summers off to work the farm). And it seems to have adjusted itself to the industrial era of jobs for life. However, the schools have not caught up with the information era because that would mean fundamental change.
School involves getting up and going to the classroom (the factory), punching in, and doing the proscribed work until age 18. Then in college you have more freedom. High school is absolete. It should be replaced with a variety of choices: community colleges and universities, trade schools, practical experience, etc.
The first few years of school should be spent learning the basics of reading, writing, and math. After that, kids should be presented with a menu of options based on their interests and apptitudes. With such a system you would get way more learning going on in the teenage years -- and less boredom and even less violence. I think that things like Columbine are partially the result of the agrarian/factory high school system that crams thousands of kids into an confined space and an obsolete learning environment.
The result of such a flexible system would be that many more students would leave school prepared for college and the real world.
The idea that everybody should work is a fairly modern one. It's become tangled up with our lives and economy in various ways that made sense at the time but are now a hindrance.
Increasing automation should make us all better off, but doesn't. The problems boil down to the concept "if I can't get a job, I won't have any money". To properly fix this we need to overhaul the way money works. The real problem is that we have a debt based economy which *forces* us to perpetually invest efficiency gains rather than enjoying them.
You're probably thinking: what the fuck am I talking about. Sorry - it's not easy to convey how this works or what's wrong with it in a few sentences and it's extremely difficult to find decent information about this online. You won't find it in most economic texts, but these are so full of holes it's a wonder that economics as a discipline has more respect than astrology.
The problem boils down to the fact that almost all money today is created in the form of debt. Extra stuff gets created constantly. As more stuff is created, either more money needs to be created or prices need to fall otherwise nobody could afford to buy it an afford to buy it. Currently money is created faster than stuff which is why we have positive inflation rates. However this money is all created in the form of debt. Governments don't make money [cash is only about 4% of money in system] - private banks *invent* money by lending out more than they borrow. When you write a check, you are effectively using a currency printed by your bank. Since interest must be paid on loans money is only loaned to those who will invest it, ie almost all the created money is targeted for investment. The monetary system keeps society on a technological conveyor belt.
So, we live in a system where the humans are being automated out of the system, but none of these advancements *can* go towards making life more pleasant or free. In fact, people must work more and more. It doesn't have to be like this, and there is a simple solution, but it'll never happen while humanity is asleep. People spend their entire adult lives trying to aquire something that they don't understand to even the slightest degree. It's funny how people can be so obsessed with money, but if you ask them where it comes from all you get is a blank stare or some irrelevent crap about the mint.
Understanding this stuff is not difficult but it does require thinking clearly about things that we normally don't think about at all, and there are lots of aspects to it - pollution, poverty, ever decreasing quality of consumer goods. An intelligent and informative book that explains this stuff and related ideas quite thoroughly is "Confronting Tyranny - The case for monetary reform" by Mike Rowbotham, but this is hard to get hold of.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
There is nothing new about these ideas except the fact that their application has become transnational and cosmopolitan in scope.
...continually... revolutionises the division of labour within society, and incessantly launches masses of capital and of working people from one branch of production to another. ...(T)his absolute contradiction between the technical necessities of Modern Industry, and the social character inherent in its capitalistic form, dispels all fixity and security in the situation of the labourer...(and) constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands his means of subsistence, and, by suppressing his detail function, to make him superfluous....a social anarchy which turns every economic progress into a
Karl Marx, writing in ca. 1867 penned these words:
"Modern Industry
social calamity. This is the negative side.....Modern Industry,...compels society, under the penalty of death, to replace the detail worker of to-day, crippled by the life long repetition of
one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to a mere fragment of a man, by the fully
developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any changes of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."
This is from Capital, Vol 1, Chapter XV, Machinery and Modern Industry, section 9, pp 486- 488 (my edition, at least).
Marx always thought that the positive potential of
Modern Industry to produce educated well rounded human beings would always subordinated to the necessary pursuit of short run profits inherent in the capitalistic way of doing things.
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose
Bekwin
Go to the grocery store and buy a loaf of bread with your satisfaction of doing a damned good job.
Would you be satisfied with Lucent giving you a hearty handshake and a pat on the back for doing a good job? Or would you wrap that middle-manager's necktie around a ceiling fan until he forked over a check?
Please--spare me the working-class-blues routine. You wouldn't expect anything other than a bottom-line-oriented paycheck from your employer; why hold them to a different standard?
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Why is no one talking about the expanding gulf of earnings mentioned in the review? 80%(!!!) of Americans have their effective income reduced by 19% in about 20 years (about 1% per year average), yet the "top managers" have their income increased by 19 % in 10 years (about 2% per year). And we are talking about US of A, the most powerful state in the world, ever. We are not even talking about some other much sorrier places.
I find this trend very alarming, but not unexpected. The top dogs make the rules, and guess whose benefit are the rules for? This is really the same situation throughout the history of civilization, which is exploitation.
Exploitation?! How can that be? Why not? It is the trend in human history, it is what a person in power does to keep his advantage (in general). Except that in an "advanced democracy" like USA, the exploitation assumes a more advanced form. It is not done with guns to the head, it is done with more legal means, which is threat of loss of income. Wait till the high tech "globalization" hits you (and I think it will be much sooner that 10-15 years), and your job is now being done someone else in India or China (no disrespect to workers in that country at all!). Then you sit there and wonder: what the hell happened? Then you think and remember who benefits from all this, and who makes the rules, and how come the rules seem right, but the outcome feel so damn wrong?
There is no simple answer, really. Just interesting to watch the world whirl along. A few people get the carrot, a wast majority just keep chasing thinking that they can get the carrot. I think it helps to know what is going on, even though one can't realistically change the situation.
Cheers.
Americans are also slaves to the consumerist mentality. Houses that would've been considered mansions 50 yrs ago are now considered the standard for new suburban developments. Most families own multiple cars, many of them costing well over $20K. To pay for all of this both parents work (assuming a couple with a family) full time. Once the bar is set higher I guess it'll be time to change the child labor laws so the kids can start supporting the household also.
I'd rather have the time off the Europeans have than a fat paycheck. The richest person in the world can never buy more time than the poorest person. There'll always be 24 hrs in a day.
I got a big kick once when a contractor told me about the huge kitchens they were putting into all of the new mini-mansions. He said the people never used them to cook since they were too busy working paying for the expensive house! Plus he'd come back to do work months later and the houses barely had any furniture in them because they were so in debt for the lavish home and cars. Spend spend spend!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
At the beginning of the 20th century, the vast majority of workers in the U.S. were dedicated to agrarian jobs. Obviously, within a very short time period there was massive social change as the the majority of work shifted from agricultural pursuits to industrial pursuits where it peaked at over 60% in the mid 60%. During the early part of this period, there was much public grief as everyone complained how horrible it was that people were working in factories and the sort. There was much hysterionics as various alarmists talked about the disaster in the making.
By the year 2000, less than 2% of the U.S. population was dedicated to agricultural work. Agricultural producitivity expanded something like 200 fold during this period. With the wonderful, colorfully, jaundiced lens of hindsight, of course, we know this was no disaster.
Something similar is happening now. The 1960s saw the beginning of the decline of industry in the U.S., and it's been steadily decreasing ever since.
Service jobs are beginning to rule the day, and -- just like the early 1900's -- hysterionic alarmists are espousing their doomsday predictions (n.b.: I'm not accusing the author of the book of this, just a general observation).
A close examination of the tranformation, however, yields the information that the very fastest growing sections of the service sector are the professional services. We are quickly becoming a society where specialized knowledge rules the day. Lawyers, physicians, engineers, hell even the mechanics and secretaries are workers who need to understand computers and computing.
I'm not sure where I'm going with all this, except to point out that by 2100 and most likely a lot sooner very few people will be in jobs directly attached to manufacturing. We'll be one giant service economy.
C//
The second was written a couple of years ago, and asserts that innovation and openness to change will keep the American programmer on top for years.
One of the ongoing memes in American culture is our eagerness for new technology and ideas. Many Americans falsely believe that many of the worlds most important inventions were actually invented here. They weren't. The vast majority of them were invented somewhere else first and then blithely ignored. What happened here is that the invention was adopted.
The continued presence or absence of our technological eagerness and flexible predicates our future success.
This is one of the reasons I think the Japanese will fly very high indeed across the 21st century. They have an appetite for technology that exceeds even our own.
There are many cultures world wide that have this appetite now. I firmly believe that this will quite reliably predict the success of these countries through the 21st century, mitigated of course by outside influences.
The converse is also true. Look at the cultures that repudiate technology; they're practically guaranteed to remain impoverished has-been countries which any of the dominate players could roll over on a whim.
N.B.: I'm not making any claim that America is the superior culture in this regard any more. I will say, however, that we are on the list.
C//
I'd like to see you tell that to my father-in-law, a freelance technical writer who has found it increasingly difficult to do his work as he's reached his 60's.
"If you can't spend the time to improve, screw you, those that wish to improve will survive, and you'll starve."
God. I can't believe your fucking callous arrogance.
I'm not a religious fellow, but maybe you might want to think about the response Dickens wrote to Scrooge's comment: "If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
From Dickens: "Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! To hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust."
In other words, you aren't "superior" by living by "the law of the jungle" -- you're inferior. An inferior human being.
I can't wait til you get old. If there's any justice, you'll be shown the same lack of compassion you've shown today.
Leave room in your brave new world for the well-being of the rest of humanity, or you too may become a lesson for future generations.
Funny you should say this. In the book 'Brave New World' a very comfortable place was made for the underclasses. They got everything they needed and were permanently prevented from bettering themselves.
What you call the 'elites' in modern society would be better termed 'the ones that provide for every advance in the world and make it a better place'. As long as the elites you sneer at are able to provide a better place to live for the other 99%, then the world will get along just fine.
Thanks mostly to the unconstrained greed of the "elite," the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bigger than ever, and it continues to grow.
Apparently, you only have to do 3 things in America to avoid poverty: finish high school, marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of the families who do these 3 things are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do them are poor. The greedy elites may have made holding onto a middle class life-style harder than ever, but avoiding poverty seems doable.
How many regimes have been toppled because arrogant rulers thought the peasants were powerless?
None! At least in the 19th and 20th centuries, revolutions are largely middle class affairs, backed by disaffected soldiers. In Latin America there are instances of peasant revolts but they are typically defeated. There might be a case for a successful peasant revolt in China except one arrogant set of rulers seems to have been replaced with another.
Despite the damage you say the greedy elites have done to America, I can't think of even one who is an object of puplic hatred. America is beset with many problems but the threat of a popular uprising is perhaps the most remote.