Jobs are going, going, gone... and will not be back. "Work",
however, will of course stay with us. People are often inclined to believe
that the more mechanized, computerized and robotized our society will become,
the less work and effort will be required to attain our objectives. It seems
obvious, but it is a total fallacy, because our new objectives, when we
define them, will be as hard as ever to obtain.
Hopefully we, as a society, will choose also to work as hard as ever, because
one of the reasons we are leaving the null-p. orbit with some urgency is
to get back to work before some friendly neighbor societies zoom ahead of
us. We need work, and work will stay with us... but jobs will never be back.
The job framework is dead.
The Rule of Autonomy means that self-employment is the way of the future.
We can get on with the work at hand, and obtain from workers the hyperjob-style
motivation we will need to move ahead in the Age of Creativity, only if
we accept "professionalization" and promote a new framework of
self-employment for human work-activities. We must take a "gambit
on leisure "
Leisure, in its most obvious connotation, could mean that we all go to the
beach. The leisure we have in mind here, though, is not collective farniente
but a more subtle twist to the work game: acceptance that what "work-for-man"
remains to be done in our society, in the fields of Education, Culture,
Health, Research and other services, simply does not fit the current job
framework and will have to be done "at one's leisure", the way
of high professionals... and hyperjobs.
Why will work, in the Age of Creativity, necessarily have to be done at
one's own leisure? Because our material needs have been fulfilled to the
point where further improvement to our welfare cannot come anymore from
the repetition of previous production models. Evolution, now, begs for creative
inquisitiveness; the ingenuity and motivation needed to identify as well
as satisfy the demand for intangibles does not fit the job framework. More
basic still, because the very nature of the human work we still require
now makes the actual job framework obsolete. For this type of work, it is
cumbersome and uncompetitive.
Thought is the greatest of multipliers. Even to-day, more and more people
are getting paid for "thinking"... but nothing can replace leisure
as a proper environment for original thinking. It's been told often how
great men have discovered the solutions to problems while they were dreaming:
we have reached the point where we, as human beings, must all have time
enough to dream.
The leisure gambit is not a revolution but a normal step in human evolution,
the ineluctable conclusion of the Industrial Age. Creativity has made "jobs"
irremediably obsolete and we will go beyond the employment structure we
have inherited from the early Industrial Age. Professionalization will grow
and permeate the whole labour market.
Beyond the gum-drop framework
The fundamental reason that jobs will be replaced by self-employment is
that the job framework is not adequate for the kind of work we need in the
future. What is a "job"? It is a work-package that can be sold
as a commodity; the objectives of a job must be known, its targets pre-determined,
and its execution planned in detail.
"Work-as-a-commodity", like any other commodity, must be subject
to some kind of quality control that should be easy to apply, if the employer
is to take into account productivity, figure out his costs, fix his selling
prices, project his profit and behave like a good manager. A job must have
precise standards of performance and, to have practical meaning, these standards
somehow must be quantified: your job is to produce this much of this, or
that many of these, each item in turn being a proper object for quality
control.
When producing goods, standards of performance are a proper tool for control.
You should do your job in a given time frame, for a given price. It is reasonable
to expect that a change in the quantity and quality of the "work/input"
will also reflect measurably on the quantity and quality of the "product/output",
so the employer may check the output of the workers, and pass judgment on
the work performance: just count the gum-drops every day and, for good measure,
chew one once in a while.
In a job, get it right once, then right always, since the best way to do
the job and produce more gum-drops soon becomes known and the repetition
of the most efficient behavior becomes the rule. Don't think, don't feel,
don't relate... Just do the job! A well-planned job should eliminate the
i factors, because they mean unnecessary risks and delays in mass-production.
Jobs, during the Industrial Age, could provide the perfect framework for
the repetitive activities of a great number of interchangeable workers toiling
as servants to the machines. It is a very efficient way to produce, if you
and I produce shoes or gum-drops.
As demand for production in the industrial sector was satisfied and more
services were required above the Prestige Barrier, though, systems had to
be developed to provide these service, and jobs were created, within these
new systems, just as if they had been an extension of the industrial framework.
To-day, with much more jobs of "services" than jobs of "production"
on the labour market and this creates a problem.
The problem is that the job framework is not adequate for services. When
we began providing services to the population on a large scale, concepts
like control and performance became fluid. The real objectives could not
be predetermined, the way they had been in the industrial sector. Just try
to eliminate the i factors in services and trouble begins, because
the real goal of "services" is not the visible production of this
or that, but the client's final satisfaction. Since we are in no position
to count and chew all these intangible services, how will we measure productivity
in procuring final satisfaction? How will we control their production?
We may ask, or presume that final satisfaction will be related to the occurrence
of some external event, of some tangible result that can be identified and
measured; but this, in daily practice, is a dubious proposition. We may
very well achieve the symbolic tangible results in a way that will leave
the customer quite unhappy and will thus defeat the original purpose...,
we may use unknowingly so much of the worker's inner resources to obtain
the result that it is not cost effective..., we may induce great temporary
"satisfaction" in a misinformed manic client, "dissatisfaction"
in his misinformed depressive neighbor, and inadvertently ruin long-term
goals for immediate small profits, in a way that was not possible when the
target was simply to produce more and better shoes or gum-drops.
How to control is a problem; but, even more important is the problem of
who will control? The worker in a job, if he thinks at all about evaluation,
thinks of his boss' opinion... and knows that his boss evaluates him most
of all in terms of tangible, immediate results. It is incidentally only
that he will receive good or bad marks in terms of the end-user's final
satisfaction; yet, this is the criterion that should really matter. The
reason a job is inadequate for services is that, in a job framework, the
direct control link is broken between the providers and the recipients of
services.
Finally, what will we control? When standards for evaluating the worker's
performance are applied to jobs in services, the only aspects of the job
that are evaluated accurately are the immediate, tangible, quantifiable
results. Unfortunately, most of all in fields like medicine or management,
these happen precisely to be the programmable aspects of the activity! The
essence of the services which the consumer wants - the Initiative, Imagination
and Interaction (like sympathy!) which would procure him real satisfaction
- are left out and even eventually neglected, because these cannot be measured
until it is too late for job evaluation of the worker's output by his supervisor,
and so are often not even considered to be a real part of the "job".
We may well treat patients in factory-like hospitals, teach and train children
in factory-like schools, but statistics and diplomas do not mean that patients
and students - or the population as a whole - are happy with the present
medical and educational systems, nor that these "services", medicine
and education, are really the best that we could have if our society really
cared as much as it should.
Because it is impossible to plan a smile, and that 9-to-5 sympathy is not
really what the child in school or the terminal patient wants, their needs
are unsatisfied and will remain so in the factory-like, jobs-staffed schools
and hospitals, until we realize that there is no all-purpose critical path
to achieve the unprogrammable, and that a gum-drop efficient job framework
does not necessarily work well to provide services.
What's so obviously true in the fields of Health and Education is true also
for all creative activities. True for every significant bit of work that
will still be needed after Helots have taken over. The requirements of unprogrammable
activities, specifically the necessary reliance on i factors, oppose
the use of strict controls, and workers who must rely on intensive application
of these factors cannot perform adequately in a job framework. They need
more autonomy and their increased bargaining power will get them the autonomy
they need.
Therefore, the way to solve the employment problem is not to try
to create more "jobs" that will straight-jacket people in a framework
fit for other purposes, and bound them in a job in which they will have
to fight a losing battle to express feelings, creativity and entrepreneurship
. The way is not for "more jobs", and it is safe to assume that,
from now on, "jobs" as we have known them will represent a diminishing
part of society's productive activities, that each job will not be so time
consuming... and that the "job" will not be at the core of productive
life as it has been in the past.
Whatever the nature of the tasks that will be designed from now on to satisfy
our needs, they will have to take into account the new Rule of Autonomy
and to fit into a new framework for creativity. The way out of our present
problems is not "more jobs", it is growing professionalism in
and out of the employment structure.
Lone Worker in the outside
It will be mostly "out". Because the creative imperative may have
those who remain in the employment structure become more professional, more
mobile and independent, it may bring about increased autonomy for them at
all decision levels to reflect this new situation, but these advantages
will be as nothing compared to the great opportunities that will be offered
to the professional workers "outside" the job framework.
A gambit on leisure means more than renouncing the gum-drop framework for
services, more than the professionalization of a large segment of those
who remain within the employment structure; it means self-employment as
the rule rather than the exception. Many workers, indeed, will not only
push the traditional production system towards creativity from within, but
will decide to compete with it from the outside.
Because machines have already made all the rest trivial, the hottest demand
on the market, even to-day, is not for what behemoth machine-tools can produce;
it is for the delivery of "symbiotic" services that Helots, at
last, are now about to make plentiful. The bonanza is in "high services",
of course, but also in what used to be the turf of "quasi-jobs"
holders. It is more than a publicity stunt, when chairmen of fast-food franchising
chains resign to operate franchises of their own!
The juicy profit margins, now, exist in the booming market for services
high and low and all intangibles. The race to corner this market is already
on amongst to-day's corporate giants; just look around and see all of them
switching priority from hardware to software as fast as the traffic will
allow. For about the last two centuries, "BIG" in production held
all the trumps; so we might have expected Big Business to be alone in this
race; To-day, though, the Rule of Creativity has turned the table. There
is a new dark horse in that race.
In the market for these services that a man with his Helot can produce,
the new ways of working tip the scales against the giants of industry in
favor of any competent self-employed professional working on his own outside
the employment structure. The production system will evolve and try to adapt
to the demand for intangibles; but, to recoup their investments in industrial
production, giants will have to do it slowly... and it will be much too
slowly! The workers themselves, working on their own, will get at this new
demand long before the system does!
The workers exiled in null-p. will come back with a sweet vengeance, joined
by those who will renounce employment out of sheer boredom, and they will
all begin to work on their own as technicians, repairmen, salesmen, therapists,
middlemen, tutors, advisers, consultants, counsellors, guides, experts and
helpers at anything, from living to loving, to getting to Heaven. They will
be a formidable threat, but the system must expect a more devastating punch
still, far below the belt, when Helots begin to multiply.
When the average worker will realize that he is slipping into Parkinsonian
leisure, it is illusory to believe that he will sit dumbly by his Helot
and daydream. Bet that he will rise to the challenge, jumping into his own
hyperjob or, more probably, working on the side. More competitive by far
than the traditional self-employed, the employees in Parkinsonian leisure
themselves, in their spare time - and even on the job as much as they dare!
- will begin to devote most of their energy and "leisure" providing
professional services that they will sell. They will compete with the system
and win, cornering the market for software and grabbing, before their employers
do, an increasing share of the market for the unprogrammable services and
intangibles. When the race really gets into the final stretch, put your
bet on Lone Worker and watch it coming in on the outside...
The question is not whether workers will do it, they already do whenever
they have a chance. Workers are craving to fill their leisure: they always
do... The question is whether we, as a society, will accept the challenge
to let people fill their leisure with constructive work rather than trivia.
This may not be that easy to accept, because it will close the avenue for
expansion of the present production system. Our decision will be known as
we redefine our position on work "on the side" and accept or condemn
work after hours: moonlighting.
A gambit on leisure will mean removing the taboos against work after hours
and lifting the ban against moonlighting, accepting that those who will
remain captives of the job framework do creative work side by side with
their traditional jobs. We cannot accept that they operate their own business
on their employers' time, of course, but we must agree that they do what
they like on their own free time, "at their leisure". As a consequence,
contracting rather than hiring will become the reasonable first choice of
wary employers. More work, less jobs.
If we favor creative work on the side, both for people in the job framework
and, as we shall see later, for all the transfer payment recipients, you
can trust growing affluence together with a reduced workload to lead workers,
at their own leisure, in productive activities that will both increase global
welfare and match their aspirations. Give people security with leisure,
leave them free to obey the new Rule of Autonomy and they will all do it:
we will flow smoothly from the job framework into a framework for creativity.
The creative imperative will have brought not farniente, but entrepreneurship.
On the other hand, if we go on prohibiting or actively discouraging work
on the side work to protect the job framework, what can we expect the workers
to do in their free time but to fly to hyperjobs for a while... and then
to throw in the towel? Resist the Rule of Autonomy, and Helots will bring
despair, not only to unemployed workers who will feel the dice are loaded
so heavily against a return to productive employment that they will not
even try anymore, but also to an increasing number of people who will drop
out and to those still employed who will do a bare minimum of work and slowly
withdraw from it all.
Our society of positive reinforcement and affluence has few credible threats
to wave and few promises of more bounty to make. Work without sticks and
for intangible carrots is a risky proposition... unless you can rely on
ambition. If nonsense prevails and the door to entrepreneurship - including
"moonlighting" - is not at least left ajar, what will fuel the
drive towards creativity? Workers will have the time, but will they have
the "dream"?
The way out of our present problems is to design a new framework for creativity.
We must monitor autonomy, and regulate the phenomenon of moon-lighting,
rather than prohibit it or let it go wild, allowing the very same working
conditions (financial security with leisure) which have led to hyperjobs
for the few in some sectors to apply, now, to the whole labour force. Productive
leisure must become a normal part of the working life of all workers.