Topic is my June 26, 1995 review of The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era by Jeremy Rifkin, 1995, G. P. Putnam's Sons (350 pp, $24.95). Notes are by Dave Ketchum, 607-687-5026, and placed on the Internet Jan. 24, 1998.
Contents:
Extra material - related, but not part of the book:
Components of the book:
The special section, and sections for each chapter, follow. I summarize each chapter with combinations of my own words and marked quotations from the text, and flag my comments about the text with "DWK:". Each of these can be combinations of my own words and marked quotations from the text (marked by me with single quotes, so that double quotes in quoted text retain their normal function).
Per the jacket: 'Jeremy Rifkin is the author of more than a dozen books on economic trends and issues relating to science, technology, and culture. He holds a degree in economics from the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce of the University of Pennsylvania, and a degree in international affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, D.C.'
The book covers the bases, describing the problems and the areas where change should be considered - seems worth reading for this information. NOT CLEAR that its recommendations would really work! I agree that transfer payments are appropriate from those who are more capable to those who need help - just not clear that this book offers a clue to the needed management of these payments.
Two hundred years ago 75/100 of the labor force had to be in agriculture to feed us. Now, with machines and automation, 3/100 of the labor force is adequate to feed us. Until recently this produced no surplus - industry, and then services, absorbed all those freed. Now, something new is required, and Jeremy Rifkin writes on this in detail.
'If he is right--and his range and depth of research strongly suggests that he is right--we are pushing the relationship of machines and work beyond the uneasy accommodation of the last two hundred years into a new relationship about whose configuration we can say little except that it will have to be markedly different from that of the past.'
'Global unemployment has now reached its highest level since the great depression of the 1930s.' 'After years of wishful forecasts and false starts, the new computer and communications technologies are finally making their long-anticipated impact on the workplace and the economy, throwing the world community into the grip of a third great industrial revolution.'
We need a few "symbolic analysts" who will command good salaries. But, then: 'Just outside the new high-tech global village lie a growing number of destitute and desperate human beings, many of whom are turning to a life of crime and creating a vast new criminal subculture.' DWK: Agreed that this problem MUST be handled more intelligently than has happened so far.
'Now, for the first time, human labor is being systematically eliminated from the production process.'
Substituting Software for Employees: This is important, but just starting.
Re-engineering: Also important - but middle management is often declared surplus here.
'The fact is that while less than 1 percent of all U.S. companies employ 500 or more workers, these big firms still employed more than 41 percent of all the workers in the private sector at the end of the last decade. And it is these corporate giants that are re-engineering their operations and letting go a record number of employees.' 'In total, nearly 16 million American workers, or 13 percent of the labor force, were unemployed or underemployed in 1993.' DWK: He makes a good case for this.
A World Without Workers: Why do we seem to be going backwards rather than forwards? 'The answer lies in understanding a little-known but important economic concept that has long dominated the thinking of both business and government leaders around the world.'
Conventional wisdom has been that as workers get displaced by new technologies, they will become available for and get employed in other growing parts of the economy. In 1867, in the first volume of Capital, Karl Marx 'predicted that the increasing automation of production would eventually eliminate the worker altogether.' DWK: It appears that Marx's prediction is close to the current status - and something must be done.
The Roaring Twenties: 'Between 1920 and 1927, productivity in American industry rose by 40 percent.' Unemployment grew, and there was a glut of unsaleable goods.
The Gospel of Mass Consumption: 'The metamorphosis of consumption from vice to virtue is one of the most important yet least examined phenomena of the twentieth century.'
'Many companies sought new ways to reorient their products to increase sales. Coca-Cola was originally marketed as a headache remedy.' But, Asa Chandler noted that, among maladies, thirst occurs more often than headaches.
'Nothing, however, proved more successful in reorienting the buying habits of American wage earners than the notion of consumer credit.'
The Share the Work Movement: 'On July 20, 1932, the AFL Executive Council, meeting in Atlantic City, drafted a statement calling on President Hoover to convene a conference of business and labor leaders for the purpose of implementing a thirty-hour workweek to "create work opportunities for millions of idle men and women."' Some major employers did this voluntarily. In 1933 the Senate passed a bill to mandate this - but President Roosevelt helped kill the bill without a House vote.
The New Deal: Collapsing consumer credit had stalled the "gospel of consumption", and Congress had stymied "share the work," but Roosevelt will put America back to work - with plenty of activist programs in which government creates jobs. 'The New Deal was at best only a partial success. In 1940 the nation's unemployment still hovered at nearly 15 percent. Although the rate was considerably lower than in 1933, when it had reached a high of 24.9 percent, the economy continued in a depression.' World War II took care of unemployment.
The Postwar World: 'By the late 1980s, over 20,000 major defense contracting corporations and an additional 100,000 subcontractors were working on Pentagon projects.' 'By 1975 total government spending was more than 33.2 percent of the nation's GNP.' 'Finally, by the mid-1970s more than 19 percent of all U.S. workers had jobs in the public sector, making the governmet the largest employer in the United States.'
New Realities: 'The new economic realities of the coming century make it far less likely that either the marketplace or public sector will once again be able to rescue the economy from increasing technological unemployment and weakened consumer demand.' Some dream of markets abroad - but there is much competition for those markets.
Retraining for What?: 'The Clinton administration has pinned its hopes on retraining millions of Americans for high-tech jobs as the only viable means of reducing technological unemployment and improving the economic well-being of American workers.' Many Americans never got the basic education needed as a starting point for retraining - anyway, there is no point to it unless they find needed skills to train for.
The Shrinking Public Sector: It is being forced to shrink. 'Although the Clinton administration does not openly use the term trickle-down technology, it continues to pursue an economic agenda based squarely on its underlying assumptions. Those assumptions are becoming increasingly suspect, even dangerous.' 'If the market entrepreneurs have always viewed new technologies as a means to generate increased production, greater profit, and more and more work, the public has long entertained an alternative vision--that one day technology will replace human labor and free them for a life of increasing leisure.'
DWK: The public can and should get the leisure; the entrepreneurs should get enough success to keep them trying; and the problem is how to glue these goals together into a workable system.
Electricity provided visions of utopia. 'Technology became the new secular God.'
Engineering Utopia: 'The age-old Christian vision of eternal salvation was tempered by the new belief in an earthly paradise.'
The Cult of Efficiency: 'More efficient use of time, they believed, would lead to a workerless future of vast material abundance and unlimited free time.' In 1912 the quality of public education was questioned.
From Democracy to Technocracy: 'The proponents of technocracy favored "rule by science" rather than "rule by man"' - and were getting many followers in the 1930s. The downside included: 'Hitler's meteoric rise to power and the Third Reich's fanatical obsession with technological efficiency gave many social thinkers, and not a few voters, second thoughts about the technocrats' call for a technological dictatorship in the United States.' Our race into space with the Russians rekindled interest.
The First Industrial Revolution: steam power generated by coal. The Second (1860-1914): oil and electricity. The Third (1945-future): "thinking machines."
Machines That Think: Computers, etc.
The Plugged-in Species: More about the history of computers. 'By 1951 six electronic computers were running.' And: 'IBM, which had scoffed at the commercial potential of computers just two years earlier--predicting a worldwide market of no more than twenty-five machines--suddenly embraced the new technology.'
Putting Computers to Work: After World War II, 'Talk of the "automatic factory" was in the air.' Labor unrest helped management embrace the concept more enthusiastically, and computers helped make it practical.
Most of them had been slaves; after the Civil War many of them became sharecroppers, in which they formally had freedom - but practically were often as victimized as some of their ancestors had been. Soon after World War II most of their labor was taken over by machines, so many of them migrated north to industry.
Caught Between Technologies: So they got jobs in industry - and the jobs evaporated due to automation.
Automation and the Making of the Urban Underclass: 'By the late 1980s one out of every four young African American males was either in prison or on probation. In the nation's capital, Washington DC, 42 percent of the black male population between eighteen and twenty-five years of age is either in jail, on parole, awaiting trial, or being sought by the police.' 'For the first time in American history, the African-American was no longer needed in the economic system.'
Automation was recognized as a concern as early as the 1960s, and some noted that the 'Negroes are the hardest hit.'
The Government Steers a Middle Course: Wasn't clear what to do.
Labor's Capitulation: 'By abandoning the question of control over the technology in favor of calls for retraining, the unions lost much of their effective bargaining power.' DWK: Not clear that the control would have been productive; the merits of subsidized retraining seem debatable.
There is opportunity to modernize, and competition forces business to pay attention.
Old-fashioned Management: This was heirarchical, and probably wor+ked as well as anything available in Henry Ford's day.
The Switch to Lean Production: Taking advantage of the brains of the workers allows both better efficiency and more flexibility. Japanese automakers were leaders.
Re-engineering the Workplace: Some stories.
Major revolutions have occurred in agriculture.
Soil and Software: Computers will help take us farther than has already happened. As one example, the Israelis are experimenting with ROMPER (Robotic Melon Picker) - with cameras to "see" and ability to judge ripeness via "smell." Trouble is, ROMPER would replace Palestinian labor. There is also work on a sheep shearer: '"The robot arms must position the shears on a bouncing target and make clean cuts right next to the sheep's skin without inflicting wounds or leaving a punk rocker's hairdo."'
Molecular Farming: The 'new gene-splicing technologies are changing the very ways plants and animals are produced.' In one experiment, 'scientists inserted the gene that emits light in a firefly into the genetic code of a tobacco plant, forcing the plant to glow.' DWK: We should wonder more whether their ability to make changes is exceeding their ability to judge whether the results are dangerous.
The End of Outdoor Agriculture: An example is producing vanilla from laboratory plant-cell cultures.
Since the 1880s, "continuous process" techniques have been radically increasing output per worker (decreasing need for workers).
Automating the Automobile: Topic is the automobile industry.
Computing Steel: 'The new high-technology mills have successfully transformed steelmaking from a batch process to a highly automated continuous operation.'
The Silicon Collar Workforce: About other industries. At the Victor Company in Japan, two workers replaced 150.
'For more than forty years, the service sector has been absorbing the job losses in the manufacturing industries.' BUT, now services are being automated.
At Your Service: More automation.
The Virtual Office: More computers and automation; less people and paper. Resumix reads resumes submitted on paper and analyzes them: 'Field tests comparing Resumix to human personnel directors shows the silicon worker to be at least as skilled in making evaluations and much quicker in processing applications.'
Downsizing the Wholesale and Retail Sectors: Wholesalers are becoming increasingly redundant. Barcodes and other automation come to retailing.
Digitizing the Professions, Education, and Art: Automation comes here too, both for efficiency in old tasks and for new automation-only tasks.
It is widely proclaimed that the Third Industrial Revolution will have a trickle-down effect, benefitting all - but a growing number of losers see trickle-down bypassing them.
Squeezing the Little Guy: 'Although stockholders have greatly profited from new technologies and advances in productivity, benefits have not "trickled down" to the average worker.' 'The decline in average wages is attributable in part to the waning influence of unions.'
The Declining Middle: The first automation wave hit blue-collar workers; re-engineering hits middle management now.
The New Cosmopolitans: By comparison top management and those with now-needed skills are doing disturbingly well. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich expects the haves to segregate themselves from the have-nots in enclaves.
The Other America: 'The new high-technology revolution is likely to exacerbate the growing tensions between rich and poor.'
One view, this is a great new world; another, alienated workers are seeing rising levels of stress and job insecurity.
High-Tech Stress: For many, the environment of smart machines allows demands by management for working harder while job content becomes less and less satisfying.
Biorhythms and Burnout: 'The physical fatigue generated by the fast pace of the older industrial economy is being eclipsed by the mental fatigue generated by the nanosecond pace of the new information economy.' 'In recent surveys, more than 75 percent of American workers "describe their jobs as stressful and believe that the pressure is steadily increasing."' '"A person under stress is an accident about to happen."'
The New Reserve Army: Larger and larger percentages of the workforce is trapped in part-time and temporary jobs with few or none of the benefits provided to permanent full-time employees (who also get better job security). Even the federal government gets in the act: after hiring temps, fire them just short of the year's service that would qualify them for health and retirement benefits - and then rehire them days later. DWK: He implies that management is deliberately creating this problem. How much is created by laws that increase the relative cost of hiring permanent full-time employees?
A Slow Death: For Americans, especially: 'To be underemployed or unemployed is to feel unproductive and increasingly worthless.' Those who lose jobs to become hard-core unemployed may start by venting 'their anger and frustration at former co-workers and employers.' 'In 1992 ... there were 111,000 incidents of workplace violence, including 750 fatal shootings.' Later the rage may turn inward, perhaps leading to psychological death and, perhaps, suicide. The pain extends to those who are waiting for pink slips.
Unemployment is rising and scaring governments worldwide.
High-Tech Politics in Europe: 'All in all, European labor is 50 percent more expensive than U.S. or Japanese labor.' 'Public spending in Europe is also higher than in any other industrial region of the world.' Governments are getting scared - unemployment goes up, demanding more spending on the social safety net - and spending on the social safety net already is pricing more workers into unemployment.
Automating the Third World: The third world is becoming able to compete industrially. This used to be because of cheap labor - now automation makes labor costs less significant but nearness to potential new markets becomes important. BUT - this means more dreaming of industrial jobs just as they are becoming relatively scarcer: 'Between now and the year 2010, the developing world is expected to add more than 700 million men and women to its labor force--a working population that is larger than the entire labor force of the industrial world in 1990.' 'The clash between rising population pressures and falling job opportunities will shape the geopolitics of the emerging high-tech global economy well into the next century.'
'In a growing number of industrialized and newly emerging nations, technology displacement and increasing unemployment are leading to a dramatic rise in crime and random violence, providing a clear portent of the troubled times ahead.' 'George Dismukes, who is currently serving a sixteen-year sentence ... reminded the rest of America:
DWK: George Dismukes said it well! We must look for a real solution - we already have more prisons than we can afford to operate or fill - and, everytime we fill another one, we tear at the fabric of society a little more. Then, with our present mindset, we see this tear as justification for building yet another one or two!
'The New York City school system now operates the eleventh-largest security force in the United States, with more than 2,400 officers.' 'Some kids have even informed friends and relatives of what kind of funeral floral arrangements they would like to have.' 'Once-safe communities are now becoming war zones, with reports of rapes, drive-by shootings, drug trafficking, and robberies.' 'In 1992 alone, more than 16 percent of all U.S. homeowners installed electronic security systems.' DWK: While security systems are an understandable, even appropriate, response to the tears in society's fabric, we need to realize that, like building prisons, they do nothing to heal the underlying problems.
A Global Problem: 'Military historian Martin Van Creveld says that the distinctions between war and crime are going to blur and even break down as marauding bands of outlaws, some with vague political goals, menace the global village with hit-and-run murders, car bombings, kidnappings, and high-profile massacres.'
'At issue is the very concept of work itself. How does humanity begin to prepare for a future in which most formal work will have passed from human beings to machines?'
The previous industrial revolutions reduced the work week to about 40 hours. Perhaps it should be reduced toward 20. BUT, somehow, we have arranged society such that those who work are now expected to work OVER 40 hours!
Toward a High-Tech Workweek: There are scattered moves toward shorter work weeks.
Workers' Claims on Productivity: 'The business community has long operated under the assumption that gains in productivity brought on by the introduction of new technologies rightfully belong to the stockholders and corporate management in the form of increased dividends and larger salaries and other benefits.' Workers think they have a right to part or all of this. Workers have, indirectly, become owners via pension funds - but they have little or no control as to how this money is invested, and object that too much of it is devoted to eliminating jobs.
Modest Proposals: Resistance to shortening the workweek may soften. Still, 'Hours of work have increased by 3.6 percent since 1981, while the number of workers employed has steadily declined.' There are also attempts to increase the minimum wage - and, perhaps, tie it to the CPI. DWK: There is more, but nothing here sounds very effective.
Trading Work for Leisure: There is wide interest in reducing work schedules to make more room for leisure and other interests - such a giving needed attention to children.
'After centuries of defining human worth in strictly "productive" terms, the wholesale replacement of human labor with machine labor leaves the mass worker without self-definition or societal function.' 'The largest global corporations have assets exceeding the GNP of many countries.' 'Standing armies cannot stop or even slow down the accelerating flow of information and communications across national frontiers.' 'Corporations and nationstates are, after all, creatures of the industrial era.' Something new is needed to adapt to changed circumstances - perhaps: 'With the employed having more free time at their disposal and the unemployed having idle time on their hands, the opportunity exdsts to harness the unused labor of millions of people toward constructive tasks outside the private and public sectors.'
Life Beyond the Marketplace: Here we talk about the third sector (volunteerism, community bonds, etc.), beyond the private and public sectors. It had 'slipped to the margins of public life,' but now is regaining importance, with assets 'now equal nearly half those of the federal government.'
An Alternate Vision: 'Although voluntary organizations exist in most other countries, and are rapidly becoming a major social force, nowhere are they as well developed as in the United States.'
'In the coming century, the market and public sectors are going to play an ever-reduced role in the day-to-day lives of human beings around the world. The power vacuum will likely be taken up either by the growth of an increasing outlaw subculture or by greater participation in the third sector.' 'Only by building strong, self-sustaining local communities will people in every country be able to withstand the forces of technological displacement and market globalization that are threatening the livelihoods and survival of much of the human family.
A New Role for Government: 'Forging a new partnership between the government and third sector to rebuild the social economy could help restore civic life in every nation.' The Clinton administration talks about this. The GOP talked about it in the 1980s, but: 'In the end, the third sector was seriously compromised and undermined by the very political forces that professed to be its champions and advocates.'
The Third Sector and Partisan Politics: Some details - the 1980s GOP wanted to milk the third sector; liberals are often scared that it will be incompetent or compete for jobs that would otherwise be paid.
Making the Third Sector Work: Government needs to be supportive.
Shadow Wages for Volunteer Work: Let's, via tax deductions, indirectly pay for 'volunteer' work.
A Social Wage for Community Service: 'Providing a social wage--as an alternative to welfare--for millions of the nation's poor, in return for working in the nonprofit sector, would help not only the recipients but also the communities in which their labor is put to use.' 'By providing a job classification scheme, grading system, and salary scale similar to the ones used in the public sector, third sector organizations could recruit from the broad ranks of the unemployed, staffing their organizations with the proper mix of unskilled, skilled, and professional labor that would insure success in the communities they serve.' Some argue for a 'guaranteed annual income' as preferable to present welfare. Others for demanding that welfare recipients "work."
Financing the Transition: Need significant government funds. 'Some of the money could come from savings brought about by gradually replacing many of the current welfare bureaucracies with direct payments to persons performing community-service work.' Some also from cutting corporate welfare, some by cutting defense. Not enough, so: 'Much of the revenue for financing a social wage and community-service program wil probably have to come from new taxes.' Probably a value-added tax (VAT) - but that is regressive.
'The independent sector is playing an increasingly important social role in nations around the world.'
A Vew Voice for Democracy: 'Not surprisingly, the new interest in third-sector associations is also paralleling the worldwide spread of democratic movements.' 'Fisher says that "what you have in the third world is the third sector promoting the private sector on a massive scale."'
The Last, Best Hope: 'Northern and Southern hemisphere countries alike face the threats and opportunities brought on by powerful market forces and new technological realities.' 'The high-tech savants remain unconvinced of the crisis at hand.' 'The critics, on the other hand, as well as a growing nember of people already left at the wayside of the Third Industrial Revolution, are beginning to question where the new jobs are going to come from.'
'This much we know for sure: We are entering into a new period in history where machines will increasingly replace human labor in the production of goods and services. Although timetables are difficult to predict, we are set on a firm course to an automated future and will likely approach a near-workerless era, at least in manufacturing, by the early decades of the coming century. The service sector, while slower to automate, will probably approach a nearly automated state by the mid-decades of the next century.' 'If the talent, energy, and resourcefulness of hundreds of millions of men and women are not redirected to constructive ends, civilization will probably continue to disintegrate into a state of increasing destitution and lawlessness from which there may be no easy return.' DWK: I endorse this last paragraph, along with the thesis that something must be done - just not clear to me that Heilbroner has a clear vision as to what to do.
© 1998 by Dave Ketchum, 108 Halstead Ave., Owego, NY 13827-1708, 607-687-5026, davek@baka.com Permission to copy? Permission to make a single copy of any part or parts for personal use, or to copy the entire set of notes (including this paragraph), for non-profit purposes and without change other than (optionally) adding clearly identified notes provided by the copier, is hereby granted.