Work is an anachronism, a product of the industrial revolution. Start now preparing transition plans for all endangered Second Wave industries. Focusing on human issues: old age, health, loneliness, parenting. Continuous learning. Even with all these measures, a large number of people will not find a new job - therefore, a guaranteed income is needed. Such trends at the beginning of the 21st century were described in 1986 by the great futurist Alvin Toffler.
Alvin Toffler is an American philosopher, sociologist and futurologist, one of the authors of the concept of a post-industrial society. The person who "invented" the principles of the information society. We published his conversation with Fyodor Burlatsky about the upcoming demassification of society. Their conversation took place in 1987.
A year earlier, Alvin Toffler presented an interesting work about work in the near future. It was published in the Soviet scientific collection "New Technocratic Wave in the West" (collection of texts, publishing house "Progress", 1986). We publish part of Toffler's work.
“We may be on the brink of an even bigger economic disaster. I have been repeating this since at least 1975, when I published Ecospasm. But today's crisis is unlike all previous depressions. This is not the new all-encompassing crisis of 1933. It stems from completely different reasons, and if we want to fight it, we must identify its distinguishing features.
The distinctive feature of this crisis is that it is a radical reorganization, not a collapse. This is a restructuring crisis. We need new ideas. We're talking about unemployment, but we don't even know what kind of “work” will be in the new society. Neither work nor unemployment is today what it was in the past.
Consumption is a new form of economic activity
I have always mentally made the distinction between working for hire in an exchange-based economy and unpaid non-exchange work - an activity I call Presuming. This is what women or men do when raising children; when they build an extension to the house; when they grow their own vegetables, sew their own clothes, or work on their own in a hospital. They produce goods and services. They work. But not for a fee. Consumption is a key factor in the new economy. But for our purposes, let's now stick to the issue of paid work, which is what most people have in mind when they talk about work.
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Unlike many people who write about this, I have worked for many years in the dirtiest factory jobs. Worker labor. Manual labor. Work on the conveyor. In addition, I have been to factories all over the world. I have studied labor in some of the most modern factories and offices. All this convinces me that our general ideas about work are outdated. They go back to Adam Smith and Karl Marx and are associated with the concept of division of labor and alienation. A closer source is Wright Mills' concept of clerical work.
We all know how miserable part-time factory jobs in the traditional manufacturing industry have been and still are. And this factory style of work was carried over to the office, where each worker does very small, endlessly repetitive work, without any understanding of its relationship to the whole, without any hope of originality or creativity. But it is precisely these types of labor, these forms of dehumanized labor that cease to exist. What amazes me all the time is the nostalgia that makes me keep the kind of work that is common among people who have never done it.
New professions
Millions of workers, even in the most technologically advanced countries, are still forced to take miserable jobs that provide just this kind of work. But the key to the future of work lies in realizing that routine, repetitive, part-time work is not more effective. She has already outlived in technologically advanced countries. Therefore, such work will become obsolete regardless of what various companies, unions and governments do about it. We should not cry and lament over this. And something in this direction is already there. This is part of a restructuring economy.
Spreading the Third Wave realm involves a very different type of work. New professions already exist or will soon appear, ranging from PET scan technicians in hospitals, resource recovery specialists, people capable of repairing voice recognition equipment, organizing and coordinating in-home production, ocean development, materials designers, specialists to install photovoltage panels, underwater archaeologists, fiber optics specialists, space laboratory architects to direct broadcast satellite programmers, video training theorists, and teleconferencing consultants. Few, if any, of these new types of professions may be suitable for routinization and Taylorization.as was possible with most professions in the past.
The new intelligent worker
In the sectors of the Second Wave we have production stops and wage declines, profits decline, more and more pressure on the worker. In the sectors of the Third Wave, it is mainly about the participation of workers in decision-making; increasing production and enrichment instead of increasing fractionality; about a time-flexible work schedule instead of a rigid one; about such concomitant advantages, when the worker is given the opportunity to choose, rather than present him with a fait accompli; about how to encourage creativity rather than demanding blind obedience.
The Third Wave worker is more independent, more resourceful, and no longer an appendage of the machine. A worker with a specialty or professional knowledge is typical. Like a preindustrial artisan with a toolbox of hand tools, new intelligent workers have the skill and information that make up their toolbox of spiritual tools. New workers are significantly more like independent artisans than interchangeable conveyor workers. They are younger, better educated. They hate routine. They prefer to work uncontrollably in order to do their job the way they see fit. They want to have the right to speak. They are used to change, ambiguity, flexible organization. They represent a new silt, and their number is growing.
As the economy transitions from Wave Two to Wave Three, we acquire a new set of values along with new professions, which implies significant implications for employers in government policy, in Marxist political economy, for trade unions.
Non-profit associations
We are likely to see an explosion of new and diverse organizational forms. Instead of economies formed by private and public enterprises or even a mixture of them, we can see "electronic cooperatives", religious and family production associations, nonprofit workers associations - much more forms than we can currently imagine. Among them, no doubt, there will also be self-governing enterprises.
In the near future, however, depending on the country, we will still talk about either state or private companies. They will increasingly come under pressure to reorganize on a less bureaucratic and less hierarchical basis. The more the economy and society enter the period of the Third Wave, the less effective traditional forms of organization will become.
Guaranteed income
Industrial civilization, or Second Wave civilization, paid for various professions. The Third Wave civilization will also pay for certain traits and abilities better than others. In all periods, those with poorly paid professions had to take on a lesser role in society or had to fight to change the reward system. I suspect this will continue in the future. Which brings me back to the idea of a guaranteed minimum income for all those who contribute to production. Whether this is done through the negative income tax proposed by Milton Friedman, or as proposed by an economist such as Robert Theobald, all technological societies will have to move in this direction. Such payment systems do not need to be standardized or centralized. They can also cover the private sector. We can show considerable creative initiative regarding the method, but if high-tech countries do not address this problem, they will face explosive social conflicts.
Alvin Toffler's Eight Rules for the Beginning of the 21st Century
1) The concept of "work" is an anachronism, a product of the industrial revolution. As the industrial era ends, the concept of work must either disappear over time, or it must be realistically reinterpreted to include many activities that are productive but are not paid. It is necessary to rethink such terms as "workplace", "employment", "unemployment".
2) Start now preparing transition plans for all endangered Second Wave industries. "Base" industries will never again be basic.
3) Fostering the growth of new basic industries: telecommunications, biotechnology, ocean engineering, programming, computer science, electronics, etc.
4) Invention and dissemination of services as a new foundation and key to future employment. Focusing on human issues: old age, health, loneliness, parenting. This sector can be removed from the government bureaucracy and transferred to a decentralized business sector based on small associations serving micro-markets and consisting of small businesses, charitable organizations, cooperative communities and public agencies.
5) Continuous learning. Training itself can be a major employer, as well as a giant consumer of video equipment, computers, games, movies and other products that also provide jobs.
6) Fundamentally change the system of mass education. Modern schools produce too many factory-style workers for jobs that will no longer exist. Diversify. Individualize. Decentralize. Fewer local schools. More education at home. Great involvement of parents. More creativity, less cramming. It is the routine work that will disappear the fastest.
7) Even with all these measures, a large number of people will not find a new job. But they can be productive if we help them produce the valuable goods and services they need outside the labor market. This means designing new products, materials, tools, even new crops that they can produce for themselves with guidance and support services. “Consumers,” or the self-service sector, can lighten the burden on the exchange sector while also making decent living possible for millions.
8) Finally, the minimum guaranteed income. Even consumers need some cash income. Payments cannot be transferred through regular channels. They must be organized as negative income taxes, or they can be distributed in a decentralized, privatized manner through families, churches, schools, businesses, local governments, and hundreds of other channels - in ways that reduce the role of centralized bureaucracy and the concentration of power. Only if we combine the more traditional modes of action in a successful way into one joint effort can we begin to overcome the unemployment crisis. Once we abandon the old, narrow concept of production and understand that millions are involved in this overcoming to make it possible - even if they themselves do not have a formal job - we will lay the moral foundation for an entirely new one.a humane reward system that matches the new perspectives of the new Third Wave economy.