The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin
One of the book I read on my holiday was The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin and it’s a great book to start your thinking process. I will try to present you some highlights.
As a backgrounder, the book talks about the problems we will have with too many unemployed people as we are moving into a time when we just don’t need a lot of people to produce all the world needs. Technology has made that possible and retraining 10 million farmers that sell sugar to become knowledge workers because science has figured out how to build perfect sweeteners in the lab. There are lots of different possibilities, one being that when there are performance improvements, you don’t fire workers but you let them work less hours for almost the same money.
This is actually what France and Belgium are doing and seem to have higher productivity than the US, partly attributed to the higher moral through more flexible working schedules and in terms of France, a 35 hour work week for 39 hour pay supported by the state. The thing is that 75% of the labor force in most industrial countries perform some form of repetitive task and these people can be replaced by thinking machines like the horse was replaced by the tractor. By now it is getting clearer that the loss of jobs in the industrial sector does not come predominantly from moving those jobs overseas, but simply by local automation. That all these unemployed people will suddenly work in smaller companies is unlikely too with 1% of the US companies employing 41% of the workers in the private sector.
The idea of trickle-down technology, meaning that advances in technology will trickle down and lead to more jobs, have been followed by lots of heads of state but is now proving to be incorrect. Think of it like this. Efficiency increases make sense, until supply surpasses demand, in which case you cannot produce more with the same amount of people, but produce the same output with fewer people. That is why marketing is so important as it creates the needs and wants that can be filled by oversupply.
In 1890 Herman Hollerith invented a tabulator machine to calculate the U.S. Consensus Bureau’s consensus data and set up the “Tabulating Machine Company”, which in 1924 became … IBM! Just a little bit of info that comes from the book that some might not know about. I love stuff like this.
Another item… The black community in the US went from slaves to sharecroppers to industrial unskilled blue-collar workers, the first to be replaced by the automation movement.
The problem partly comes from scientific management principles in which the hierarchy is king and management simply specify the manual labor based on scientific management principles. This can of course be automated. In the knowledge economy, just to add a point from my side, this doesn’t work anymore as the knowledge is being created at the bottom, which should probably change to be the top. Management then becomes, as Tom Peters said, Barrier Removal Professionals.
The Japanese introduced “kaizen” to the factory, meaning continuous improvement. I did ask myself in the book why we need release cycles in software management if a factory can practically work without it, at least for smaller problems. But back to the point, in Japan, all have the right to access all computerized information. It’s very open. They have been taking it to extremes really, like Japan’s National Bicycle Company. They measure you in a shop, tailor your bike, and let you choose each part. This is then sent electronically to the factory and can be shipped to you in under three hours!!! They now delay this for a week because people want the “joy of anticipation”. :)
Here is an example of where this is leading. In 1950, 50% of the US workforce was in farming. Today (1993) this is 2.7%. Research seems to point to the fully automated farm to be 20 years in the future, so 2013. There is a better statistic for why the trickle-down technology theory is untrue though. This can be found in the average weekly wage in the US. In 1979 this was $387, but in 1989 it was $335! In 1989, 1% of US families earned 14.1% of the total income, had 38.3% of the total net worth and 50.3% of the net financial assets. The net worth of the 834000 richest families was $5.62 trillion in 1993, while the bottom 90% had $4.8 trillion!!!