Joblessness, pain, power, pathology and promise

Abstract

Corporate downsizing has destroyed millions of well‐paying jobs just in the USA. The psychological, medical, and social costs are staggering. Families are fragmented, communities impoverished, democracies weakened by oligopolistic, plutocratic corporarchies, and Third World nations recolonized and their subsistence economies decimated. Most of the employee survivors of this economic and class warfare are working longer and harder and are suffering various stress, burnout, and psychiatric symptoms. In addition to intense global competition, cheap foreign labour, and superefficient technologies, there are psychocultural factors contributing to the “jobless economy”: executive ambition, greed, power‐lust, and winner‐take‐all ideologies. Solutions include changes in tax and other federal policies, restrictive corporate charters, shorter workweeks, community development programmes, and co‐operative, employee‐owned enterprises. The learning organization and fourth‐wave business suggest an evolutionary paradigm for the twenty‐first century based on global responsibility, economic justice, a new bottom line, and a restoration of meaningful, sustainable work.