Workers everywhere worry about the future of their jobs. After all, for the vast majority, income from paid employment (in one form or another) is the dominant means to provide for the necessities of life. The availability, stability, and earning potential of paid work are essential to our well-being. The world of work is being transformed by technology: machines and computers can perform ever-more complex tasks (including those involving judgment and learning), reigniting age-old fears that workers will be replaced by machines. Of course, workers have worried about machines taking their jobs since the dawn of capitalism. In historical experience, technological change by itself does not produce long-lasting unemployment: unemployment certainly does exist, but usually for other reasons (like failed macroeconomic policies). But technological change certainly causes dislocation and hardship for certain groups of workers – and the resulting costs are much worse if affected workers don’t get alternative job opportunities, mobility assistance, and retraining. There is nothing inevitable about how technology is developed, applied, and managed; the impacts of technology depend entirely on choices made regarding its design, implementation, and management. At present, most of those decisions are made unilaterally by the owners and top managers of private businesses, who have free rein (in most countries) to choose what technologies are implemented, to what ends, and who bears the resulting costs and benefits. Perhaps we should be less concerned with technology, and more with the unbalanced decision-making structure within which technology is presently governed. Moreover, technology is not the only force transforming the world of work. The organisational and social context of work is also in major flux. Indeed, changes in work organisation and employment relations are having a more immediate impact on workers than the much-hyped advent of robots and artificial intelligence. A permanent, fulltime , paid job with accompanying benefits (like job security, paid time off, and pension and health programs) is no longer normal practice in most labour markets – and is a utopian dream for most young workers. In its place, precarious work in many forms (including temporary, part-time, casual, irregular, and nominally independent or selfemployed positions) is the new normal. In the extreme, precarious work is now organised through ‘gigs’: on-demand, piece-work tasks allocated and compensated through faceless digital platforms. These twin disruptions – changing technology and changing working relationships – have led some observers to conclude that work, broadly defined, can no longer be the financial and social foundation of households and society. People will need to find other ways to support themselves, and/or fall back on income supports delivered by the state (perhaps through a guaranteed annual income). This vision of a workless future can be described positively (as a world in which humans have ample leisure time to pursue a range of interests) or negatively (as a dystopia in which wealth becomes concentrated amongst a narrow property-owning elite, while most people huddle at the margins seeking a way to survive). Both scenarios assume that paid work is diminishing in importance. This assumption is misplaced. Robots or no robots, work is here to stay There are enduring features of paid work that ensure it will remain the cornerstone of the economy, and the major pillar of financial well-being for most households. The question is not whether or not work will somehow ‘disappear’: it can’t. The question is how society will choose to treat, protect, and compensate the work that will remain essential to its economic and social progress. In the realm of digital platforms and ‘gigs’, for example, paid work is still very clearly the driving force of production and growth. Modern digital businesses rely on paid workers to produce their ultimate output. But those firms have developed clever systems to minimise or evade the risks, costs and obligations traditionally faced by employers (minimum wages, notice of dismissal, pension and health benefits, etc.). Contrary to the popular assumption that digital platforms are the ‘cutting edge’ of business innovation, their work practices are centuries old: including piece-work compensation, on-demand work scheduling, and labour hire systems that have been around as long as capitalism. In previous decades, limits were imposed on some of...
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Open Access
Jul 30, 2021
J.E Duval + 2
