The end of work

One of the burning social issues of our time is under-employment. 

Under-employment is one aspect of the global challenge of how to ensure that individuals are able to obtain enough purchasing power to sustain themselves and their dependents: under-employment is one face of the more general problem of economic poverty. 

We are repeatedly assured by those advocating a more-market approach to economic management that unemployment and poverty will be best addressed by economic growth and free trade. 

There is no doubt that economic growth will help to alleviate some unemployment.  However, we must also face up to the reality of a large and growing number of permanently unemployed, under-employed, and unemployable people within our societies.  We also need to recognise that economic growth and consumerism come at a perhaps intolerable price to the biosphere^[1]. 

Labour is obsolescent because technological advance is inexorably labour-saving. 

In developed economies the loss of work opportunities to technology and to low-cost labour markets has been masked by ageing populations, early and often involuntary retirements, and rises in service sector employment.  We have also seen a marked casualisation of the workforce in many economies.  There is less and less security of employment.  More are having to work intermittently or part time.  Such significant under-employment allows politicians to claim lower rates of unemployment^[2] than is the case.

These masking factors should not blind us to the underlying trend. 

The application of technology to economic activity occurs primarily to allow the production of more with less of everything, but of labour in particular. 

Mechanisation and automation are intrinsically labour saving, or productivity enhancing.  While it is true that technological advance and economic growth have opened up new horizons for people; have resulted in new goods and services; have significantly increased the consumption and hence production of both traditional and new outputs; and through all of these, have generated significant new employment opportunities for all, the numbers of people required to perform particular tasks is incessantly dropping.  Even the services sector is subject to labour-saving innovation, and all this while the global population continues to grow rapidly. 

It is much more convenient for the manager of any economic activity to use mechanical rather than human input.  Human beings, even as slaves, are temperamental, need to be motivated or disciplined, and have their own agendas^[3] within the organisation. 

Robots, computers, and mechanised productive processes can malfunction, and increase an organisation's vulnerability to technocrats.  But machines don't have rights, play politics, or go on strike. 

Computerised technology is becoming cheaper and more sophisticated by quantum leaps every year, even every quarter, and it is almost inconceivable that cybernetic labourers will not have largely replaced human labourers in economic production within the next fifty years. 

Very few appear to recognise the increasing economic obsolescence of work and the severe social consequences of the demise of the institution of work in societies that are founded on the work ethic.  Politicians, captains of industry, and economists continue to proclaim that both unemployment and poverty are solvable, and economic growth has been put forward as the only long term solution.  Many also hold that a pre-requisite to economic growth is free international trade with free domestic labour markets^[4] and implied reductions in real wage rates. 

It is frequently argued that economic growth needs to be export-led, and therefore that previously protected economies must first become internationally competitive^[5].  However, the imperatives that drive any one economy towards increased efficiency also drive its international competitors.  They too have embarked on efficiency drives; they too are seeking ways of reducing real wage rates; they too are looking to technological advances to get that contract‑saving competitive edge. 

Through international free trade, nations are chasing each other down into a competitive spiral, and it is difficult to see who will benefit from this in the long run.  Who will find lasting economic Nirvana at the bottom of the whirlpool?  Will anyone emerge victorious?  How low must real wage rates drop?  Is the lowest common factor not mere subsistence?  Are we not heading for a point where most of us will be reduced to wage slavery, being paid no more than is necessary to keep us alive to work?  For whom? 

The hope that continued economic growth will address the growing and global problem of under-employment and economic poverty is a vain hope.  It discounts the inevitability of the displacement of human labour by technology.  It overlooks the depressing impact on real wages of international competition, pushing them down to the point where labour as a source of lifestyle-sustaining purchasing power ceases to be viable. 

How will economically developed societies cope with large‑scale permanent under-employment when many of us presently derive most of our purchasing power from the sale of our labour?  How are they even coping with existing levels of under-employment? 

The answer is that they are not.  There is a generalised pretence that the problem is transient and will be cured with economic growth.  The social pressure on people to be in paid employment remains intense, and those who fail to secure a job continue to be made to feel as second-class citizens who have failed because they are inadequate or shirkers.  

This is not an issue confined to developed economies.  The world's developing or poor nations will also have to address the issue, but from a base of greater initial poverty and weaker social infrastructure. 

Technology will also render uneconomic the seemingly endless supplies of cheap labour of the poor and developing nations.  Human labour, no matter how cheap, will not be able to compete with the speed, accuracy, reliability, and low cost of computerised technology.  Economic activity among the developing nations of the world will also be forced into the use of high-technology by the requirement to be internationally competitive. 

Changing production and consumption patterns have created new economic activities that have provided new opportunities for labour even with widespread automation, but technology will displace labour and leave increasing proportions of any population unable to acquire adequate purchasing power through the sale of its labour.  

There will probably always be room for human input in economic activity.  However, because of technological advance, the human content will become of an increasingly higher order beyond the reach of an ever-growing proportion of the population. 

The challenge faced by every society in the world, whether economically developed or not, is how to ensure a majority of its population generates household-sustaining purchasing power with dignity^[6], in an environment where most economic activity is undertaken by machines, while not bankrupting the State or rendering its economy internationally uncompetitive. 

Quite a new global social order underpinned by different institutions^[7] and value systems needs to emerge.  Perhaps that is not a bad thing?  Perhaps it is our opportunity to shake off the shackles of work and our addiction to consumerism for the betterment of ourselves and our biosphere?