How the Workplace Has Changed

A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Looking for Work Instead of a Job

Is that all there is?

We have lived with the modern concept of a job for so long that we tend to think it has been around forever. In fact, it was introduced to the world about 150 to 200 years ago as nations began to industrialize. Before that, people earned a living by performing a variety of tasks, mostly in agriculture, in areas that were affected by the seasons, the weather, and the time of day. When the concept of a job was introduced to society back then, it caused just as much angst among our ancestors as it is causing now that it is in decline.

We also tend to assume, because it is the way the majority of people have earned their living for generations, that a job is the only way to earn a living. In fact, a significant percentage of the workforce doesn't earn their living from traditional jobs. Take the construction industry, for example. For people employed there, their job is tied directly to the project that they're currently building, and when it is finished, so is their job and they have to look for another project. The same could be said for people employed in the arts. If, for example, you're an actor in a movie or a stage show, once the movie or show is over, so is your job and you move on to the next project. This is also true for musicians and other people employed in the arts.

So the idea of your job being tied to the project that you're currently working on is far from new. What's new is that more people who have always had a traditional job are finding that their livelihood is now going to be earned this way. What is disconcerting is that most of us come from a background where our parents and grandparents made their living from a traditional job, which, for the most part, meant that their careers were stable and they had some security. Most of us still long for that security, but it's getting harder to come by.

The rise of the temporary or contingent worker

The twentieth century was the century of mass production and large corporations, and the workplace was dominated by industrial giants like General Motors. At the end of the century, the biggest employer in the United States was Manpower, a company that specializes in temporary and contingent workers.

In the manufacturing sector, one of the improvements that companies have made to make their process more efficient and economic is to employ a just-in-time approach to the inventory of parts that they carry. Instead of having large quantities of these parts sitting in inventory for long periods before they get used up, they access those parts from their suppliers at the time that they are needed in the manufacturing process and have thus eliminated the need for costly inventories.

The same type of thing is happening in the workplace as companies increasingly view the work to be done in terms of projects and think of their staffing needs in terms of what they need for current and upcoming projects. The idea of a temp, or temporary worker, has been around for decades, but it tended to be restricted to clerical and office staff like receptionists and data entry clerks. Now companies are hiring temporary workers at all levels within the organization.

This is particularly true in the Information Technology or IT sector. That industry is very project oriented, and IT companies regularly hire people for projects with no expectation that their employment will become long-term. Even in Japan, the last bastion of the idea of lifetime employment, many companies where employees have traditionally expected to spend their entire careers with that company are now moving towards hiring temporary workers.

A January 5, 2008 article in the Economist titled "Sayonara, salaryman" points out that almost 40 percent of the workforce in Japan are part-time, contingent, and contract workers and that this category is growing while those with permanent jobs is decreasing. It also points out that today's young workers are not interested in accepting the corporate paternalism of their parents' generation where work was the center of their lives and even led in some cases to karoshi or "death by overwork."

Outsourcing

A January 24, 2012 article in the New York Times cites the quantum advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution as key factors in the loss of middle-class incomes in the US. It points out that in the 10 years ending in 2009, US factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all of the gains in the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs – about 6 million in total – disappeared.

It talked about advances in technology that were threatening the need for waiters and waitresses. A new device, described as a "souped-up iPad" has been created that lets customers place their orders and pay for them right at their table. These devices can be rented by restaurants for about $100 per month, which works out to 42 cents per hour per table.

Dan Pink, in his excellent book A Whole New Mind, says that "outsourcing is overhyped in the short term. But it's underhyped in the long term." That opinion is supported by experts' predictions of the number of jobs that will move overseas from western countries to countries like India and China in the next few years and beyond. So far manufacturing and the IT sector have lost the most jobs, and those losses are expected to continue. But these job losses may be the canary in the coal mine. Most experts are predicting that the next wave of jobs moving overseas will be in the insurance, financial services, customer support, and engineering sectors.

The World Bank projects that in the ten-year period from 2006 to 2016, developing nations' share of world gross domestic product is expected to grow from one-fifth to one-third. When Ron Hira, considered to be a leading US expert on outsourcing, was asked in a July 3,2006 interview in the New York Times "How can this trend be stopped?" his answer was, "There's nothing that can be done to stop it. The question is, how do we adapt to it and deal with the negative effects?" Dan Pink points out that the conventional view thirty years ago was that an economy couldn't be based on services – manufacturing had to be the foundation. When asked how the US can survive outsourcing, he suggested, "We massively underestimate human ingenuity and resilience."

The future, he says, will bring "industries we can't imagine and jobs which we lack the vocabulary to describe."

Our future, in other words, lies in our imagination – to create products and services that the world doesn't know it is missing....