My last posting did not come back to me, and I am assuming that it fell into
some kind of electronic crevice. My apologies if it did go to everyone else
and you have already read the substance of this.
Like Douglas Wilson I have been expecting to see a little more discussion of
the ostensible topic of the listserve, namely the future of work.
I find Rifkin's central argument quite compelling: that the net effect of
technology is to reduce the number of available jobs in the long run
although the effect may be masked for a long time by new markets or the rise
of new types of work (e.g. the explosion of service jobs in the 50's and
60's just as many manufacturing jobs were being killed off.) I suspect that
in the near future this loss of jobs will be intensified both by
computerization (eg, Automatic Bank Teller machines) and also by offloading
service jobs onto the consumer--long since done in the self-service gas
station and coming soon to the supermarket.
I feel we are being led down the garden path by those who tell us that the
new technology will create more and better jobs. No bank, for instance,
installs an expensive system in the belief that they are eliminating 4,000
tellers just so that they can hire 5,000 more highly paid computer experts.
Another factor not much discussed is that many good, hard-working people
lack the aptitude for these new jobs. I work in a factory, and many of my
co-workers are good welders or painters, but I cannot see them--or their
children in many cases--becoming programmers.
I found Douglas Wilson's comments on the combinatorial explosion and the
assignment problem quite fascinating. It is true that in some cases there
may be a suitable job that the jobseeker is unable to find. If solving the
assignment problem would push the unemployment rate one per cent lower, it
would be worth doing. However, for the reasons given above I do not agree
with his contention that "unemployment is evidence that it is hard to FIND
a job, not that there are too few jobs." As long as we are defining jobs as
40 hours a week of employment that pays a living wage, I think there are too
few jobs and all too likely to be even fewer in the future.
Possibly this is such an obvious topic that it was hashed out before I
joined the list, but I would be interested in reading other people's views
on Rifkin's theories.
Victor Milne
FIGHT THE BASTARDS! An anti-neoconservative website
at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/pat-vic/
LONESOME ACRES RIDING STABLE
at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/
