There is an interesting Rand report available for free. Forces Shaping the Future U.S. Workforce and Workplace Implications for 21st Century Work
http://www.rand.org/pubs/testimonies/CT273/ John Verdon Sr. Strategic HR Analyst Directorate Military Personnel Force Development Department of National Defence Major-General George R. Pearkes Building 101 Colonel By Drive. Ottawa Ontario K1A 0K2 voice: 992-6246 FAX: 995-5785 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Searching for the pattern which connects.... and to know the difference that makes a difference" Sapare Aude -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, 26 June, 2007 12:00 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Futurework Digest, Vol 43, Issue 60 Send Futurework mailing list submissions to futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can reach the person managing the list at [EMAIL PROTECTED] When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Futurework digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Time-zone shifters (Ed Weick) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 11:13:30 -0400 From: "Ed Weick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Futurework] Time-zone shifters To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" There's an article in today's Ottawa Citizen, originally in the LA Times, on what globalization, outsourcing and the international connectedness of work are doing to peoples' lives. The article says that all of the 46 million knowledge workers in the US are engaged in some form of "time-zone shifting", meaning that a considerable proportion of them would need to be in instantaneous connection with people living in far away places like India, China, Japan and Europe. This would not be a problem if the world were flat and the sun shone its daylight on all parts of it at the same time, but unfortunately night and day occur at different times in different parts of the world, meaning that workers on whom decisions depend have to remain connected both day and night. As the article suggests, this could play hell with both personal and family life. The kind of work world the article describes raises some additional rather big-ticket issues. One is how workers who increasingly comprise a multi-national labour force might organize themselves to bargain in unison with their employers, given that each country has its own rules around such things. The outsourcing of both labour and production is likely to already have had a major negative impact on unions which, if one thinks about it, would have been strongly dependent on production taking place within a particular country and within a limited area of that country. Another issue is that of what might happen to a business that has spread itself over several countries if those countries became hostile to each other. And here the concern is not the possible loss of relatively independent branch plants, but the loss of vital parts of an internationally integrated knowledge based business. I couldn't access the article on the web, so I've scanned it and am attaching it as a PDF file. Ed -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/private/futurework/attachments/20070626/81e57bf7/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework End of Futurework Digest, Vol 43, Issue 60 ****************************************** _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
