Hello FWers, This may be a bit much to ask (and indeed is half in jest) but I would very much welcome help from the members of this list.
I find myself, among others, having promised to produce four sentences (and no more than four sentences) for a group that is thinking about the future of work and is looking for practical proposals. The deadline hasn't quite arrived and meanwhile any comments on the following four sentences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Gail Four Sentences: 1. The current bimodal character of projections of the future -- on the one hand densely urban, high tech and widely networked (in short, more of the same, intensified and accelerated), on the other hand environmental and energy disruptions, population crashes, smaller communities and much hand labour -- makes it difficult to project the future of work and discern appropriate educational and other personal and public policies. 2. However, given this high uncertainty about the perhaps not-so-distant future in which any one of us might find ourselves (whether conditions of flood, famine, or fortune; among friends or isolated in disoriented crowds of strangers; scratching a living from the soil or living securely and well-informed in a world of agricultural surplus and discretionary expenditures), it appears that the focus on the future of work might perhaps most viably and sensibly be on the self-organizing and entrepreneurial capacities of the individual person rather than on large collectivities of workers such as are often envisioned, e.g., "the labour force," and furthermore, in such circumstances, that the issue of the future of work and practical proposals for it might most effectively be addressed as an issue of risk management. 3. Emphasis on the competent self-organizing individual facing an uncertain future might suggest children lovingly nurtured and schoolchildren supported in learning (as well as immediate and continued self-education on the part of all of us) in order to gain complex capabilities including how to grow and preserve food, use hand tools, be cyber- and media-literate, flexibly problem-solve, adjust creatively to change, work cooperatively with others, and be able communicate safely, whether over distances or face to face, with all kinds and conditions of people by recognizing their human dignity and one’s own and thus, suggestively, to point personal and public policy toward not only the need for sustaining the abolition of the unequal degree of human status that distinguishes slavery but the need for the abolition of situations where one person works for rather than cooperatively with another -- in short the abolition of “jobs” and “employment” in favour of individualized contracts to mutual advantage (as indeed is already a practice for a substantial number of persons, including many playing roles in the upper echelons of corporations) -- and for pursuing this personal and social path not only for emancipation and personal freedom and mutual respect of everyone owning and allocating their own personal time and energies and knowledge, entrepreneurially, with respect to work (as, in the developed democracies, we own and allocate entrepreneurially, through mutual enfranchisement, our personal social, political and religious lives) and for working with others (including one's elected representatives in government), for the development of the social infrastructures that support such “working in dignity,” (with the not inconsequential byproduct of greatly improving the functioning of the market for “work” and thus improving the productivity of work which might then be used to reduce the needed amount of work in the world, even while the remaining necessary component in society of unwantedly boring, or arduous or unhealthy or high-risk work receive their due respect and acknowledgement) but also for the purposes of political stabilization by creating a large entrepreneurial class interested in preserving the worth of its human assets of life, liberty and health and thus anxious to preserve peace, order and good government. 4. Thus "work," through such a mutually agreed (Wilberforcian) restructuring of the social order abolishing the capacity of one person to make an “employee” of the other could, nurtured by appropriate social insurances and supportive family, community and public policy, be helped to evolve from its current commonly perceived condition as a functional disutility detracting from human satisfaction (and all too often a one-sided exploitation of socially inferior and perhaps depersonalized employees) into an activity perceived as involving the mutual fulfillment of a social contract between persons sharing entrepreneurial considerations, concerned to protect and wisely invest their personal assets of energy and health and (irretrievable) time, thus leading further to “work” being increasingly perceived as continual re-creation, a way of life, even daily re-creation in the form of accruing human experience and development in a society in which one's dignity and enfranchisement is valued by oneself and others, with human time, energy, knowledge (including knowledge embedded in technologies) and creativity perceived as valued inputs and also, with multiplied effect through combination in the activity of "work," as producing the desired output of enhanced human health, energy, knowledge, and creativity, the net accumulating as assets of fruitful experience, wisdom and social and environmental diversity and enrichment, as humankind ecologically co-evolves with its knowlege and environment, using the new coin of human dignity as the economy catches up with the polity in assuring universal enfranchisement of its participants and training or retraining people for "jobs" as "employees" becomes replaced by a more respectful approach to their capacities and a more helpful approach to their well-being in an uncertain future. Gail Stewart Ottawa 070813
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