The Future of Work Modernizing the Market Economy
1. Human relations Draft 1.0. Comments would be appreciated. 1. Our future is deeply uncertain: plausible possibilities -- environmental, social, economic, cultural -- range widely. 2. In such circumstances, each of us, in preparing for future work, might best engage also in risk containment by acquiring and sustaining versatile capabilities including skills in teamwork. 3. A major a society-wide initiative may be desirable however to address an existing risk -- the prevailing lag within the market economy in modernizing its structures of human relationships. 4. The structures of human relationships in the economy have not kept pace with the personal, social and political enfranchisement prevailing in the surrounding society. 5. This failure not only affects the economy, heightening discontent within it, but adversely affects the broader matter of social and political stability and flexibility 6. The lag also adversely affects the health and productivity of participants at all levels in the economy and the productivity of the economy itself. 7. A major step toward the modernization of human relations was taken two hundred years ago by the abolition of slavery in Great Britain, thanks to William Wilberforce and others who led the campaign against the slave trade. 8. A similar major step toward a modernization of human relations is currently overdue: the abolition of employment, i.e., of situations where one person works "for" rather than "with" another, each freely self-governing as they already are in their capacity as citizens. 9. Many participants in the current market economy, perhaps as many as 25%, already work as independent contractors including senior executives who, almost universally, have already made this transition. 10. Such emancipation is however more difficult and costly to achieve at the individual personal or corporate level and might be more readily accomplished through mutual society-wide agreement that the employment of one person by another should end. 11. This suggests that a campaign against the employment trade, toward universal emancipation from employment, might be timely. 12. The abolition of employment could usefully be accompanied by public policies supportive of the new working conditions, increasing their benefit to the economy and to the participants involved. 13. The abolition of employment (and with it the roles of employer and employee) and the resulting greater flexibility and dignity in the world of work may be expected, over time, to change the perception of "work." 14. Commonly perceived today as a functional disutility, work may become a social and personal practice, a developmental element in the lives of each of us as we more entrepreneurially allocate our personal resources of time and energy and skills. 15. Co-evolving within and among ourselves and with our social and natural environment with greater human dignity than is now involved in being either an "employer" or "employee" (both roles being now rather embarrassing, a sure sign of their passing, their growing decadence), we will also better enabled to develop our human capacities. 16. Similarly, our shared hopes may better prosper, for life, liberty and happiness, peace, order and good government, etc., and our capacities to function as citizens responsible for our own self-governance and for our governments. 17. Who will step up to become today's Wilberforces: it will not be easy, e.g., can the economy survive without employment, as it had to be argued it could survive without slavery? 19. The path will be strewn with misunderstandings but, as William James said, "First a new theory is attached as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim they themselves discovered it." 20. So it will be, I predict, with the notion of extending enfranchisement through abolishing the "employment trade," i.e., abolishing the employment of one person by another so that rather than being “worked for” or “working for” another person or persons, we may more consistently work “with” each other and have the personal and economic (and also environmental) benefits of doing so and of conceiving of our work in this way. Gail Stewart Ottawa August 20, 2007
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