(Cross-posted at NV-CA Politics)
Quick quiz, hotshot: How many hours a week did George Jetson, patriarch of a typical middle-class family in the year 2062, actually work at Spacely Sprockets?
Nine. Just nine hours a week. Yet he had a home, a car, a maid, was raising two kids, and a wife who worked as a homemaker. An old-fashioned one-income family that thrived off of the salary earned through just nine hours of work a week.
Yes, that was a 1960’s-era utopian view of the future. But it raises an important question: As we seek some magic wand to brush over the economy and create jobs, what if there simply aren’t forty hours a week per person to be worked anymore? Is the combination of technology and a rise in worker productivity slowly closing the door on work that can be paid for? If so, how do we change and sustain our quality of life?
Author Jeremy Rifkin wrote about this phenomenon in “The End of Work” back in 1995. Rifkin pointed out that Industrial Revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries reduced the eighty-hour work week to sixty, and sixty down to forty, respectively. Fifteen years after that book was published, we’re in an economy where we’re encouraged to “go online,” get that easy-to-use iPhone app and do things with a few gadgets that used to create lots of work for people to do.
As I sit at McCarran Airport in Vegas writing this, I think back to a conversation I had over lunch with a Monte Carlo bartender. He noted that the moment the big casinos moved from the traditional clang-clang-clang slot machines to ones that printed receipts for your winnings (a trend that is prevalent in Nevada casinos now), hundreds of cashiers and change-makers lost their jobs as the receipts made their jobs irrelevant. Perhaps it was a long time coming, but the industry cut down on costs and raised profit margins by automating this work to machines.
Not only is this trend slowly working its way in-it’s actively being encouraged. Recently, I called Comcast to get my bill adjusted. I was encouraged to pay online or over the phone. But if I wanted to do the latter, I was subject to a $5.99 fee for the privilege of a live person. Customers are being handed an incentive to send those jobs out the door! Live employees still blessed with those jobs are often now filling time in-between those calls taking calls for other companies who did the same thing. Or are only working part-time to begin with.
Michael Bernick, a former California Employment Development Department Director, took to the Fox & Hounds blog a few weeks ago to assure everyone that such hysteria accompanied previous economic downturns, yet we always bounced back.
Can we afford to be so sure? Certainly, the current downturn is unlike any other we’ve experienced. Neither period Bernick mentions had game-changers like the internet revolutionizing the nature of business. Plenty of workers in the private and public sectors are experiencing furloughs right now and taking pay cuts. For those employees, if the companies prove they can get by without the extra work, the 32-hour work week (with diminished pay) might be permanent.
Assuming this is another Industrial Revolution, finding a new model for assuring a suitable quality of life-including a decent paycheck, a right to health care, and a retirement-with a shorter work week must be developed.
While Americans are loath to adopt the structure of other places, many already operate under such conditions. We’re told some employers aren’t hiring, they say, because of the marginal cost of bringing on more employees. If we’re going to need them to spread out their available hours among more workers to lower unemployment and dependence on government assistance, do we finally have a civil discussion of the government taking on the costs of health care and retirement (by expanding Medicare to all and making Social Security the de-facto retirement plan), as competing nations have done? Or will business reflexively reject attempts to relieve them of those responsibilities like they have for decades?
This month, the Democratic Party lost control of the House of Representatives because the economy isn’t working the same anymore. Perhaps if they had stepped back, stopped fear-mongering against Republicans, and came out with a plan to re-organize society around keeping George and Jane employed while helping Mr. Spacely and Mr. Cogswell spread out the work amidst a reasonable safety net, voters might have reconsidered voting to take them out of office and projecting a vision for the Jetsons Economy.
Nine. Just nine hours a week. Yet he had a home, a car, a maid, was raising two kids, and a wife who worked as a homemaker. An old-fashioned one-income family that thrived off of the salary earned through just nine hours of work a week.
Yes, that was a 1960’s-era utopian view of the future. But it raises an important question: As we seek some magic wand to brush over the economy and create jobs, what if there simply aren’t forty hours a week per person to be worked anymore? Is the combination of technology and a rise in worker productivity slowly closing the door on work that can be paid for? If so, how do we change and sustain our quality of life?
Author Jeremy Rifkin wrote about this phenomenon in “The End of Work” back in 1995. Rifkin pointed out that Industrial Revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries reduced the eighty-hour work week to sixty, and sixty down to forty, respectively. Fifteen years after that book was published, we’re in an economy where we’re encouraged to “go online,” get that easy-to-use iPhone app and do things with a few gadgets that used to create lots of work for people to do.
As I sit at McCarran Airport in Vegas writing this, I think back to a conversation I had over lunch with a Monte Carlo bartender. He noted that the moment the big casinos moved from the traditional clang-clang-clang slot machines to ones that printed receipts for your winnings (a trend that is prevalent in Nevada casinos now), hundreds of cashiers and change-makers lost their jobs as the receipts made their jobs irrelevant. Perhaps it was a long time coming, but the industry cut down on costs and raised profit margins by automating this work to machines.
Not only is this trend slowly working its way in-it’s actively being encouraged. Recently, I called Comcast to get my bill adjusted. I was encouraged to pay online or over the phone. But if I wanted to do the latter, I was subject to a $5.99 fee for the privilege of a live person. Customers are being handed an incentive to send those jobs out the door! Live employees still blessed with those jobs are often now filling time in-between those calls taking calls for other companies who did the same thing. Or are only working part-time to begin with.
Michael Bernick, a former California Employment Development Department Director, took to the Fox & Hounds blog a few weeks ago to assure everyone that such hysteria accompanied previous economic downturns, yet we always bounced back.
Can we afford to be so sure? Certainly, the current downturn is unlike any other we’ve experienced. Neither period Bernick mentions had game-changers like the internet revolutionizing the nature of business. Plenty of workers in the private and public sectors are experiencing furloughs right now and taking pay cuts. For those employees, if the companies prove they can get by without the extra work, the 32-hour work week (with diminished pay) might be permanent.
Assuming this is another Industrial Revolution, finding a new model for assuring a suitable quality of life-including a decent paycheck, a right to health care, and a retirement-with a shorter work week must be developed.
While Americans are loath to adopt the structure of other places, many already operate under such conditions. We’re told some employers aren’t hiring, they say, because of the marginal cost of bringing on more employees. If we’re going to need them to spread out their available hours among more workers to lower unemployment and dependence on government assistance, do we finally have a civil discussion of the government taking on the costs of health care and retirement (by expanding Medicare to all and making Social Security the de-facto retirement plan), as competing nations have done? Or will business reflexively reject attempts to relieve them of those responsibilities like they have for decades?
This month, the Democratic Party lost control of the House of Representatives because the economy isn’t working the same anymore. Perhaps if they had stepped back, stopped fear-mongering against Republicans, and came out with a plan to re-organize society around keeping George and Jane employed while helping Mr. Spacely and Mr. Cogswell spread out the work amidst a reasonable safety net, voters might have reconsidered voting to take them out of office and projecting a vision for the Jetsons Economy.
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