The most significant domestic issue of the 2004 elections is unemployment. The United States has lost nearly three million jobs in the last ten years, and real employment hovers around 9.1 percent. Only one political analyst foresaw the dark side of the technological revolution and understood its implications for global employment: Jeremy Rifkin.
The End of Work is Jeremy Rifkin’s most influential and important book. Now nearly ten years old, it has been updated for a new, post-New Economy era. Statistics and figures have been revised to take new trends into account. Rifkin offers a tough, compelling critique of the flaws in the techniques the government uses to compile employment statistics.
The End of Work is the book our candidates and our country need to understand the employment challenges-and the hopes-facing us in the century ahead.
User Ratings and Reviews
3 Stars Pass on this book, unless you need it for coursework of some sort
I read this book on the suggestion of a friend. In general, I’m not a fan. Here are some highlights.
On the positive side of the book, Rifkin has obviously done a very thorough job researching employment throughout the century, various periods, etc. He also makes some interesting points with respect to the manner in which technology rids people of jobs. He does articulate that the net result is that production increases past the point of which the economy can absorb the excess.
However, where I really disagree with him is on the following points. First, he has not really normalized his data to incorporate those that were not included in the count (minorities, countries with non-purchasing populations, etc) during the different periods in question. He also fails to see some of the other fairly pertinent changes that have occurred throughout history as well that also impact unemployment rates, i.e. changing population demographics due to war, the opening of communist economies, the end of dictatorship/regimes.
Further, he does not quite articulate the need to reinvest. He hints at it a bit, but he does not see that with each economic downturn and rise in unemployment, society has created a better secondary net. The loss of jobs generally occurs at the lowest level, and I get that it effects those that are the poorest. However, cheap goods leads them to have a slightly better time of fulfilling basic needs. In other words, though the poor continue to be poor, we should consider at each period what the poor they are better off. Alternatively, you could comparatively do the analysis across countries with varying levels of technological access (though of course, that would be a mess to neutralize second order affects). There are other far more interesting arguments that look at income gap between decile-d wage earners. While I’m not completely in agreement with such research, at least it is more fleshed out.
He somewhat completely misses that the end game is for people to become smarter as a whole. Or that the increase in goods does make life – from a basic needs standpoint – easier; allowing for more inclusion in politics, society, etc.
I do agree with him that people need to think past the rat race and try to figure out how to evolve and think of creation of things outside of material goods to be exchanged in the name of greed. I get that. And perhaps an alternative solution is to fulfill basic needs but foster enlightened understandings/education of what “choice” of livelihood really means. I recognize that only the greatest of optimists would think that people would not just choose to be a lazy stump and watch reality tv all day, but hey, maybe. Still, I’d like to see the conclusion be to improve education; not to hate technology or see it as an enemy which isolates blue collar, less resource rich citizens.
5 Stars Middle Management
Middle management is vulnerable to job loss in the event of restructuring. Typically a reconfigured company sheds forty percent of its jobs. The computer revolution is most pronounced in the manufacturing sector. A world with fewer and fewer workers is a disturbing trend.
In the early years of the Great Depression the link between labor-saving and overproduction was discerned. By 1932 shorter hours of work was supported by the rationale of economic justice. In 1963 a triple revolution was identified by J. Robert Oppenheimer and others, cybernetics, weapons manufactures, and human rights concerns. The issue presented was the possibility that previously disfavored groups could become outcasts in the new cyber economy. Norbert Weiner warned of technological unemployment. Labor leaders decided not to fight automation, the use of labor-saving devices, but rather to push for retraining. Unfortunately too few jobs were created and the union began losing membership and clout.
Modern management began with the railroads in 1850. Now organizational hierarchies are being deconstructed. There is a connection between biotechnology and automation resulting in rapid changes in farming practices.
Service work has been absorbing losses of manufacturing work in the past, but service work is being automated and can no longer be depended upon to create jobs. Productivity gains and increased profits are being made with fewer workers. Electronic inroads highlight the advent of the paperless office in the insurance and banking industries. Paper in a service business has been compared to cholesterol in the bloodstream.
A lot of retailing has gone electronic and wholesale functions are being eliminated. In the meantime cashier productivity has increased greatly through the use of bar code technology.
The author terms the current state of affairs the third industrial revolution. The work force, though, is in retreat in nearly every sector. Trickle-down is a chimera.
The newest victims of re-engineering are apt to live in affluent suburbs. A fading middle class is described. There is gross disparity between high wage earners and low wage earners. The pace of work due to automation has increased resulting in worker stress. There are more temporary jobs and fewer full-time jobs available in the re-engineered business environment. Technology displacement produces an increase in crime statistics. Hardship and stress lead to spontaneous upheavals. One cure for unemployment is a shorter work week.
In the future the market sector and the public sector will be less important than the third sector embodying volunteerism. Notes, bibliography, and index follow this enlightening text.
4 Stars Job Displacement, Period
Fast forward, December 2008, and the impending economic collapse of America. Hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs lost, millions of service sector jobs, near collapse of domestic auto industry, housing and mortgage meltdown, credit card crunch, trillion dollar government bailouts. Most of these jobs will NEVER return. What are all these displaced workers going to do for sustenance? Mr. Rifkin nailed it in this book: The Rise of a Massive Welfare State. That day has arrived. Technology didn’t do it, I don’t think. Rampant greed and colossal corruption on all levels, including the financial industry and lack of government regulation sent this country over the cliff in a short order of time.
2 Stars A rather poor effort
I often enjoy reading books written trying to read the future that are several years old. If only to see why the writer was right or wrong and where he went wrong.
Well this book was published in 1996 and is basically written around the US although other countries are mentioned in passing. The basic premises is that the new industries will employ a few people but not enough to make up the fall in the established industries. So the unemployment will go up. Furthermore we better get used to it. His partial solution is reduction in hours of employment and a greater stress on the third sector.
Looking at the US economy which most of the book is written about in the past 50 years the workforce in the US has almost tripled. Yet in the same period there is no long term trend to greater unemployment. Just look at a graph. Currently now its where it was in 1950. So obviously unemployment is not going up. So the writer got it wrong.
Looking at a graph of US unemployments percenatges, its clear that the situation was a bit high at the time of writing. The writer made a typical mistake of many futurologist of extrapolating into the far future based on the past few years.
Furthermore the writer paid too much attention to the publicity departments of R&D companies. He keeps bring us all these new technologies that are going to change the world dramatically eg getting rid of farmers with chemical vats and vanilla production from genetic research. Well, its been 10 years and most of these technologies are still coming. He obviously has forgotten Daniel Bell warning in what is an absolute gem of a book “Coming of Post-Industrial Society” that many futurologist look too hard at industries worth millions of dollars and generalize into industrials worth billions.
He seems to also forget that labour hours are dropping all the time. I am not sure what the situation is in the US but as the pay master in an Australian company, I can see that the labour hours are steadily dropping every year. For example old timers tell me that the standard office hours 40 years ago was 44 hours a week, by the time I started working it was 40 and now at 38 hours plus now two 10 minutes breaks are included in the working hours so its more like 36 hours week. Furthermore in the past few years the number of sick days a year has gone from 5 days to 8 days a year. Two extra days a year has been introduced for compassionate leave. Long service leave (a holiday of 15 weeks) is now given at 10 years not 15 years. Furthermore the average worker now starts his employment later as he tends to study much more, so early 20s is now quite standard to start working and he retires at 55. All this works out to a rather dramatic drop in hours worked in a generation.
Finally we come to the third sector. The sector the writer hopes is going to take some of the unemployment. This is a sector that I have had considerable contact with over the years eg I went to a private school, been active in political and religious organizations, been computer programmer in a private cancer research organization and have been too many private hospitals. I don’t see the employment opportunities. The volunteers or people on the committees that he is referring too tend to be at most a few hours a week. Hardly an equivalent of a job. Nor is it generally like they are working. Often its more socialible. The people that work for these organizations tend to be regular workers eg the janitor in the church, the nurse in a charity run hospital or teacher in a religious school does a similar job to the same people in a similar government or private institution. They tend to get paid roughly the same. Often they go from government to private to the third sector depending on who gives them a better deal. I just don’t know where the writer is coming from with his arguments here. I suspect that he has little contact with these organizations.
Overall I would say that this book is best forgotten.
5 Stars An Unintended Appeal for African Values in Western Society
A must read. Written back in the 90s but arguably more relevant today than it was back then. Very thoroughly chronicles the progression of the 3 Industrial Revolutions—the 3rd of which we are entering now—and their impact on global economics and politics.
The message is clear: Millions of people are becoming economically obsolete; because of technology we no longer need them to help produce things like automobiles, steel, and many consumer goods. At the same time, they can no longer afford to purchase these things due to job displacement. They have been shoved out of the world economy, and if we don’t do something about it, we will have a global French Revolution situation on our hands as their ranks continue to grow exponentially due to outsourcing and tech upgrades and the chasm between haves and have-nots continues to widen daily.
There are two futures that the author sees as possible. The first—and more probable according to him—is a bleak one with rising crime and massive backlash of the poor on each other and the wealthy. The other is a refocusing on the volunteer/social sector and employing the displaced masses in worthy contribution to communities. Rifkin does not realize it, but he is basically suggesting a casting away of European values originating from Platonic dichotomies of good/bad, us/other, valuable/expendable, etc…then evolving into the “us” VS. “other” mentality of medieval Europe…before finally maturing into full-scale imperialism, colonialism, manifest destiny, etc…..the ULTIMATE “Entitlement” mentality…resulting in the unapologetic exploitation of land, people, and resources until imploding on itself out of its own greed and ravenousness. When he talks of the 3rd/social sector–the “‘post-market” area, he is actually suggesting the adoption of more cooperative and community-conscious African principles once the European worldview has collapsed on itself.
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