The death-knell is tolling for the eight- hour day and the five-day week, reports Simon Caulkin
With employment back at the top of the political agenda, it might seem an odd time to write a notice announcing the death of the job.
Isnt Europe debating how to create 12- million new jobs in the next few years? Isnt the French government working to generate 300000 new posts in the public sector? And in the United Kingdom, with jobless totals steadily falling, hasnt the Labour Party just recommitted itself to the goal of full employment, albeit some time in the 21st century?
Even if that happens, however, it wont be the full employment of the past. The ecology of work is changing faster than peoples attitudes. Already nearly half the adult workers in the West are self-employed or have non-standard flexible, temporary or part-time contracts.
It is time, according to a growing body of opinion, to face up to the uncomfortable facts: the job as we know it, with its regimented boundaries and grades, is not an immutable part of the economic landscape but a product of the Industrial Revolution. As that era closes, its work patterns are destined to fade and blur, too.
If that is the case, the traditional assumptions about work crudely, that economic growth and training can put people back to work again are questionable. Whats more, the institutions that support or are built on the full-time permanent job the career, the pension, the mortgage, education and training are similarly in jeopardy.
Routine jobs arent going to disappear, says William Bridges, author of JobShift. For those who favour them, some will probably always be there. But less and less will they be the royal road to security and success.
In short, except in slow-moving areas of the economy such as parts of the public sector the job has become dysfunctional, encrusting old habits and obstructing change. This helps explain why few private sector firms, especially small ones, will take on the long-term unemployed even if they are paid to, and why training by itself is no solution for unemployment in depressed areas, where there is no demand for labour in the conventional sense at any price.
The paradox is that theres no shortage of work but it no longer comes in eight- hour-a-day, five-day-a-week chunks, points out Professor Chris Brewster of the UKs Cranfield Management School, who in research sponsored by the European Commission is investigating what employment flexibility actually means.
His conclusion: in the remorseless quest to cut costs, employers are steadily trampling on the traditional job boundaries. Theres no doubt that its happening, he says. Only if it pays them to do so will employers offer work in permanent job-sized bites. Often it doesnt, so flexible work is on the increase.
The implications of the job shift are far- reaching for both individuals and society. Both Bridges and Brewster foresee a society divided not directly along the old class or educational lines (neither Bill Gates nor Larry Ellison, the United Statess software emperors, completed a university course) but between those with and without the savvy to find a niche in todays work landscape.
For the top-end minority of professionals, the new world of projects and portfolios may well work out fine, says Brewster.
But at a lower level which means in most cases where flexibility is being imposed on people doing commodity work without entrepreneurial skills, the result is not so happy. To talk airily of portfolio careers or do-it-yourself career management for contract cleaners or security guards is absurd and unrealistic, says Brewster.
While individual firms strive to reduce the cost of their most expensive input by de- jobbing work, society as a whole bears the price directly in terms of increased social security benefits, indirectly in reduced training, the social ills of exclusion and less individual spending power.
Individual firms may be more efficient, says Brewster, but the economy is less so than before.
Bridges, like Brewster, believes governments will need to be much more upfront and radical in their thinking about the implications of the changing patterns of work. I wish I saw more signs that political forces were thinking in terms of building transitional institutions, he says.
He, like Bayliss, is troubled by the old- fashioned emphasis on very specific education and training rather than developing new habits of mind.
The question is how to make people future- literate, equipping them with the skills to adapt, says Bayliss. We currently dont have the pedagogy for that.