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Book Review/Introducing

The End of Work

by Jeremy Rifkin

IN HIS COMPELLING, disturbing, and ultimately hopeful book, The End of Work (1994), Jeremy Rifkin argues that we are entering a new phase in history-one characterised by the steady and inevitable decline of jobs.

Worldwide unemployment is now at the highest level since the great depression of the 1930s. The number of people underemployed or without work is rising sharply as millions of new entrants into the workforce find themselves victims of an extraordinary high-technology revolution. Sophisticated computers, robotics, telecommunications, and other cutting-edge technologies are fast replacing human beings in virtually every sector and industry - from manufacturing, retail, and financial services, to transportation, agriculture, and government.

Many jobs are never coming back. Blue collar workers, secretaries, receptionists, clerical workers, sales clerks, bank tellers, telephone operators, librarians, wholesalers, and middle managers are just a few of the many occupations destined for virtual extinction. While some new jobs are being created, they are, for the most part, low paying and generally temporary employment. More than fifteen percent of the American people are currently living below the poverty line.

The world, says Rifkin, is fast polarizing into two potentially irreconcilable forces: on one side, an information elite that controls and manages the high-tech global economy; and on the other, the growing numbers of permanently displaced workers, who have few prospects and little hope for meaningful employment in an increasingly automated world.

Rifkin suggests that we move beyond the delusion of retraining for nonexistent jobs. He urges us to begin to ponder the unthinkable - to prepare ourselves and our institutions for a world that is phasing out mass employment in the production and marketing of goods and services. Redefining the role of the individual in a near workerless society is likely to be the single most pressing issue in the decades to come.

Rifkin says we should look toward a new, post- market era. Fresh alternatives to formal work will need to be devised. New approaches to providing income and purchasing power will have to be implemented. Greater reliance will need to be placed on the emerging "third sector" to aid in the restoration of communities and the building of a sustainable culture.

The end of work could mean the demise of civilization as we have come to know it, or signal the beginning of a great social transformation and a rebirth of the human spirit.

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Unemployed and underemployed of America, take heart! Your plight is not totally your fault!

Seriously, Rifkin spends a lot of time in this book documenting the rise in unemployment. From manufacturing to farming to retail to services, all parts of the US have been hit by massive job reductions over the last few years. Among the causes are corporate re-engineering, automation making fewer people necessary, and pure corporate greed. Rifkin says that all the job training in the world will not take care of everyone suddenly unemployed; where are all the well-paid jobs supposedly available for these newly retrained workers?

Rifkin's solution is what he calls the "third sector", the non-profit, volunteer sector of society. If these millions of people were set loose at places ranging from the local hospital to literacy teaching to Greenpeace or Amnesty International, America would be transformed. The workers would either get some sort of minimum wage or a tax credit for each hour worked. It would be paid for by a tax on computer sales and cuts in corporate welfare and the defense budget.

A person can argue about Rifkin's solution and how to pay the costs. What is not arguable is that it is long past time for our national leaders to advocate concrete proposals for absorbing the millions of people that free trade and global competitiveness has tossed out of the American economy.

© 2003 The Nework Centre   |   email neworknz@yahoo.co.nz

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