The disintegration of work

Mark Pesce predicts that online supply and demand applications will destructure the labor market:

“For many years, economists and futurists have discussed the fragmentation and disintegration of the labour market. We’ve seen a steady increase in casual work over the past generation, but we’re at a precipice, about to take a plunge downward, into the complete liquidation of the job market. All of the friction that exists around hiring someone for a job – or being hired – has just evaporated.

This is going to be a huge transition. The economy will remake itself. Now that everyone is so well connected, we will abandon all of the support structures which we’ve always needed to support employment. Even if some of us want to cleave to the time-honoured traditions of full-time employment, the pressure from everyone else, everywhere in the world – moving between jobs and gigs at a dizzying pace – will slowly pry us away from our comfortable perch, dumping us into the maelstrom.

Our parents had an expectation of lifetime employment – at the factory, in the firm, on the farm. We live with a succession of jobs that each last a few years. We and our children will confront an economy that measures us out by the quarter-hour, weighing us instantaneously against everyone else in range of a smartphone (that’s a billion people now, and about six billion by the end of this decade), leaving us to bid for jobs as best we can.

This could be an ugly race to the bottom as every firm dissolves into a closely-connected mesh of temporary workers. Why have an accountant in expensive Sydney when a cheaper one in Dubbo (or Dhaka) can get the job done just as well? This is the darker side of connectivity: space collapses and time becomes a unit to be bought and sold, and there is no loyalty between employer and employee because neither relationship exists any more.

Yet there is also cause for hope. The same connectivity which atomises us also allows us to band together in pursuit of common goals. The firms of the deep 21st century will look a bit more tribal than buttoned-down, closer in nature to the family firm than the global giant, but because of their reach, just as powerful. In a world levelled by connectivity, the new giants will be those who can cooperate and communicate most effectively.”

1 Comment The disintegration of work

  1. AvatarEric K.

    Stupidity kills but not fast enough

    When ressources are capitatlized

    and when capital is in the hand of a few

    you have no ressources

    If you don’t get a global income garantee , you die

    there is no more work, no more capital for you , you die

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