> Jack, I agree that "a society which systematically puts people out of work
> is obsolescent". However, I'm not sure all this progress is really
> putting people "out of work". Maybe I'm an idealist, but I tend to think
> we are providing opportunities to refocus the energies of these workers to
> new challenges. The cycle you explained (people lose work, they are less
> able to buy things they need...) looks at the issue from one perspective,
> the displacement of workers. What if we looked at it from the perspective
> of the displaced workers? As people lose work, they search for new
> opportunities of employment. These workers may acquire new skills through
> job training programs or formal institutions. The new skills may allow
> the workers to help expand new business ventures or markets, increasing
> the overall domestic product and potentially expanding the need for
> energy. How about looking at it from the consumer point of view? By
> reducing the rates through technology innovation (displacement of labor),
> more income is provided to pursue ventures previously unattainable. These
> new ventures could help expand markets, increasing the overall domestic
> product and ... you get the picture.
Very good points. However, not only do individual displaced workers have
to learn to changes, society as a whole needs to learn a new value system
regarding work. Currently we think of a person who holds down a job with
the same company for all his adult life and retires with a gold watch as
having some highly desirable properties that we classify under the
concept of Character, whereas we think of someone who changes jobs as
having a less desirable form of Character. When someone gets laid off,
we say "they lost their job," which implies that the transition from
having that particular job to not having that particular job was the
result of a particular set of behaviors on the part of the individual,
even though it would be more factually (not just "politically") correct
to say "their job went away." We're still stuck in what I call the Job
Behavior Model of Employment, where we believe that if an employee
exhibits appropriate job behavior (usually implicitly defined as
"obedience to authority"), that employee will have the job (or a job that
he was promoted to) indefinitely.
For example, there was a court case several years ago in Detroit. A
group of rowdy, drunken autoworkers beat a Chinese-American man to death,
amid screams of "you're taking our jobs away" (they didn't distinguish
between Chinese-Americans and Japanese nationals). The principal
assailant received a slap-on-the-wrist sentence. The judge explicitly
came out and said that one of the reasons for the light sentence was that
he was extremely impressed by the fact that the assailant still had his
job in a car factory at a time when lots of other autoworkers were
getting laid off. Now at that time (early 1980's), auto-industry layoffs
were being done strictly on the basis of seniority, so the fact that the
assailant still had his job had nothing to do with his "character" and
everything to do with the year in which he started working, which in turn
had mainly to do with the year in which he was born.
We will be able to cope with the changes in the economy if we can learn
not to pass judgment on people based on how the changes effect them in
the short term. We need to encourage ("you can do it!") the people who are
displaced, not write them off ("you don't have the right stuff"). We've
got to remember the children's story "The Little Engine that Could" even
though some of us might be tempted to think of "The Little Engine that
wasn't in the Right Place on the Bell Curve." We need to emphasize
people's potential, not their limits. We need to start valuing people's
ability to adapt to change and to do a variety of things, and start
*devaluing* people's ability to "stay the course" and "stay on task."
Does this mean abandoning some Values that we grew up with? Of course it
does! But that's not a bad thing, because Values are simply judgments of
what's adaptive in a certain environment, not Timeless and Transcendent
principles. New environments mean new Values, and that's nothing new in
itself. We need to remember that here in the US, every July 4 we
celebrate the abandonment of one of the most traditional Values
(monarchy) imaginable. This doesn't mean that we abandon basic ethics;
as C.S. Lewis points out in _The Abolition of Man_, there are some basic
ethical principles (such as honesty and reciprocity) that can be found in
every culture and every time, and these are adaptive everywhere. But we
need to stop promoting artifacts of a particular economy (such as the
"normative life course" made possible by the peculiar economic
circumstances that the US had in the late 1940's and 1950's) to the same
status as these basic ethical principles (we also need to stop promoting
matters of fashion and style to the same status as well). In short, we
need to realize that change has always been with us and always will be,
and that success comes from participating in it, not from fighting it and
not from simply submitting to it. We need to remember that there never
has been a Golden Age and there never will be.
From: ebohlman@netcom.com (Eric Bohlman)