Why Doesn’t Work Just End (Already)?
How is it possible that we are, at the same time, terrified of losing our jobs and fed up with working?
The original (Spanish) version of this article can be found here.
In 1929, John Maynard Keynes made a prediction: in 100 years (meaning today), productivity would have grown so much that we wouldn’t need to work. As industrial economies advanced and we became able to do more with less, a moment would arrive when almost no one would be needed in the economy.
But even then, work had become such an important part of the social structure that, to solve the conflicts its disappearance would create,
“We shall endeavor to spread the bread thinly on the butter — that is to say, to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible.
Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour workweek could postpone the problem for a very long time. For three hours a day are quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us.”
In 1995, Jeremy Rifkin published The End of Work, a book warning that the advance of automation and new technologies would make Keynes’s thesis come true. The automation brought by the digital age was going to destroy more jobs than it created, making full employment impossible in the future.
In this change, Rifkin identified a similar problem: part of the population would be left without occupation while another part would monopolize all the opportunities offered by employment. That’s why he proposed a social transformation where unpaid work — in voluntary, community, and cultural activities — would play a central role in distributing purpose and meaning among people. Just like Keynes, he suggested that jobs should be split into shorter shifts to maintain social cohesion.
Keynes was wrong about only one thing: he anticipated that productivity would multiply by 4 to 6, when in reality it has multiplied by 15.
In everything else, these two economists laid out an undeniable thesis if you follow economic theory: increasing productivity, the ability to do more with less, results in fewer working hours being needed to produce the same.
This idea is so prevalent we hear it everywhere: every time someone says that artificial intelligence will destroy millions of jobs, for example.
And yet, work does not seem to disappear. One hundred years after Keynes’s prophecy, and thirty years after Rifkin’s book, here we still are, working almost the same hours as in 1930. Work has not only failed to disappear, but it seems as if we work even more (more people, and more hours per person).
How can this be?
How can we be terrified of losing our jobs and, at the same time, exhausted by working?
There are two explanations: one from a static view of the economy, and another from a dynamic view.
From a static perspective, work is disappearing, even if it doesn’t seem like it. Not in the number of workers, nor in the number of working hours, but in the share of economic activity represented by the labor factor.
The share of gross national income — that is, the total value of income received by a country — allocated to pay for labor has been declining over the last 50 years, and that decline has accelerated since 2000.
So, although more people are working, and total working hours are still rising, in proportion to the rest of the economy, the share represented by labor is increasingly smaller. In the economy, work really is disappearing.
In people’s lives, this feels like an increasingly acute scarcity. More people working, more hours worked, but for less money. The feeling is the same as living in a pond that is slowly drying up. There is less and less space to swim, and more fish. From inside the pond, it is hard to perceive, but the reality is that there is less and less water.
But this interpretation comes from comparing two snapshots (what work represented in one year, versus another). And as we have discussed in other articles, this way of looking at the world — as a series of still photos — is a terrible representation of a changing reality like ours. If we see reality as a river, it would never make sense to take two pictures of the water and try to compare them.
If we observe the river in its living, moving nature, we can see how the economy has transformed in recent years. And then a much clearer — and stronger — explanation emerges.
The mutation of the idea of work
There is a curious thing about work: although it has played different roles throughout history, we have always called it the same. That’s because the concept of work is not attached to the function it fulfills in production, but to the role it plays in the moral system.
Work is not all effort, but only those (arduous, painful) tasks one does outwardly, for others, for “society.”
Before the Industrial Revolution, only the tasks that serfs performed for their feudal lords were considered “work.” The tasks they did for their own survival or for their community — like farming their own land or maintaining roads and forests — did not count as work. This conception partly persists today. That is why we do not recognize the work women do in the home.
During the Industrial Revolution, a new idea emerged: work was the way men put their strength at the service of producing goods. That narrative of the worker using his muscles, his effort, “the sweat of his brow,” to produce things of value for society (like cars or houses) became a way of existing in the world.
But in the 1980s, Western countries effectively abandoned that economic model, which required workers to use their strength. Instead, they decided to create a “knowledge economy,” where people’s role would no longer be to contribute strength, but intelligence.
This goal — which had never been tested in history — was supposed to create a society in which Western workers would be the creatives, the designers, and the engineers who would devise the products later manufactured elsewhere.
Not only would workers continue to be the central element of the system, but they would also be freed from the exhausting, devastating demand of wearing down their bodies.
Drunk on excitement over their own dream, no one seemed to ask if this would be possible. That is, whether it would take the same number of engineers to design a product as it took people to build it on an assembly line. Whether it was possible to replace, at the same scale, a system where everyone had a place in the factory with one where everyone would be an engineer.
Fifty years have gone by, and that dream has never come true. This is crystal clear in one example:
Apple has about 164,000 employees worldwide. How many would you say are dedicated to designing iPhones or other products? 10,000? 1,000?
And how many to manufacturing iPhones?
None. Although Steve Jobs initially wanted to manufacture his computers in the US, the attempt to create factories in Silicon Valley was a disaster, and in the 1990s they fully outsourced production of all their devices to third-party companies in other countries.
Currently, iPhones are made in China at a labor cost of around $30 per unit, about 3% of the sale price. Good luck to anyone trying to bring that manufacturing industry back to the US at those prices.
And if they neither design nor manufacture, what do all those people working at Apple do?
They sell. About 70,000 of their employees worldwide work in the brand’s retail stores. And although Apple is very secretive about the rest of its workforce, we can safely guess that another large portion works in marketing, and another considerable portion in managing that massive workforce and its stores.
The share of Apple’s workforce — or that of any other brand — involved in the “productive” process of the goods it sells is minimal. Not to mention the number of brands that no longer manufacture ANYTHING and only put their label on the packaging, like Red Bull.
In the transition from a producer economy to a consumer economy, Western countries stopped being a “productive” system and instead transformed into a giant machine competing to sell things.
The knowledge economy never arrived. What emerged instead was an “attention economy,” where countless brands compete to capture the attention of some people. In that economy, most people work (if we even want to keep using the same word, although it no longer means the same) capturing, managing, and organizing the attention of other people.
The reason why work doesn’t end is that it no longer fulfills the function described by Keynes, Rifkin, and the other economists. That work did end. It did disappear or was reduced to a minimum. What we call work today is a contribution of a different nature, even though it is still called the same. The mechanisms organizing it have nothing to do with the role work played in factories.
Because factory work was a way to contribute energy (strength) to the productive system. And machines were designed precisely to replace that strength. So the better the machines became, the less work was needed to produce. But in the attention economy, there is nothing better than humans at capturing and managing the attention of other humans (and no, no artificial intelligence will change this in the near future).
Any company, given the choice between putting a person to sell one-on-one and putting in some kind of technology, if the price were the same, would choose to put a person. What happens is that labor is the best resource, but also the most expensive (per unit of sale). That is why companies replace labor with cheaper — but also less efficient — mechanisms to capture attention, like advertising or branding.
That is how employment today has a direct relationship with growth (the more you grow, the more jobs you need), the opposite of what Rifkin and Keynes expected. Put simply: the more you sell, the more salespeople you need.
As a consequence, instead of a society of architects and engineers, the West has ended up with a society of salespeople. A society where between 25% and 40% of the college-educated population is overqualified for their jobs.
We have ended up in a society where graduates fight tooth and nail to jump from being an Apple store clerk to the brand’s marketing department. But there is nowhere else to go.
And that’s because capturing the attention of other humans does not require specific technical knowledge — the kind we get at university — but rather all those “soft skills” everyone talks about in today’s economy.
The commoditization of employment
This explains another paradox of the contemporary labor market: wages have been stagnant (or falling) for decades while the demand for work continues to rise.
That’s because the skills needed to work in the new “factories” — shops, bars, call centers, etc., in this attention economy — are naturally possessed by all human beings with a high-school education and a short training course. So workers cannot compete except on the price of their labor. This keeps wages stuck at the minimum cost of living in each city. Workers, who need the income, will be willing to accept the minimum that allows them to live where they work.
Therefore, companies will want to keep hiring as many employees as they can fit in their P&Ls, but for the lowest price, because employment has been commoditized and one person no longer adds distinctive value compared to another.
This can be seen in how companies are organized, becoming experts in designing systems where people play as interchangeable a role as they did on the assembly line.
And this trend also explains why such a large part of society sees immigration as a threat. Immigrants from developing countries are just as prepared to compete in this attention economy as the nationals of a country (allowing for cultural differences).
The worst of both worlds
The final punchline of this phenomenon is that, while industrial work gave each person an important role in the world, creating things of value for others, in the attention economy workers only create value for shareholders.
No one cares whether your company does better than its competitor or sells far more than last year, except the person pocketing the profits. When people went from making things to selling things, work lost its ability to give meaning to people’s lives.
Companies know this and try to patch it by creating brands, cultures, or workplace experiences to get workers emotionally involved with the organization. But it doesn’t seem to be working very well, judging by the data. Up to 80% of workers worldwide report feeling “disconnected” from their company.
But, as Keynes and Rifkin explained, work is one of the main sources of meaning in contemporary society. So we have ended up in the same scenario they anticipated for the end of work — with a society where many people find no meaning in their existence anywhere — except, on top of that, they also have no time to find it elsewhere because they are still working.
And I would say that much of contemporary unease is born from this.
My friend Mario Sánchez-Herrero, who loves me too much to let me fall into intellectual laziness, has been demanding for some time that I explain (and explain to myself) why, from my own discourse about productivity, work never quite disappears. This article is an attempt to answer that question.
I’ve been a bit less active on this blog these past few weeks than I would have liked. I’m finishing up a book I hope to deliver in the next few weeks, and it’s taking up all my time. I really appreciate your patience, and I promise to come back at full steam once I’ve turned it in.