The Future of Work

All rights reserved, May 2, 2016
THE
FUTURE
OF
WORK

SWEDEN’S SIX HOUR WORKDAY
This year Sweden started on a little experiment that could have a
dramatic impact on our world. The way we work, play, live, love,
everything. In a bid to increase productivity and increase happiness,
the country is experimenting with a 6 hour work day.
Responses to this move range from dismissive “Not for us” to
skeptical “Will it work?” to militant “What are they doing to the
moral fabric of society?”
ICE, All rights reserved, May 2, 2016

This report explores the before and after of such an idea, the
context and implications. It will look at why this is an idea whose
time has come and what kind of steps others who seek to emulate it
(and even Sweden itself) will need to keep in mind in such an effort.
To understand the move will require us to go back a few hundred
years to the industrial revolution, grapple with notions of work and
its role in society. How this history is in conflict with the new
realities of today’s technology and the information economy. And
arrive at a sense of how we would like to shape the future..
THE FUTURE OF WORK

WHAT IS
WORK?
The Fordist
paradigm
Alternative
paradigms
UBERFICATION
OF PROCESSES
Changing
Work processes
Company side
(Uber)
People side
(FOSS, Wikipedia)
RECASTING
OF WORK
Implications?
from Need to Choice
New Systems
21 Hours
Universal Basic
Income
THE FUTURE OF WORK
TOMORROW’S
TECHNOLOGY
ICT, Computing,
AI, Robotics
Automation of
Blue Collar and
White Collar Jobs

Our story begins about a hundred years ago.
While the industrial revolution of the 18th and
19th centuries made drastic changes to the way
work was carried out, it is in the early part of the
20th century that we see ideas of FW Taylor’s
Scientific Management get entrenched at the
workplace. And more so in the factories of Henry
Ford than anywhere else.

FORD’S 8 HOUR WORKDAY
In 1925, Henry Ford, in a bid to improve
productivity and also reduce employee turnover,
absenteeism and the accident rate, cut the
working day to 8 hours, and the work week to 5
days. And doubled the wages, while at it.
Other manufacturers were forced to follow suit—
leading to the institutionalization of the 40-hour
work week.
It led to improvement in workers’ health and
productivity. Their rising affluence allowed them
to actually buy the cars (and other goods) they
were making.
Thus was created the consumption-driven American economic system, which has now found resonance and adoption
throughout the world.

The Fordist paradigm of
work is first and
foremost productive
Work creates or increases value.
It shapes raw material,
cultivates crops, dams rivers to
produce electricity. It moves
things to where they are useful.

Work as a
means to an End
Work is a means to earn money
or status or other benefits. Work
may be mindless, boring,
painful, dangerous, but can be
and is done since it pays for a
living or allows for other
benefits.

Work, in this paradigm, is also a means of
keeping people consuming and the economy
running
Work. Earn. Consume.
Economy grows, Earnings rise. Consume more. People's worth is
measured by the market value of their labor.
Any threat to this order of things is quickly dispensed with. Policy
is modified and tweaked and bent over backwards to ensure this
system is strengthened and unthreatened. People are kept in this
state of work in order to keep the economy running.

But work can be more than a means to an end.
Work can be a pleasure in itself. It may be seen as a duty, or simply a
part of being part of a society.
In his book The Craftsman, Richard Sennet describes people who are driven more often by the
pleasure of their craft than the reward at the end. Another popular example is the Slow Food
movement which highlights the pleasure in making food and talking rather than food quickly
prepared for consumption.

CURIOSITY / SELF EXPRESSION
Work might be the pursuit of a
curiosity or a mode of self expression.
And decoupled from monetary reward,
a means of building character.
“Character is formed primarily by a man's work.
And work, properly conducted in conditions of
human dignity and freedom, blesses those who
do it.”
EF Schumacher

WORK AS PLAY *
Similar to the idea of Sennet’s
Craftsman, but as opposed to the
seriousness of the craftsman’s
exploration, play is activity for it’s
own sake.
The best examples are of course children who are
very serious about their play. But some adults, the
most creative ones are also often ‘playing’ a great
deal.
* Not to be confused with the modern sports
professional where in fact Play as Work.

WORK AS SOCIABILITY
Work may also function out of a
simple sense of society. eg When an
accident victim is taken to hospital
by people nearby. When a parent
bathes a child. When we help out.
That we look out for each other as humans, that
we feed each other, clean each other may not be
classified as work, but is far more important and
valuable and significant.

Two important developments of the last 30 years are
recasting our notions of work.
One, the advancement of IT enables truly
automatic tasks and processes.
Two, the Internet of Things. As more and more
of these machines, robots and people get
connected to and communicate with each other,
it enables coordination and targeted delivery at a
planetary scale.
The combination of these two allow for hitherto unimagined
possibilities.

Computer programs can write
newspaper articles and even stories of
a passable quality.
Self Driving Cars: Activity which was
considered extremely complex and
therefore human now being automated.
Robotic melon pickers, that can judge
ripeness of fruit by smell. Similarly robots
to spray pesticide and fertilizers; Robot
shearers tested in Australia.
Complex Supply Chains integrated
and managed by software

Earlier, manual labour was being replaced by machines,
Today’s computers and robots can supplant white-collar work
and complex activities like diagnosis, trading and writing.
Where they don’t completely do the work, they can perform
large chunks of tasks, drastically reducing the number of
people required overall.
Deloitte expects cognitive technologies embedded in products
to provide “intelligent” behavior, natural interfaces (such
speech and visual), and automation. The impact of product
applications on workers ranges from none (robotic toys or
intelligent thermostats), to marginal (robotic vacuum cleaners
may reduce hours demanded of house cleaners), to
significant.

“People are racing
against the machine in
media and music,
finance and
manufacturing, retailing
and trade, in short, in
every industry. And
losing.”
Erik Brynjolfsson
The advent of an increasingly
machine run world is one which
humans will finding increasingly
difficult to cope with.

The use of technology and automation is only speeding up at a rapid
pace. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, in ‘The Future of
Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization’ expect
about half of present jobs to be automated in the next two decades (by
2035). Gartner forecasts that “one in three jobs will be taken by software
or robots by 2025.”
ABB’s CEO expects European unemployment expected to rise from the
present 10 to 20 or 25 percent in the next decade. The Wall Street
Journal expects corporate re-engineering to eliminate between 1 million
and 2.5 million jobs a year across the entire U.S. economy, for the
foreseeable future.
90% 2.5milOf Jobs replaced by smart
machines by 2030
Jobs eliminated in the US every year
by corporate re-engineering

The Internet enables
Innovative means of
work organization:
It is possible now to
break up work into
tiny tasks that can be
performed by people
in different parts of
the world.

The Free and Open Source Software
movement, which gave us Linux and
Wikipedia, is one of the most
significant examples of a distributed
model of work enabled by the internet.
People across the world connected by the Internet,
are able to collaborate and contribute to the creation
of something that is useful for millions.
The work is done free or occasionally paid a
honorarium, it is done at programmers own time, as
much as they wish to or can contribute.

This gives people a lot more flexibility, allowing
different work-life-play balances and dynamics.
People (both companies and individuals) looking to
more ethical ways of being and functioning (green,
sharing, voluntarism/open source models, sourcing
of materials and labor etc) are enabled by this
network.
These then also allow us to imagine alternatives to
the big business model of work.. For instance, the
Exchange economies that were popular during the
aftermath of the 2008 crisis.

Companies too are
outsourcing more and more
work to contractors. Like
Uber’s ‘independent
contractors’ who are
summoned and used as and
when required, and are kept
on standby forever

While Uber itself will likely shift to completely
automated vehicles and not need drivers, more
and more organizations will adopt an Uber-like
reliance on contract and on-demand workers.
This will result in and be facilitated by an
increasingly large self-employed workforce. Self-
employed will thus likely be the largest section in
the workforce of the future.
This leads to the emergence of micro-task
economies. So "workers" cease to exist in the
same big masses. Even turn invisible.

Imagine an economy in which 1 percent own the machines,
10 per cent manage their operation, and 90 per cent either
do the remaining scraps of ‘unautomatable’ work, or are
unemployed.
This may seem like a proposition that the 1 percent find appealing, but the very
economics that got us to this point where this can happen tells you otherwise.
“The reality is that the free market economy, as we understand it today, simply
cannot work without a viable labor market. Jobs are the primary mechanism
through which income—and, therefore, purchasing power—is distributed to the
people who consume everything the economy produces. If at some point,
machines are likely to permanently take over a great deal of the work now
performed by human beings, then that will be a threat to the very foundation
of our economic system.
This is not something that will just work itself out. This is something that we
need to begin thinking about.”
Martin Ford

Simply put, machines don’t buy things.
And people who don’t have jobs or income
will not be able to buy. So what happens to
the economy?
Will it lead to a global crash, depression, swabs of wealth
destroyed across the globe?
More important, what happens to people?
The impoverishment to large sections of the globe, entire
countries going bankrupt; The possibility of civil wars or
simple old fashioned genocide that can be ordered by those
in charge of the machines make people especially
vulnerable.

FROM needing to work
TO choosing to work
It is also possible to envision a happier world. Where people don’t
abandon their vocation for soul sapping means of livelihood. But
rather one where they indulge in what they most truly wish to do,
their calling.
Like John Lanchester suggests, “The robots liberate most of humanity
from work: we don’t have to work in factories or go down mines or
clean toilets or drive long-distance lorries, but we can choreograph
and weave and garden and tell stories and invent things.”

Once we do away with the need to work, it is possible that we
choose work. Work of the character-building kind. The kind that is
fulfilling and truly human. The play kind. The social kind.
‘Worklessness’, then, is reframed from a problem to solve to an
opportunity to discover what is most truly human about us.
Or in the words of Ernst Fischer:
“As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it
will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.”
It is in this context that Sweden’s move begins to make sense.

This will require a
paradigm shift in the
way we think about
the world, the
economy, our notions
of work and play, our
education system, our
infrastructure,
everything.

A NEW EDUCATION SYSTEM
To begin with, something as elementary as our
education system. The bulk of the present
system creates workers for factories, and
managers for them.
The future will require more liberal arts, more
pure science, more explorers. It will have space
for people without a formal education , trained
in the world, on farms, in communities,
through travel, through exploring curiosity like
people, used to in the past.
Large scale reform of the education system will
be the first ask of this new world.

NEW MODELS OF WORK ORGANIZATION
We will also need to update our policies around
employee relations and organizational structures. We
would do well to consider seriously proposals like the 21
hour work week.
Paul Mason adds that the transition is not just about
economics. It will have to be a human transition. Our
roles as consumers, lovers, communicators are as
important to this as our role at work.

NEW ECONOMIC PARADIGMS
We will need to move out of the present neo-liberal
paradigm and tend towards more socialist principles like
Universal Basic Income.
What it will allow is the creation of a security that
allows people to pursue things they would rather, than
be forced to do things they do not like. Allowing a much
freer flowering of creativity, exploration and if one were
to be a little optimistic, a little more happiness.
Let us look at two interesting suggestions mooted in the
recent past.

21 HOUR WORK WEEK
This proposal comes from the New Economic Foundation, a think tank
based in the UK.
NEF suggests that shifting from the current default of the 40 hour work
week to a 21 hour week could help to address a range of urgent,
interlinked problems: overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high
carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack
of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life.
The logic of industrial time is out of step with today’s conditions, where
instant communications and mobile technologies bring new risks and
pressures, as well as opportunities. The challenge is to break the power
of the old industrial clock without adding new pressures, and to free up
time to live sustainable lives.

21 HOUR WORK WEEK
This move would offer several benefits:
 Increased social justice and well-being. A 21-hour ‘normal’ working
week could help distribute paid work more evenly across the
population, reducing ill-being associated with unemployment, long
working hours and too little control over time.
 More sustainable habits: Work pressures of today make it necessary to
use a number of ‘time saving’ devices, technologies, and habits.
Similarly, the pressure of the work-week ends up making us consume
on weekends, creating an unsustainable ecological situation.
 Improving gender relations: It becomes possible to share childcare
equally between two partners
 Break the habit of living to work, working to earn, and earning to
consume.
The Swedish experiment is a step in this direction.

UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME
But to make any of these earlier proposals feasible or even thinkable,
requires a guarantee of the basics: housing, food, healthcare. We’ll have
to begin by guaranteeing the trio to the entire population. People can
(and will) work for more, but they also will not be compelled any longer
to do things (like David Graeber calls them, bullshit jobs) in order to live.
A basic income will free up people to pursue what they really love.
A two year pilot is to happen in Finland starting next year. 100,000 Finns
could get up to 1,000 euros a month. For this, they will not need to work
or prove they're in poverty. They will simply get a fixed amount to do
with what they will.
Cities in the Netherlands and Canada are also planning pilots with
Universal Basic Income.

UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME
There are several challenges to introducing Universal Basic Income.
Many governments have such lean budgets that they can’t even try
doing this. Besides the cultural resistance against giving away free money
to people for doing nothing would be huge.
It is important to consider the idea not in the context of our current
economy, but in a context British economist Paul Mason calls
Postcapitalist. Mason explains how capitalism isn't as socially productive
as it's traditionally been. In fact, the 2008 crisis would point to the
opposite. One can also see that the nature of the Information Economy
(based on zero marginal cost) is radically different from the economics of
the industrial age that Capitalism is based on.

Sources:
Paul Mason PostCapitalism
Jeremy Rikin, The End of Work
Juliet B Schor, The Overworked American
Bertrand Russel, In Praise of Idleness
EF Schumacher, Small is Beautiful
Martin Ford, The Lights in the Tunnel
Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time Work and Leisure
Deloitte, Redesigning Work in an Era of Cognitive Technologies
New Economic Foundation, 21 Hours
http://dupress.com/articles/work-redesign-and-cognitive-technology/
fastcoexist http://www.fastcoexist.com/section/the-new-rules-of-work Anti-Work | 21 Hour Work-Week | Post-Work Economy |
Universal Basic Income
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/11/neoliberalism-hijacked-vocabulary
Images from:
commons.wikimedia.org
flickr.com
freeimages.com
pexels.com
pixabay.com
unsplash.com

Pagewise Photo Credits:
1
2 http://www.loc.gov/pictures, pingnews
3 http://www.loc.gov/pictures, pingnews
4
5 ClkerFreeVectorImages
6 ClkerFreeVectorImages
7 US Dept of Agriculture
8 US Dept of Agriculture
9 Tim Gouw
10
11 Eddy Klaus
12 StockSnap
13 Wikimedia
14
15 BMW
16 kropekk_pl, Google
17 BMW
18 Amazon
19 kaboompics.com
20
21 Tim Gouw
22 ubuntu
23 StockSnap
24 Jim Jackson
25 Jim Jackson
26
27 Jim Jackson
28 Jim Jackson
29 Paul Proshin
30 Paul Proshin
31 Paul Proshin
32 cherylt23
33 Rainbow_Loom_und_Nadel
34 Tung Wong
35 Shanice Garcia
36 Shanice Garcia
37 Jesse Vermeulen
38 Jesse Vermeulen
39
40

Interested in future trends and reports?
ice@humanfactors.com
facebook.com/uxtrendspotting
@UXTrendspotting
Author: ANAND VIJAYAN
Supervised by: DEEPA S REDDY

The Future of Work

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