Everyone is talking about the Future of Work, capitalization apparently mandatory. Pacific Standard has a series running on the Future of Work. Forbes and Fast Company have new dedicated sections on the Future of Work. Various big foundations are putting big money into researching the Future of Work. Some unions are doing that too.
So, what is the Future of Work? Here are seven semi-informed thoughts on future labor markets, income distribution, and social movements.
1. Nobody really has much of a clue which sectors will be remade.
Consider this: the VC firms that spot and fund those startups thought to be shaping the Future of Work by disrupting all our ordinary folkways? They expect almost all their startups to fail. Nobody knows where the next Uber is going to come from. Not to get all Hayekian here, but the market has its own logic.
But… 2. We probably should not be panicking about technological unemployment or a robot revolution.
See here David Autor’s great new paper “Why Are There Still so Many Jobs?” One is that it turns out to be awfully hard to automate some “menial” jobs–food preparation, hotel cleaning, landscaping–because they require human judgment that machines just aren’t close to having yet. Remember Google’s neural network electric sheep dreams? Same principle.
A second is the dynamic effects of automation on labor markets. Increased automation can spur greater demand for skilled workers, which in turn creates demand for different sorts of unskilled workers. More systems analysts with higher salaries means more restaurants, hotels, child care centers, and the like.
A third is that when major disruptions do occur, it is just anyone’s guess what will happen afterwards. As I’ve argued elsewhere, and as Ben Evans points out far more eloquently, driverless cars may eliminate jobs for drivers but also enable totally different uses of urban space. Maybe retail and restaurants move in, or maybe even factories do. Evans paraphrases Carl Sagan: “it was easy to predict mass car-ownership but hard to predict Wal-Mart.”
3. But–and again, summarized nicely by Autor–the distribution of jobs will probably be bimodal.
We’ll have a bunch of highly-skilled professionals and analysts at the top and a bunch of less skilled workers at the bottom. This is actually the distribution we’ve had in the U.S. for a while. The decline of industry hollowed out the middle, but the low-wage service sector grew a lot. Insofar as the U.S. maintains its global leadership in high tech, health care, finance, and other professional services, we’ll need a lot of highly skilled professionals to analyze things and a lot of service workers to take care of those professionals.
4. That means the wage distribution will probably remain bimodal for a while, but doesn’t have to forever.
The key is whether workers on the left side of the distribution have much bargaining power. Lots of industrial jobs paid miserably until they were unionized; policies of embedded liberalism then helped protect those jobs by limiting product market competition. Now, I don’t think we’re going to see labor law reform anytime soon, but the distribution of income would surely look quite different if workers could unionize more easily, or if they were placed into unions by default.
A new burst of unionization would also have all manner of second-order effects that would be hard to predict. Would a union of Uber drivers soon decide they’d be better off just setting up a competing referral service? Would that hasten or prevent the widespread adoption of driverless cars? Would it lead toward a tax code or capital market regulations that encourage allocation of capital to cooperatives?
As always with labor law reform, when and whether this changes will be a political question, and will probably involve lots of social conflict.
5. Another truism, but largely absent from debate: broader trends in globalization are still enormously important.
A Europe with several million new migrants looks quite different from Europe a few years ago. Global labor markets look very different if border controls are relaxed, or if the migration crisis continues. Global product markets look very different if the Trans-Pacific Partnership goes through. What happens in the various European crises will help determine what happens in TTIP, which will shape the U.S. regulatory structure.
6. We haven’t yet begun to appreciate how new technology can change secondary associations, social movements, and politics.
The following is from my abstract for the upcoming “Coming Out Party” for Platform Cooperativism:
Apps and algorithms that exploit network effects have enabled the rise of the so-called “sharing economy.” But they can also enable the rise of new social movements to check corporate power and undergird robust platform cooperativism. The reason is that such apps and algorithms could make organizing far, far easier. Traditional organizing is time-consuming and expensive, and involves five phases. Organizers must contact workers, consumers, or citizens (the “targeting” phase); figure out their desires (the “assessing” phase); show them that others share those desires (the “assuring” phase); move them into action (the “motivating” phase); and consolidate those individuals’ collective power into a lasting organization (the “institutionalizing” phase).
Citizens linked together by the right platform running the right set of algorithms could pass through these phases at dramatically lower cost. Such a platform might gather data on consumer purchases and web browsing, not to enable sales, but to determine which consumers have strong preferences for ethical consumption, to put them in contact with one another, and to help them organize boycotts. Such a platform might link together all restaurant workers, or all health care workers, or all security guards within a particular city—or nationally, or globally—both providing them job-related information and enabling workers to organize walkouts or consumer boycotts.
Think of this as Organizing 3.0—a platform that enables fast and effective concerted action through smart use of network effects, that moves online networks into the streets, and that is radically democratic, designed to enable thousands of new experimental forms of user-driven mobilization.
Artisanal production led to craft unions, industrial production led to industrial unions, and new production strategies will eventually lead to new sorts of “unions.” They will probably be mediated through technology, exploiting network effects to build collective power. Hopefully they can play the basic political-economic role of past unions: enhancing workers’ bargaining power, democratizing work relationships, and serving as a political counterweight to corporate power.
But I think they’ll be very different from what we’ve seen in the past. They might be far more anarchic than current unions, they might be small but tightly organized, they might be very large but based on weak ties among worker. They might be truly global organizations–no reason that isn’t possible today given that cross-border communication is essentially free.
So, to summarize:
7. The Future of Work is a question of politics as much as economics.
This article originally appeared on the Internet of Work blog.
