A world of labour in terms of cooking

Let’s think of the world of labour in terms of cooking. The hunting society was primarily interested in the ingredients; the farmers invented storage so that the community could preserve food for a “rainy day”; the industrialists made the machines to process food; the managers delivered the cooks but the future will be in the hands of the recipes, not of cooks. The ingredients (raw materials) and the processing will be selected on a global level based on price, performance and quality. The order intake and the fulfillment will be outsourced locally. The recipe however will be glocal: thought of in one place in the form of patent, franchise or format (or any other packaged business knowledge), produced globally and distributed locally. Homeworkers will be recipemakers, cooks, ingredient suppliers and sometimes storage facilitators. They can be one or all in one, depending how they market themselves.

Of course when you read this you will think that this is again neo-liberal bullshit. But let’s call a spade a spade. A micro-entrepreneur is usually a different word for a long term unemployed person. We are talking about entrepreneurs out of necessity. We are living in a knowledge economy. In the west we are told that we need to look to add value to labor. We are told that our competence and skills are a life long process of learning and that this will make our price in the market. But what does it all mean when you lose your job? We think it means that in a knowledge economy, competences become commodities. They can be sold and traded, and that is a new concept. The trading on services because up to now we have been trading on assets all over the world. We are now talking of a derivative of work that needs to be marketed. Somebody makes a translation, somebody else copy edits it, somebody else designs it, somebody else supplies it with pictures, and the last one prints it. That is how you add value. But somewhere in the beginning of the line there may be a salesman who buys the service to be rendered, splits it up and in the end coordinates it again and sells it again. That is trading on services.

A market is a place where things are bought and sold.

We must be realistic: unemployment will not go away. Even if our economy now embarks upon the largest growth ever known in its history, jobs will never simply come back. Robotization, informatics and globalisation have been their silent killers. We are faced with an economic paradigm shift and we have to be careful or we disappear between the tectonic plates. We (and our political leaders) must have the courage to disconnect from the fantasy that jobs can be created. We do not need more jobs. For heaven’s sake, the ‘job’ as we know it is exactly the problem. We certainly don’t need more of that. On the contrary, jobs should disappear. The definition of a job as a little boxed entity in which we can find a job description connected to a solid hourly work schedule and a variety of benefits guaranteed through governmental negotiation – such as pension rights, unemployment benefits and health insurance, plus taxes that are recouped both from employer and employee – is no longer useful. The whole job model should be abandoned, because it prevents us from looking forward at a time when there is no time to lose. Without jobs, there will be plenty of work which we will be able to divide over smaller job packages, but the ‘job’ itself must evaporate, because they are holding us down.

Our economy is market-oriented. The market provides a lot of work, but no ‘jobs’: we have invented this concept. A market is a place where things are bought and sold. It’s a space for work without bounds, now providing fulltime and part-time jobs, then temporarily dwindling into unemployment. Sometimes the market place supplies work through freelance contracts or barter, sometimes via consultancy or micro-entrepreneurship. The trend of personalization fits this flexible work scheme, but standardization (standard wages, hours, job descriptions, pension rights, health insurance, unemployment benefits, work place ...) derives from an industrial work model that has long gone.

There is no doubt that kicking the habit of the job concept will be difficult. However, a world without jobs doesn’t necessarily mean a world without work. There is plenty of work, more even than there used to be, but the notion of a job, as it was conceived in the process of the industrial revolution, should be abandoned. We can start our own businesses. We can set up virtual companies (assembled from independent suppliers connected to one another through a joint product, a joint product strategy or a communication medium) or multiple companies at the same time; we can establish ourselves as an artist, we can work as ‘inplacement’ for an existing company; we can set-up our own transactions (real estate, project management ...) as a dealer; we can become consultant in our own area expertise; or we can work as a freelancer or as a part-time worker, all at the same time. We will no longer have ‘one job’ and we should not expect it to be so any longer. The word ‘job’ is only a hundred years old. Before that time, people had ‘work’ and this lasted for thousands of years, without difficulties worthy of mention. It should be possible to return to such a model.

To argue that jobs will return is as nonsensical as to claim that cotton nappies will return to replace diapers or that traditional postal services will replace e-mail services with a vengeance.