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.