The death of the job

Every day brings another story of 'job losses'. We are told the recession is over, but the proportion of the workforce that is 'jobless' has not fallen as it has after previous recessions. The government is trying to 'create jobs' by easing taxes and regulations, but says it should intervene more. We hear that the only way to protect jobs is to increase productivity, yet the result seems to be to make the jobs redundant.

When I was growing up, we used to read that by the year 2000 everyone would have to Work only 30 hours a week and that the rest would be leisure time. But as we approach the year 2000, it seems more likely that half of us will work 60 hours a week and the rest of us will be unemployed. What is going wrong?

The reality is that what is disappearing today is not just a certain number of jobs, of jobs in certain industries or in one country - or even jobs in the developed world as a whole. What is disappearing is the very thing itself: the job.

The job is a social artefact, though it is so deeply embedded in our consciousness that most of us have forgotten its artificiality, or the fact most societies since the beginning of time have done fine without jobs fine without jobs. In the pre-industrial past, people worked very hard, but they did not have jobs to frame and contain their activities. Then jobs became not only common but important: they were nothing less than the only widely-available path to security and success. Now they are disappearing.

So what do people do without jobs? Some possibilities are obvious, you can start a business on your own, you can become an artist; you can become a consultant; you can do freelance work, or part-time work, or piecework in your own home. Under the pressure of dejobbing in organisations, more people than ever before are doing all of these things. But there is another answer. You can do what more and more people are doing: working within organisations, but under arrangements too fluid and idiosyncratic to be called jobs.

'You won't last at Microsoft if your job is just a job.' That is how Teresa Stowell, a software design engineer, describes what it is like to work at the Seattle software powerhouse. To begin with people work any time and all the time, with no one keeping track of their hours, but with everyone watching their output. They are accountable not to conventional managers but to the project teams of which they are a part.

When a project ends, Microsoft employees move on to a new one, taking with them the reputation they earned on the last project. There are no standard career routes. 'If people want to change functions or they want to get different experiences, that's not frowned on at all. Employees drive their own development, and we need to design all of our management and our training programmes to support, augment and facilitate that development.'

Just as workers will need to be ready to shift from project to project within the same organisation, they should expect that much more frequently than in the past they will have to move from one organisation to another. Long-term employment is, for most workers, a thing of the past. The organisation will try to minimise these shifts, recognising that they are difficult and disruptive to the effectiveness of both the organisation and the worker. But both parties will have to make their long-term plans with the likelihood of such shifts in mind..Unless we begin soon to re-educate our workforces in these new expectations and the economic realities that have shaped them, we are in for decades of economic chaos that will damage our organisations and devastate several generations of workers.