Workforce Development and the Lessons of Urban Planning
In the mid 20th century, urban planners made a series of investments and enacted policies designed to help cities adapt to the new technology of the automobile. History proved many of these noble efforts to be catastrophic failures that exacerbated the problems they intended to solve and nearly destroyed the physical, economic and social structures of American cities. The reason that so many seemingly well-conceived and professionally-executed policies failed so miserably is that they rested on a theoretical conception of what cities were and what they were supposed to be that turned out to be much too narrow. Policy-makers only succeeded in revitalizing urban environments when they broadened their views and took into account the multitude of intangible elements that made city life rich and interesting – elements obvious to any resident, but easily dismissed by theorists obsessed with quantification.
In my observation, well-meaning analysts of work and working life in the 21st century seem poised to repeat this mistake.
Like cities in the mid-20th century, the whole scope of human activity known as “work” is poised on the brink of technology-driven transformation. In 1920, the agent of change was the car. In 1980, it was the computer. Both technologies demanded a significant capital investment in equipment and infrastructure. Both also entailed huge unadvertised costs of adaptation: a reordering of physical, social and economic relationships that was a byproduct of their power to supplement human capabilities to such a great extent.
For nearly half a century, this transformation has been occurring on its own, without plan or policy, leaving businesses, governments and workers scrambling to adapt in an ad hoc, piecemeal fashion. The results have often been disruptive, unforeseen problems were created by adoption of the technology, and expected advantages have not always materialized. The gap between the promised benefits of technology and what was actually delivered continues to leave many stakeholders disappointed. And there seems to be a continual need for additional investment.
The urban planners of the mid-20th century tried to meet the challenge and opportunity of the automobile by making massive changes to the shapes of cities. They widened roads, built freeways and parkways out to the suburbs, drove tunnels through mountains and bridges over rivers. Economic and housing policy encouraged decentralization. Public transit was neglected; old housing and declining neighborhoods were leveled to create new environments that planners theorized were more suited to the pace of car-culture.
Their goal was to streamline the urban environment, making it less of a bottleneck to the smooth flow of traffic and thereby unlocking its economic potential. What happened instead was collapse. The middle class left cities in droves, eviscerating the tax base and leaving municipal governments starved of the resources to provide services and amenities to the remaining residents. Neighborhoods were physically torn apart by freeways and huge, alienating housing blocks destroyed street life. Industrial decline accelerated, the cultural advantages of urban concentration dissipated, and, in the final insult, traffic continued to get worse with the opening of each new freeway, bridge or parking complex.
Planners, in their enthusiasm for efficiency and productivity, forgot one important component of cities: People. Their redevelopment schemes took no notice of the underlying strengths of the old city model – the resilient ecosystems of neighborhoods that provided networks of social and economic support. Once these were destroyed by wholesale infrastructure “improvements,” they could only be replaced inadequately, and at great cost, by the state.
Planners assumed people would adapt. Instead, huge numbers slipped into economic and sociological limbo. Consequently, the costs of planning blunders made half a century ago remain with us today.
The future of work poses many of the same challenges to planners and theorists today as the future of cities did 50-60 years ago. New technology enables communication and collaboration across time and space, and increasing numbers of organizations are taking advantage of this to decentralize and flatten their work environments. Ever-more powerful computers are able to replace higher and higher levels of human activity, or bring complex information into focus for human decision-makers to an unprecedented degree. Today’s cycle of investments in IT are driven, as always, by profits and competition, not an altruistic desire to improve the lot of workers. Despite the rising productivity of capital, however, human workers obviously retain a central importance in the creation of value. Ensuring that the workforce remains willing and able to participate in the fast-paced economy that businesses have created (and consumers have embrace) is therefore critical.
So the central question today is, how do we change our conception of work to capitalize on the advantages of new technology? How do we ensure the benefits are well-distributed, and what, if anything, do we do for those left displaced in the wake of change?
The most common answers to these questions are “training and education.” Information technology (IT) has accelerated an epochal shift from physical labor to symbolic analysis. High value work today requires the ability to create and manipulate data, draw conclusions, make decisions, operate within structured processes, and communicate ideas. Workers who lack the skills to perform those kinds of activities can expect steadily declining economic rewards and rising job insecurity, as low-skill work becomes increasingly susceptible to automation and outsourcing. Naturally, theorists assume that workers, as rational actors in a traditional economic model, will generally pursue the course of action most likely to result in financial gain. That is, they will adapt.
Consequently, huge investments are being made to transform the workforce through training and education. The more people we can move from low-skill, low-value labor into the more productive reaches of information work, the greater the benefits to workers, employers and society.
This sounds to me like the 21st century version of “slum clearance.” Move the underclass out of their dilapidated, decaying old industrial jobs into the shiny new tower-blocks of the information economy, connected with big fat roads for the most efficient traffic flow. Surely this hygienic, transparent, wired new world of work will prove far more rewarding than the grim routine of manual labor and manufacturing.
And perhaps it will. But recent history provides a strong warning against equating transformation with progress. Work is primarily an economic activity, but not exclusively one. From the perspective of employers, workers may be merely units of labor, and the goal of any changes is to maximize the productivity per unit. Workers are also people, however, and the reasons people work, and the occupations they choose, are more complex than just economics.
A lot of workforce development theory I’ve seen exhibits an alarming indifference to the social dimension of work. The exclusive focus is on sustaining productivity growth, and if there is any discussion of on-the-job recreation or integration of work and family life, it is in the context of keeping workers happy so they will work harder. As with urban planners of the previous generation, it is perhaps easier to ignore the relationships you can’t quantify, and to omit evidence that runs counter to the thesis that all investment leads to progress and all progress is good.
It may turn out that running the equivalent of bulldozers and superhighways through the workplace really does deliver the social and economic benefits that its proponents promise. It is equally possible that doing so will destroy many the fragile treasures that not only enrich the lives of workers, but sustain wider support networks that will come crashing down, at unforeseen cost.
Fortunately, there is a middle course between the downward spiral of low-value work and the disruption of radical occupational transition. More on that in a later post.
8:11:23 AM 
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