The One-Dimensional Work World
Imagine for a moment that technology, globalization and other “big trend” factors have transformed the US economy such that the only good job prospects are in the construction industry. In this world, construction work enjoys not only high economic status, but high cultural status. Prime time is filled with light comedies featuring affluent, attractive young roofers and carpenters; the tastes and values of this class of worker are celebrated in magazines and talked about on news shows. And because of declining prospects elsewhere in the US economy, displaced information workers and “symbolic analysts” in fields like finance, engineering, law, marketing, human resources and software development are encouraged to seek retraining, so they can profit from successful new careers in ditch-digging or cement pouring. “Making the most of the transition through education” is the policy makers’ solution, in lieu of any effort to preserve information work jobs, which are seen as wildly susceptible to outsourcing and the ticket to a permanent spot in the underclass.
Perhaps this scenario doesn’t interest you much, given its implausibility. But because of my professional role as a cheerleader for the information work economy, I can’t help thinking that the prevailing social, political, educational and analytic approach to occupational re-alignment has a certain poverty of perspective.
Here’s the thing: I’m a fairly bright guy in average physical condition, but I’ve always been a hopeless klutz with tools. If my economic survival were based on my ability to compete in a construction-centric economy, I’d be lucky to find minimum wage work. If the goals and orientation of my education were to prepare me for a life in construction, I’d have likely found the curriculum boring and irrelevant. I may have lost interest in education entirely and dropped out, or found marginal service-type work because I realistically appraised that neither my temperament nor my natural talents suited the economic opportunities that society presented. I probably would have resented the cultural sway of the dominant economic and occupational class and those people whose family or social background naturally inculcated them with the skills and values to succeed in a field that my “book smart” upbringing never prepared me for. I would certainly be receptive to any political message that promised to stand up for my values and my economic interests, and ignore “sophisticated” arguments that such messages were actually manipulative and exploitive demagoguery. Would all of this make me somehow deserving of my inferior social and economic status, despite my being possessed of the same basic humanity and moral character in this alternative world that I am here today, where I am economically successful?
It’s a troubling question. America in recent decades has become more sensitive to cultural diversity, but somehow less concerned about economic and occupational diversity. There’s an implicit assumption that one’s occupation is more mutable than cultural, religious or ethnic identity; that people, as economic creatures, will adjust their perspectives on work in response to a rational appraisal of the job market: in other words, that we will follow the money.
This is true to a great extent, but it’s not as true as it needs to be for a capitalist society to successfully weather a profound economic transition. The fluidity of labor will never match the fluidity of capital. Money doesn’t resist being taken out of real estate and put into the stock market. Money is indifferent as to whether its generated through rents or value-added processes. In an open economy, money passes with little friction from country to country, from use to use, instantly and without pain of adjustment.
By contrast, workers will change employers if conditions demand, but many would prefer steady work to the uncertainties of having to always be looking for the next opportunity. Some people have an ambition to climb through the ranks and levels of an organization, acquiring new skills and responsibilities, but many would prefer to show up day after day with little change to their routine. Some people may find the concept of changing careers several times in the course of their working life challenging and exciting; others are liable to view the prospect with dread and alarm. These are human reactions, morally and psychologically defensible in spite of their limited economic utility. As such, they represent a drag on the adaptability of labor that capital, by its nature, doesn’t have to face.
Globalism and technology exacerbate this irreducible inequality of labor and capital. As transactions become more complex and abstract, the human skills associated with the creation of wealth have become more complex and abstract. Work such as agriculture, construction and manufacturing has lost value relative to information work (the creation and manipulation of intellectual rather than physical property). This shift in value has been accompanied by a societal shift towards the values and assumptions of the information worker class.
What makes the transition to the information work economy so disruptive in America is that we seem incapable of discussing the full dimensions of it honestly. America’s mythology of the classless society demands that we ignore the heavy burdens and extreme demands we are placing on workers whose skills, temperament, values and priorities substantially handicap them in an information-centric economy. Capitalism has no good answer for the textile worker who doesn’t want to be retrained as a LAN administrator because she finds the work boring and stupid, or for the worker who is unmotivated by promises of advancement and new responsibilities because he prefers a simple routine.
Instead, we celebrate change, celebrate flexibility, and celebrate ambition, because it is only these characteristics that give labor any hope of maintaining some kind of parity with capital in a globalized world. The best we can do for workers is give them tools to adapt and be more productive: technology, education, communication channels and communities.
This is helpful to a point, but doesn’t address the moral dilemma at the heart of the economic transition. That is, in America, we are comfortable accepting high levels of economic inequality on the presumption that those at the bottom have, in some way, chosen to reject the possibilities for economic advancement that society offers them.
I’m not talking about lazy, inert, sociopathic or ineducable people, but those who cling to old ideas about work – that it’s sufficient to show up and do a days’ work without having to compete for advancement all the time; that it’s more rewarding to work with one’s hands, or work outside; that “information work” skills are confusing, frustrating and basically irrelevant; that traditional, less productive “craft work” is more interesting than homogenized, high-output information work. Because these attitudes represent an individual choice on some level, capitalism tells us that it is okay to punish those who hold them by consigning them and their labor to the lowest-value rungs on the occupational ladder.
The question is, do we want to allow the market to dictate values in this way? Are those attitudes toward work really “choices,” or are they closer in some ways to religious views, which Americans have no problem respecting on the level of an inherent trait?
In my professional role, I am obliged to rationalize the triumph of information work and provide a compelling narrative that includes positive scenarios for workers as well as capitalists. I am sympathetic to the values of the information work economy and sincerely believe that technology, communication, dissolution of boundaries, and rationalization of practices are the best way to achieve material and moral progress for the human race. At the same time, I can’t ignore the ways that those opinions are shaped by self interest. My skills and values are well-suited to this vision of work and society, which has, in many ways, been designed by people like me, to insure that people like me can succeed economically.
It’s comforting to imagine that anyone could be economically successful if only they embraced my values, my outlook, my tolerance for risk and change, and my attitude toward the importance of learning and information. Indeed, it’s so comforting that this has become the dominant paradigm in 21st century American culture. It conveniently aligns moral virtue with economic rewards, and absolves the successful of responsibility for those left out, since it is, after all, their choice.
However, this exclusive focus on conscious choice, on humans as economically-rational creatures, is not the whole story. There are complicated factors that shape our attitudes toward work, factors that are far less susceptible to choice than we can afford to admit. Accommodating these factors and doing justice to the wider range of fundamentally moral attitudes toward work requires our institutions to assume some of the burdens of adjustment, rather than forcing those burdens exclusively onto the workers themselves. We know this is true, but acknowledging it implies criticism of the market economy, the fount from which our prosperity springs.
It’s a complicated problem, but by addressing it honestly, we can ensure that the progress promised by the information work economy is sustainable. It’s not a matter of guilt: it’s enlightened self-interest. Traditionalists around the world perceive the threat posed by capitalism to their strongly-held values, and their responses are not always either sophisticated or civil. It’s not necessary to compromise with the substance of these people’s views when they are incompatible with our liberal ideas of freedom and human dignity, but it would be helpful to draw the emotional sting from their message by addressing the genuine fear (largely economic insecurity) that is central to their appeal.
By accommodating a wider range of views and attitudes toward work, and doing our best to ensure that those who hold them have both social status and economic prospects, we make the platform that enables our own success less brittle and top-heavy. We need to recognize that, by insisting on advocating a single set of economic (and, by implication, moral and intellectual) values without giving any moral credence to crticis, we are creating the preconditions for a backlash that threatens all the progress we have made so far. It’s not hard to see those seams appearing today. It remains to be seen whether we choose to recognize and respond to the difficult underlying problem, or persist in the comforts of our facile assumptions.
11:15:26 AM 
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