As the Time cover story for May 25, 2009 sees it, "The Future of work" follows trends from changes we've already been seeing for several years, changes emphatically made glaring by our economic troubles. Nothing in the article came as a surprise to me. Most people would probably agree with Time's analysis. How accurately we are setting our directions is probably not what matters. We create the future so seeing where things are going we can alter its final shape.
Time sees employers providing fewer benefits like company-funded pension plans. I think we'll also see companies making employees pay more of their health insurance, maybe, as with retirement plans, make health insurance the employee's sole responsibility. What the government and private sectors work out in streamlining health delivery and its cost will shape how this is going to turn out. With everything else President Obama seems bent on changing, we might well see changes in health care this year.
Time sees the factory or manufacturing landscape change. The industries like automakers will survive but more and more as foreign car makers making cars for the U.S. market while we focus manufacturing on products requiring greater skill and technology to produce like cutting-edge biologicals and computer technology. We've led the way in these other industries that developing economies like China and India have the manpower and knowhow to do them more cheaply. Americans excel in innovation and in the foreseeable future, with our excellent universities, we should maintain the lead here. But less developed economies catch up. Wasn't there a time not too long ago when the U.S. were just a collection of states aggressively acquiring territory and not as concerned with its global impact?
Office work like technical support and customer service are now largely done abroad but key positions, again in innovative information technology and health care will continue to attract new workers. Health science and computer technology are the next big areas for industry and commerce. We shall need workers with highly specialized skills and education. We have a healthy entrepreneurial system, what people used to call "the American Dream." Our social, legal and economic systems still provide the best environment for an update definition of the Dream.
Time sees employees increasingly working from their homes and more people working as consultants rather than employees. The traditional route of "going up the ladder" in one's profession or career is changing. If more people work as independent contractors instead of moving forward career ladders will take on all kinds of directions and shapes, a multi-nodal pattern more complicated than the straight-line path many of us are still trying to resuscitate. Various career patterns can offer more opportunities to independent and independent-thinking individuals. In our affluent society (still perhaps the most affluent in the world barring small-country exceptions) workers have the opportunity to pay more attention to the quality of the lives they lives instead of just focusing on earning money and acquiring real estate and property. As women move into more leadership positions, leadership models can take on what were traditionally feminine approaches to decision-making. Women are more emotionally intelligent, more likely to lead by consensus, and have family-style values which are both practical and sensitive to human needs.
In the course of this fanciful meditation on how our world of work is going to change I was struck by how my new-found career in photography and videos already have these qualities. Time didn't mention this but I think America still leads in the arts and entertainment. These areas often go hand in hand with affluence and people having more time to be creative instead of putting their energies on physical survival, which is still true for most other countries in the world. I work at my own pace, at something I enjoy doing, manage my own retirement and other benefits, and work on both lifestyle and career holistically. With the new work paradigm, Americans might even add more wallop to philosophizing, redefining happiness not as a destination to be attained after death but as a goal for here and now.
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