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THE END OF THE JOB As a way of organizing work, it is a social artifact that has outli... Page 1 of 5 060 is 1* CctwnlJMoneycon, Naws MaM1e[5! Technology; Personal Finance Soren ru-. ax CNNcom 17~-El -1 1-1 I i~r~rrune r E.,~ c I ..._a _~.s I RES Top Stories Wail Sveet extends a rive-m:cnlh ralro Chrysler deal rcwee dcser j out the bubby? Not s fast has outlived its usefulness. Its demise Fan-.e loses S23 umo^ seeks more US ah confronts everyone with unfamiliar risks 88r'ssaY-orao"='crrore03"1casn THE END OF THE JOB As a way of organizing work, it is a social artifact that and rich opportunities. Y hr ;rill=erg . tc c_ (FORTUNE Magazine) - EVERY MORNING'S newspaper carries another story of new job losses. We hear the recession has been over for quite a while, but the percentage of workers who are jobless has not fallen as after previous recessions. The Clinton Administration is trying to create jobs, but critics claim some of its new taxes and regulations will destroy jobs. We are told the only way to protect our jobs is to increase our productivity, but then we discover that reengineenng, using self- managed teams, flattening our organizations, and turning routine work over to computers always make many jabs redundant' We used to read predictions that by 2000 everyone would work 30-hour weeks, and the rest would be leisure. But as we approach 2000 it seems more likely that half of us will be working 60-hour weeks and the rest of us wsj be unemployed. What's wrong? It is not that the President or his critics don't care what happens to us, or that organizations that asked for our loyalty and grew because of our efforts have double-crossed us. The fault does not lie even with that dread monster overseas competition, which has been blamed for everything from unemployment to falling living standards. It's a shame these things are not the culprits, for if they were our task would be simpler. The reality we face is much more troubling, for what is disappearing is not just a certain number of jobs - or jobs in certain industries or jobs in some part of the country or even jobs in America as a whole. What is disappearing is the very thing itself: the job. That much sought after, much maligned social entity, a job, is vanishing like a species that has outlived its evolutionary time. A century from now Americans will look back and marvel that we couldn't see more clearly what was happening. They wilt remark how fixated we were on this game of musical jobs in which, month after month, new waves of people had to drop out. They will sympathize with the suffering we were going through but will comment that it came from trying to play the game by the old rules. The modern world is on the verge of another huge leap in creativity and productivity, but the job is not going to be part of tomorrow's economic reality. There still is and will always be enormous amounts of work to do, but it is not going to be contained in the familiar envelopes we call jobs. In fact, many organizations are today well along the path toward being "de- jobbed." The job is a social artifact, though it is so deeply embedded in our consciousness that most of is have forgotten its artificiality or the fact that most societies since the beginning of time have done just fine without jobs. The job is an idea that emerged early in the 19th century to package the work that needed doing in the growing factories and bureaucracies of the industrializing nations. Before people had jobs, they worked just as hard but on shifting clusters of tasks, in a variety of locations, on a schedule set by the sun and the weather and the needs of the day. The modern job was a startling new idea and to many, an unpleasant and perhaps socially dangerous one. Critics claimed it was an unnatural and even inhuman way to work. They believed most people wouldn't be able to live with its demands. It is ironic that what started as a controversial concept ended up becoming the ultimate orthodoxy - and that we're hooked on jobs. Now the world of work is changing again. The conditions that created jobs 200 years ago mass production and the large organization are tlisappearing. Technology enables us to automate the production line, where all those job holders used to do their repetitive tasks. Instead of long production runs where the same thing has to be done again and again, we are increasingly customizing production. Big firms, where most of the good jobs used to be, are unbundling activities http://hrtoncy.cnii.corrmagazines/fortune/fortune-archive/1994/09/19/79751/index.htm 5/8/2009 AVI RAGt AUTO Ir.'Sl1RANCF COST 569:'MONTI1'