There’s this thing called the service economy, where jobs are no longer about making stuff, but instead are about providing services. Automation and global trade have combined to make earning a living from a manufacturing job pretty much a chancy thing.
If a company needed a work force to make product and ship it, the workers had at least a small amount of negotiating leverage over the physical aspects of the business. If there’s no one there to run the machines, the owners of those machines are going to feel some hurt. But, as fewer and fewer workers are needed to produce the same goods, and there’s always a cheaper work force somewhere else in the world, that leverage is gone.
So what happens when the economy is less and less about things happening in the physical world and more about the intangible aspects of providing service? It’s a lot easier to change the rules of the game — and who gets to make those rules? The power in the relationships between workers and employers keeps shifting, and not in a good way for the majority. That’s only going to get worse as we find more and more ways to replace expertise with expert systems. Just as the hard skills of making things have increasingly been shifted to machines, we’re now seeing the same thing happening to jobs based on personal expertise. “We have an app for that now.”
I confess I’m having trouble getting my head around this. Servant economy seems a more apt description for a world increasingly shaped for the benefit of those with the money to call the shots, shape the laws, while the rest of us are here basically on their sufferage.
Keep your mouth shut, get used to being always in debt, and don’t forget that while all of us are equal, some of us are more equal than others. And nobody is going to take your calls or pay attention to your letters to the editor.
The big issue in the 2016 race for the White House is money — who has it, what (and who) they’re buying with it, what they want — and where’s my share? On the Democratic side a big fight is over which candidate has a more realistic chance of taking on the power of organized money — or if they even want to. On the Republican side, the leading candidate’s biggest catch phrase is “You’re fired!” — or at least it used to be.
There seems to be something wrong with this picture. Thoughts? Labels matter, because they shape the way we think about things. Servant economy seems a better fit to describe what’s going on, because once you start talking about servants, you realize this implies the existence of masters...