The ideas I want to share in this post have been bubbling in my mind for quite some time now. A few months ago I was asked to give a presentation about “Innovation in the workplace” and I decided to try to focus my thoughts and tell the story you are about to read.

What is the future of work? In order to try and answer that question I want to go back to the old days. Let’s talk about work for a bit, or the more official term: wage labour.

A wage labourer is defined as a person whose primary means of income is from the selling of his or her labour. Which is just a fancy way of saying you get paid to do stuff. When wage labour was introduced a long long time ago it was already a big step up from the previously ruling trend. Slavery.

In essence the concepts of wage labour and slavery are actually quite similar. Both are based on the premise that workers are forced to sell or give their labour to others, who reap the benefits. I say forced because they really don’t have much of a choice. Of course wage labourers have more freedom but they are still fully dependent having a job.

You, as a wage labourer, are a slave to having a job.

Workers depend on their employer giving them money to buy food and shelter. They literally depend on their employer for survival. And this dependence becomes even more evident when the competition on the job market is fierce.

So in the best case you are dependent on having a job, worst case you depend on a specific job, since you might not find another. Not that different from slavery…

It’s quite understandable that most people developed a healthy fear of losing their job. Especially in the early days of wage labour. Your added value was not that high, so you could be easily replaced by someone else.

This fear of losing your job was at first directed at others, usually at immigrants. Cheaper labor, that could easily replace you.

They are taking our jobs!

But the threat soon changed, and technology became the real enemy. This change actually started in the 19th century, way before you might have expected it. The concept of technology being the cause of unemployment caused great concern, even back then.

Have you ever heard of the term: Luddite? It is often used to describe people who oppose the introduction of new technology. Luddites were best known for their destruction of technology because they were afraid of losing their jobs. In their case the anger was directed at the newly introduced automated looms, which were causing them to lose their high paid jobs as textile workers.

The concept of technological unemployment has been discussed thoroughly but the fact that the term “Luddite fallacy” is now synonymous for technological unemployment might hint at the way people are skeptical that technology will be a real long term threat to employment.

If the Luddite fallacy were true we would all be out of work because productivity has been increasing for two centuries.

Alex Tabarrok

Every time a new technological solution threatens jobs, the end result is a rise in productivity and a reshuffling of the workforce. The introduction of the computer, the advent of robotics in factories all sparked this discussion, only to be disproven over and over again.

Technology might impact employment in the short term but longtime employment has always been safe. But what if there is a core truth in the Luddite fallacy? What if somehow employment was threatened? It has happened before, just not to humans…