The Future of Work Is Our Humanity’s Future

Without work, your rights will be chipped away.

@martenbjork unsplash.com

In recent years, this one statistic keeps nagging at me. Since 2009 when the great financial crisis ruined many people’s financial prospects, I’ve been thinking about how this statistic made us all complacent. Remember the great financial crisis? Ten years on, many think that we are in a much better place. After all, we have record unemployment rate. What do we have to worry about?

Here’s a thought, today’s generation in their 20s and 30s all say that their career might only be 10 or 20 years long. They lose hope in finding a job when they turn 40 years old. What about their children then?

Let’s work out where exactly are the issues here.

What the Unemployment Rate Does Not Tell You?

The unemployment rate only measures the people who are seeking jobs at the moment. The ones who want a job but have given up looking are not counted. It does nothing to measure the quality of the jobs and what they pay.

The truth is that the labor force participation rate has been slowly going down since 2008 or the great financial crisis even with all the stimulus going into the financial markets. Now in 2020, the rate is projected to be 62%.

This means that only 6 out of 10 working-age people are participating in the labor force.

In the US, in 2015, there were about 15 million self-employed people. These people were mostly white, foreign-born, and incorporated their companies. Most of them hired 1 to 5 workers. There were more of these self-employed people who are men than women.

It is estimated that in 2020, we have about 42 million self-employed people in the labor force. Nearly 60% of these self-employed people are professionals between the age of 50 to 65 with no expectations of ever retiring. These types of self-employed people earn their living freelancing and in gig economy work. They are less of business owners and more of people who are “underemployed”.

In the US, from various polls, it’s estimated that the people who are underemployed in the US stands at around 11% to 12% in 2018. But, some surveys find that there are nearly 22 million Americans “underemployed”.

Being underemployed often means that these people are spending more time working while being paid less.

Future of Work

With automation in data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence underway at every single sector, it’s no wonder that every single large companies in the US are concerned about the issue. Most of them want to impact this conversation.

A casual search on Google for “future of work”, you will see, not news articles, but companies, large corporations who want to be at the center of this conversation. These companies are management consulting firms to the largest corporations in America. They see it as an opportunity by helping their Fortune 500 company clients deal with this issue.

Image from Google Search on Future of Work, by Author

It is estimated by McKinsey Global Institute, that by 2030, 25% of American workers in rural counties will be displaced while only 20% of Americans in cities will be displaced.

The Forrester report or Future of Work report predicts total job loss at 29% by 2030 and 13% job creation to compensate.

What Happens When People Lose Their Jobs Without Safety Net

If you are lucky to have savings in the bank, then you will have a better chance of weathering this storm.

But, if you don’t, then what awaits you is high-interest credit cards, personal loans, and reverse mortgages on your house.

If you can’t manage work in the gig economy or freelance economy, which by then will shrink as well, because a lot of these jobs are ripe for automation. Then, you will be living on loans.

As housing prices continue to skyrocket due to new immigrants seeking safe havens for their investments in major US cities, the jobs that we have, the ones we might be staying in because it pays us anything at all, won’t be enough to put a roof over our head.

Living on loans is a slow but ticking time bomb. Sooner or later, what awaits you is homelessness and bankruptcy.

You think that joblessness is bad. How about if you have a job but can’t afford housing?

Here’s the ridiculousness of the Bay area’s housing price change. This type of drastic change can also be seen in NY, LA, and other major cities in the US.

Image from https://www.bayareamarketreports.com/trend/3-recessions-2-bubbles-and-a-baby

Even if you have a job, you still can’t put a roof over your family’s head.

In San Francisco, currently, approximately 10K homeless people are living in the city displaced by high rents and joblessness. More people will join this homeless crowd in 2020.

The response from real estate developers who profited heavily from the rise in real estate prices is simply to build sleep pods in basements of buildings to rent to people for $1300 a month.

If you are lucky to get one of these units in a City-owned housing that will be implemented in the next four years, then you are an Affluent Homeless person. You will get a desk and a bunk bed. In this story, NPR talks to Steven T. Johnson who works in social media advertising about his affluent homelessness status.

If you go to the website you can see the picture of the man and his bunk. It looks to me just like these “communal” living quarters of factory workers in China who leave villages to work for assembly lines.

We Sign A Contract With Society

Here’s the thing. Every single person in a democratic society signs a contract with society. If you contribute positively to society, then you will have your basic rights be guaranteed in the constitution.

These rights include:

right to self-determination

right to liberty

right to due process of law

right to freedom of movement

right to freedom of thought

right to freedom of religion

right to freedom of expression

right to peaceful assembly

right to freedom of association

When you can’t get a decent wage that pays for a roof over your head, here’s what happens:

You lose any option to skill up if you can’t pay for internet service.

You lose any option to find new work because you spend all your time to look for food.

You stop thinking long term. You are only focused on putting a roof over your head tonight.

You stop going out because you are at your computer day in and day out trying to figure out a way to use freelancing or gig economy jobs to pay for your next meal or your rent.

You stop caring for yourself and your mental health deteriorates.

You will lose your kids to your family members or social services.

Essentially, you lose the right to live in this society. You lose your right to self-determination. You lose your freedom of movement. You lose the right to freedom of association.

Your rights will be slowly chipped away until you don’t have anything at all.

This is not because you haven’t done everything you can.

But, it’s because society has failed you.

Future of Work Is Our Collective Future

There are many solutions to avoid this “impending doom” scenario. Artificial intelligence, automation and all of that is good for our economy as a whole. However, the gains inside the economy must be trickled down to the average person. Otherwise, there will be exponentially more class differences in our society. Corporations will receive almost all of the benefits of automation.

They will put people in retraining and re-skilling programs, but not everyone from those programs will be rehired or retrained.

Basic Income is another solution to help those who can not be retrained.

The issue is our mindset. If we all think with the scarcity mindset competing with one another, then we will end up with all those who are super-rich and those who are extremely poor.

In this type of society, humanity is an afterthought. When humanity goes, then eventually, our society will be lost.

So, when you are in your comfortable living rooms playing video games and making large thanksgiving dinners hosting people of power in your townhouse, do you ever think of the day that you might find yourself out of a job?

If this thought is remotely scary, then just be kind and think of solutions to how you can contribute an idea to better the situation of our collective “Future of Work” problem.