by Jon Roberts, TIP Strategies

No topic is of more immediate, more urgent concern than America’s job situation. The unemployment rate remains stubbornly high, the op ed pages overflow with prescriptions, warnings, and admonitions, entire communities are at financial and social risk. Among all these issues, there is a deeper discussion to be had. It goes something like this: what is a job – really – and how does it fit into the larger historical framework?

Before we tackle this question, there are a few related problems worth exploring. Whose job is it to create jobs? Well, not the public sector. At least we know that from the current giddy assault on government employment. Yes, cities, states, and federal agencies hire people but we are right to be suspicious of their contribution to the economy. They are doing work that we are paying ourselves to do. Or so the argument goes. They are like paying your own kids to mow the neighbor’s lawn. Your neighbor may like it (let’s assume he does), but your family is earning no additional income. It’s not a sustainable business model.

There’s more to be said on that topic, but let’s leave it at that. Then if not the public sector, who else? The private sector? Really? In what sense is it a reasonable expectation that the “private sector” should add employees? No private business exists in order to create jobs. It really is that simple. Businesses add employees when they have to add employees. Not before, and for no longer than they are needed. Any other attitude would result in . . . (you guessed it) an unsustainable business model.

But certainly there’s more to it than that. In a healthy economy jobs are created. It is in the interest of businesses to add employees. But this “interest” is self-interest, it is not for the good of economy as such. That can’t be a business concern. Which leads us to an interesting question: Can we have a healthy economy that isn’t producing jobs? Those who want jobs to be created, for whom it is a bit of crusade (the public sector) are powerless to do so directly. Those who could create jobs (the private sector) put themselves at substantial risk by adding workers when it compromises their competitiveness – thus making their model unsustainable. We are looking at a huge disconnect.

All these thorny questions and we haven’t even come to the really difficult one yet (what, after all, is a job?). Suffice it to say that if we ask whose job it is to create jobs, there is no easy answer – or perhaps no answer at all. We need to be asking a different question. Something like this: what are the conditions under which jobs will be created (by the private sector, of course). Are the answers easier to come by? Let’s try. Jobs get created when two things happen: there is a steady demand for product and services, and new workers are required to fulfill that demand. So what are the conditions under which this occurs? Consumers are confident and have the income (or credit) to act on their desires. And workers are able to increase the productivity of the company. Not just one of these things needs to happen. Both do. If I can increase my productivity (i.e., satisfy the demand for goods efficiently) without adding workers, I have no economic motivation to do so.

Before we leave this topic, we need to see the paradox this represents. If the only way I can sell my goods and services is to have customers able to do so, but the only way I can stay competitive is to reduce my labor costs, then who will there be to buy what I have to sell? As paradoxes go, this one is a doozy. Against this background we’re ready to ask our question:
What is a job?

Some historical context is relevant here. The concept of a job is not something we should take for granted. By that I mean people working directly for a company (an employer) who provides wages for specific activities. In fact, it’s a relatively recent development. Industry as we know it – and the structures that support industry – are a recent historical phenomenon. Prior to the 17th century, a merchant class was something of a novelty. There were farmers, to be sure, and craftsmen. Farmers typically worked for themselves, or they were indentured, but no one gave them a paycheck. Craftsmen did not go to a job in a factory and punch a clock. People did jobs, but they didn’t have a job. Even the rise of the merchant class did not immediately usher in an employer-employee structure, at least not in the corporate sense.
So you know what comes next (what always comes next in economic history). You guessed it. The Industrial Age. The 19th century changed everything. The idea of a workforce preceded the idea of a job. To put this somewhat differently, we were creating an economy that required specialized skills. Highly specialized skills – the ability to do one thing very, very well. This economy resulted in corporations, something that also had never existed before. The idea of a workforce had an almost transformative effect. If you weren’t “working for” a company, you weren’t working at all. Freelancers, housewives, apprentices – these all existed largely outside of the idea of the workforce.

Now all this is grossly over-simplified, but not entirely without basis, and certainly not without a point.
The point is that the notion of a job is not a fixed idea. It can change, it has changed, and it will (we think) change again. To explore this idea is to engage in a thought experiment. It is to imagine a growing cadre of highly talented individuals who fit their skills to the specific needs of corporations. They see that corporations have less and less need for things that machines can do. To put this more provocatively, the industrial age is over, and the machines have won (“I, for one, welcome our robot overlords,” to paraphrase from the Simpsons.). An economic model that seeks to create jobs by ignoring this reality is a failed model.

If we begin from that premise, entirely different models open up to the imagination. A flexible talent pool that moves to solve problems. A new cooperative corporate model in which consumers are themselves marketers, testers, and shareholders. Social innovators who build networks of services and products that operate first in a closed, then an open system. – Can we imagine any of this? Yes, because it is already happening. Social networking is redefining traditional sales models. “Professional services” are reconsidering where their value lies as search functions redefine legal analysis and insurance claims.

Simply put, there is no sector of the U.S. economy that is not fundamentally altering its business models. In this series of radical changes, why would we expect to solve the jobs question (i.e., to reduce unemployment) by expecting companies to hire people into permanent full-time jobs? This conception of “jobs” fits a model that simply doesn’t conform to business realities. And, for that matter, it doesn’t conform to the needs of the would-be worker.

None of this is simple. None of this will happen in a predictable way. None of this will be painless. But the changes have already begun. It works as a thought experiment not only because we can imagine it, but because we sense its inevitability.

The future of jobs is that they have no future. Passive job seekers desperately hoping to find job postings that fit their skills is the sad and painful dead end of an economic system that has run its course.

To say that the transition will be hard is more than an understatement. In fact, it will be as wrenching as the shift away from an agrarian economy was. Entire industries will cease to exist, communities will be in turmoil, families will suffer terrible indignities.

We could, perhaps, have eased the blow of this transition, but that opportunity has passed (if it ever was an option). Just as in the private sector, more efficient government is more efficient because it can do more with less. And in these times, that means fewer people. And fewer people employed (regardless of which sector) means higher unemployment.

This is not an economic forecast. Employment in the traditional sense will continue to go up and down. But the pattern, the move away from a 20th century employment model, is inevitable. Anything else is… unsustainable.



Jon will be presenting on this theme as an IGNITE presentation at IEDC’s 2012 Leadership Summit, January 29-31 in San Antonio, TX.

Related posts:

1. Sizing Up the Small-Business Jobs Machine
2. Practitioners’ Forum: What Does the Future of Jobs Mean for Your Community?
3. The Freelance Surge Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time
4. Manufacturing’s New Innovation Labs
5. Community College as a Bridge to New Skills