Shifting digs...

Hello, everyone - I suppose that just means Debbie and Matt :).

As a part of consolidating the maze of social connections around my writing into a coherent writer's platform, I am pulling in all the bits and pieces from hither and yon into a single WordPress site on my webhost. You can check it out on http://www.lupestro.net/wp.

While you're there, sign up for my newsletter to be informed of upcoming events or use the links there to connect with me on Twitter or Facebook. I've also posted two pieces of flash fiction there - Telephone of the Gods, which is also posted here, and a darker piece entitled Choir Rehearsal.

Waste and Employment

I recently heard a review of an economic study showing how the rise of technology has polarized the kinds of available work to produce a technical and managerial elite and a nontechnical service class. The many jobs for mid-level paper pushers and other such positions, it is claimed, have been eliminated by the new technologies.

True, many such jobs have been removed from the economy, but I have seen compelling statistics that suggest at least some of these jobs have vanished for a reason I never see mentioned in print. It isn't really a technology, but the reasonable questions of Kaizen. "Where is the waste in this process? How could we arrange the process to achieve the same throughput with less effort?"

Every industry has set itself to puzzling over this question, rearranging offices and assembly lines to put things closer together, removing steps from procedures and piles of stuff from shop floors, redesigning the work so that the materials that enter the receiving bay in the morning are going out the shipping bay as finished goods in the afternoon in a nonstop continuous flow. As a result, we are now making much more with better overall quality at much lower expense than at any time in history.

But think carefully about the person who spent their life futilely copying figures from Form 2166a (used in one department) to Form 2166b (used in another) or the person who ran the forklift putting the output of Line 1 in a holding area from which somebody else driving another forklift delivered it to Line 2. These people went home to houses in the suburbs where they made their kids study so they could get into a good college. The substance of the job didn't mean a lot - they knew this was no way to run a rodeo and commented on it frequently among friends - but a steady job at a good company provided them with the things their family needed.

We aren't talking about an insignificant number of people. The operating efficiency created by throughput accounting has brought with it staggering savings, often on the order of 50 percent or more. Some of this was material savings and opportunities created by versatility, but the largest part of it was the discovery and elimination of work that never needed doing.

So what's the lesson here? That it is good for the greatest part of a society to be engaged in, and paid for, meaningless labor? Well, no. On a limited planet, waste isn't just foolish, it's lethal. The lesson is that something historic is fundamentally changing.

What happens when it takes only a modest fraction of the world's population to produce all the goods the world needs? It isn't a frivolous question. This happened in farming years ago. It was one reason that young people from the country flooded into the cities and the factories. The trend has swept through factories with Kaizen and now into offices. The service sector lacks the capacity to absorb such a population, so many are unemployed, barely employed, doing what day labor they can find, or beyond even trying to look. With it comes futility, hopelessness, a desperate sense of invisibility, that it would make no difference whether they had ever lived. 

If, suppose, the labor of 10% of the worlds population could supply 100% of its material needs, a system in which only the needs of workers are fully met would be grossly unjust, and would force us to rethink some deeply held values. Is my value in the community determined by what I am paid to produce for it? If employment were unavailable to me for my entire life, what would I spend my life doing? What would I do and how far would I go to give it meaning?

It would need a completely different sort of economy. I don't know what sort of economy that would be, but I think we may be about to find out.