We’re running out of jobs. The number of available jobs has decreased for several decades now, and as time goes on there will be ever less jobs available. Forget full-time employment, think about ‘multi-activity society’ with several part-time jobs and a spot of volunteering on the side, plus a few hobbies and other leisure-time activities. We’ll all still have busy lives but of a different kind.
This is what Ulrich Beck, the famed German sociologist, argues succinctly in his 2000 book The Brave New World of Work. In this book, he also makes references to Frithjof Bergmann’s idea of a new work culture. This is what it would look like:
Bergmann’s vision is that everyone will spend two days a week at a paid job, two days working for themselves [i.e. self-employed], and two days ‘doing what they really really want to do’. This might be things of substance, which perhaps even lead to new paid activities.
Bergmann’s website gives a lot of information on these mind-blowing and radical ideas and offers workshops to try and help people to find out what it is that they really, really want. It could be something like wanting to become a better gardener and therefore taking courses, or reading books on gardening, or simply work in the garden a lot. Or a project like writing a novel, or become a painter.
I’ve discussed Bergmann’s ideas with my students today and we came to the following conclusions:
- Bergmann assumes high levels of self-motivation and discipline but not everyone has these gifts.
- He also seems to assume that everyone is quite knowledgeable – which is true to an extent but what about tradesmen?
- Implementation would be a nightmare.
Other than that I think it’s a brilliant idea! And we’re doing this already to an extent anyway; we work in part-time jobs and juggle things already. The sad point perhaps is that whilst this sounds all creative and free-floating and all, in 10years time or so this is perhaps the only way for people to have work (and to thus live meaningful lives – work is integral to our sense of well-being). There simply won’t be enough jobs, or in other words: There will only be enough jobs for most people to work, as an employee, for two days a week. Everything else they have to come up with themselves.
So get the thinking caps out.
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Ulrich Beck (2000). The Brave New World of Work. Cambridge: Polity.
If I remember correctly Jeremy Rifkin argued this about twenty years ago.
That’s true, Irving, and Beck refers to him A LOT, too.
It’s possible that Bergmann became the populariser of Rifkin’s ideas in Germany though I would presume that Rifkin’s work did also get translated into German. Hm. Either way, still radical ideas. For peeps like me it’s also definitely the reality.