The 21st Century Limited

...Rifkin next describes in detail the erosion of the traditional agricultural, manufacturing and service sectors, as well as the emergence of "the knowledge sector...

...So, some three decades after a group of prominent economists and intellectuals issued their "Triple Revolution" manifesto—which predicted a growing permanent gap between job seekers and jobs, and called for a guaranteed income—its key points are not only being echoed but supported with convincing new evidence...

...Indeed, the "declinists" point out, the current false sense of optimism is a result of averaging incomes...

...In his compelling concluding section, "The Dawn of the Post-Market Era," the author tackles the critical question posed by all that has gone before: How can the unprecedented work-liberating "productivity gains" of the Information Age be distributed in a manner that will produce a "computopian" universe, rather than a dystopian hell of depression, crime and rioting unemployed...

...Aronowitz and DiFazio dismiss the lingering expectation that the high-tech era will ultimately provide more employment: "The new technology has fewer parts and fewer workers and produces more product...

...A fascinating aside, incidentally, traces the brief history of the shorter workweek during the Great Depression, when then Senator Hugo L. Black vainly introduced a bill mandating it...

...As fate would have it, too, this is happening just when a Republican Congress is dismantling programs that directly or indirectly nourish employment or give succor to the jobless...

...Second, employers balk at controlling hours because, they say, their companies would be at a competitive disadvantage globally...

...There remain, moreover...

...This is true not only in traditional production industries but for all workers, including managers and technical workers...

...The huge gains registered by the 0.5 per cent of American families who have a net worth of $4 million to $5 million seriously distort the true picture...

...Hardly the best way to prepare for the new Information Age...

...This is discomfiting, but does not invalidate their diagnosis of the future crisis...

...392 pp...

...Similarly, most of the roughly 3.5 million jobs added to the economy in 1994 are low-paying, "contingent," dead-end service sector positions lacking health, pension and other benefits...

...We need a political and social commitment to a national guaranteed income that is equal to the historical level of material culture," Aronowitz and DiFazio declare...

...The authors endtheirbookwitha burst of hopefulness: Such, apparently, could be the benefactions of superproductivity that "Labor need no longer occupy a central place in our collective lives...

...Depending on how many hours they volunteered, the employed would receive modest "shadow wages" in the form of an income tax deduction...

...When and how their Utopian vision is to be realized is left fuzzily up in the air...

...Statistical and anecdotal evidence of the negative impact automation and computer-mediated processes are having on employment opportunities has been available for some time in the writings of declinists, who include Richard J. Barnet, Robert Heilbroner, Edward N. Lutt-wak, Wallace C. Peterson, John Kenneth Galbraith, even Kevin Phillips, and—though he might now dispute it?Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Alan S. Blinder...

...Thus, Rifkin, convinced that both the private sector and the public sector are going to "play less of a role in day-to-day affairs" urges the development of what he terms a new Independent Third Sector: "The talents and energy of both the employed and the unemployed—those with leisure hours and those with idle time—could be effectively directed toward rebuilding thousands of local communities and creating a third force that flourishes independent of the marketplace and the public sector...

...Everyone would assume the responsibilities of producing and maintaining public goods, so no able citizen would be freed of the obligation to work...

...The unemployed would receive a larger "social wage," financed in part by a nonregressive value-added tax...

...Reviewed by Edward T. Chase New York-based writer and editor A MARKED discrepancy persists between the way economic figures are reported in the general media and how they are viewed by a group of leading academic and independent economists...

...An immediate expedient that Rifkin strongly advocates—and that Germany and France are trying on a small scale?is sharing the finite number of jobs available by adopting a 30-hour or four-day workweek, with wages raised to maintain income levels...

...Its members are presumably those Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich calls "symbolic analysts"—scientists, computer programmers, bankers, brokers, editors, university professors, consultants, etc...

...They seem to relish the terms "un-work" and "nonwork," citing with approval the East Coast longshoremen after they were unhorsed by the introduction of shipping containers...

...Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, assesses the situation globally and demonstrates that along with blue-collar workers, middle managers and service employees will soon be swelling the ranks of the 800 million already unemployed or underemployed worldwide...

...Today's record use of overtime would have to double or perhaps triple to make new hires more economical...

...The press tends to see the slightest drop in unemployment, especially when accompanied by increased production, as a sign of economic recovery...

...In Growing Together (1991), Blinder too cites 1973 as the year economic stagnation set in for 80 per cent of U.S...

...households...

...As their titles bluntly suggest, they foresee more and more people being permanently replaced by machines, more and more giant corporations merging and downsizing and taking advantage of cheaper surplus labor overseas...

...This approach, however, must overcome two problems to be practicable...

...The End of Work begins with an overview of "the innovations and market-directed forces that are moving us to the edge of a near-workerless world...

...John's University, respectively, argue that, without radical social change, "there is absolutely no prospect, except for a fairly small minority of professional and technical people, to obtain good jobs in the future...

...Of the 12 million jobs created in the 1980s, half paid an annual wage below the official poverty line...

...He goes on to observe that in contrast to the richest fifth of the nation, whose income has risen sharply, the poorest fifth has "lost out not just relatively but absolutely" to technological change in the budding Information Age...

...Overall, Rifkin's objective is nothing less than a new "social contract...

...7.2 million individuals listed as unemployed—plus an estimated 10 million who have given up looking for work or are underemployed...

...In The Jobless Future Aronowitz and DiFazio are particularly concerned with the individual's self-definition—the retention of dignity, not to mention legitimacy, in a society whose dogma is that a person's job is his defining ticket...

...First, it is less expensive for employers to pay time-and-a-half for overtime than to incur the cost of benefits for additional workers, and they are doing so with a vengeance...

...The last is an elite formation, only capable of absorbing "a fraction of the hundreds of millions who will be eliminated [from the labor force] in the next several decades in the wake of revolutionary advances in the information and communications sciences...

...These men, whom DiFazio has studied, have made constructive use of their time and seem not to have suffered from any special dysfunctions or increased mortality...

...We are at a stage, the authors insist, where work must be "decommodified" by separating it from earnings altogether...

...No job, no self...

...Achieving a level playing field would entail negotiating agreements with all the other industrial nations, a course American business leaders flatly oppose...

...The assertion is buttressed by a review of the devastating statistics recording the human consequences of upping productivity via automation, advanced computer networks and "flexible specialization," also known as "just-in-time production...

...In any case, a shorter workweek would hardly be more than a partial remedy for combating the ravages of the Third Industrial Revolution...

...Yet this ticket is disappearing...

...The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work By Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio Minnesota...

...Aronowitz and DiFazio, sociologists at the City University of New York and St...

...The unimpressed economists, reading the same numbers, caution that although unemployment may have come down to 5.5 per cent, the decline in real income that started in 1973 continues to afflict all but the top quintile of Americans...

...Furthermore, despite the virtual consensus that the better educated alone will have the equipment to thrive in the computer-mediated world aborning, aggressive cutbacks are being proposed in funding for education and training on the Federal, state and local levels...

...Jeremy Rifkin in The End of Work and Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio in The Jobless Future focus on the 21st century...