Today’s feats of science and technology are the result of
continuous and calculated efforts. The impact in all walks of life is too
apparent to be ignored. The dreams of yesterday have become the realities
of today. Modern technology is fast becoming an indispensable part of all. operations in industry, space,water, underground exploitation
With old ideologies buried deep into the vaults of history, and the
new thrust of liberalisation and free-market economy becoming a fait
competitive, contractual, and global on content and context. Under the
towering tutelage of technology. patterns of employment are getting more
and more daunting and rewarding. If, in the years gone by, the expanding
public sector was the biggest source of employment in countries like
Pakistan, in the years to come, it will be the private or corporate sector
that is going to play the pivotal role. Patterns of employment, in the fast
changing scenario at home and abroad, would not remain static but would
be moulded by the demands of market forces under the over-all umbrella
of holding degrees or diplomas in liberal education, or those claiming to
be the new emerging land-scape, the need for those holding degrees or
diplomas in liberal education, or those claiming to be the jack of all trades
but masters of none, may not find the going as lucrative us the demand for
those who are specialists.
As thing stand today, the employment opportunities may shrink
for those who are rolling stones, but vastly expand for those who keep
pace with the turns and twist of technology in the creative corridors,
machines may move in to give a concrete shape to human intuition and
imagination. The way technology is entering into our lives, finding
employment with the ordinary or general degrees would not be a child’s
play. Expertise in new areas of exploration and exploitation, where
problems and possibilities are likely to co-exist, the chances of cornering a
job or starting an independent enterprise would go up manifold.
A change in attitude towards both work and life style, and the
increasing use of modern gadgets like the computer, fax, copier, and even
mobile phones, would enable enterprising professionals to start an
independent set-up in comfortable home surroundings also. Under the
increasing influence of technology, the educated wife can also become
more compatible and co-operative to her husband whose business
operations are being done from residential premises. It goes without
saying, “Today, everyone wants a computer. If the executive in the West
is already a walking office, in Pakistan, office gadgets are gearing up for
going home. Obsolensce, caused by technological advancements, means products are becoming sleeker, more sophisticated and compact by the
day.”
Sky is the limit as far as the use of technology is concerned in the
collection and dispersal of information; research and development in space
exploration and remote sensing operations; spread of tele-communications
network; innovations and fresh initiatives in management
advertisement; to name only a few fields where revolutionary changes are
taking place every moment. Till recently, craze for government jobs was a
compulsive obsession with most of the job seekers. The same mania drove
the best brains to the higher echelons of administrative services. But now.
the outlines on the horizons of employment have changed drastically and
dramatically. Now the steering is in the reverse gear and the most
ambitious are looking towards the corporate sector or multinationals,
where both the pay-packets and other perks are much higher than what the
government sector is willing to offer. Thus, the patterns of employment
under the magic touch of technology, are going through a metamorphosis
unheard of in the past.
There are, however. quite a few thinkers who predict that rapid
to unprecedented job
technological developments generally lead
retrenchments world-wide, and the resulting unemployment crisis is
structural in nature and may get increasingly worse in the foreseeable
future.
This is the grim scenario portrayed by the renowned American
author and social analyst Jeremy Rifkin, whose forth-coming book, The
End of Work, will show how computerisation, automation and
biotechnology have already begun to eliminate millions of jobs. Within a
few decades, predicts Rifkin, hundreds of millions of people working in
manufacturing, services and agriculture could be displaced, potentially
causing massive social upheavals in the industrial and Third World
countries.
We are fast moving into a world where there will be factories
without workers and agricultural production without farms or farmers,
said Rifkin. Much of the global work force could well be eliminated,
replaced by information technology, robots, machines and biotechnology.
Rifkin, in a recent interview while he was attending an
international workshop on the Global Economy held in San Francisco, as
president of the Washington-based Foundation on Economic Trends and author of several best-selling books on environment and society, including
Entropy and Biosphere Politics, attempted to answer the question why
countries, although productivity and output had been rising. Rifkin found
there was serious, persistent and growing unemployment in the industrial
that this delinking of jobs from economic growth could be explained by the
fast expansion of information technology in both the industrial and s
sectors. And in the near future, the livelihoods of millions of farmers,
particularly in the South, will be threatened by tissue culture and genetic
engineering, that can produce foods and fibers in the laboratory.
service
Rifkin quotes studies that predict that in the United States 90
I million jobs out of the total 124 million work force, are vulnerable to
replacement by machines. Companies are re-engineering their technology
and restructuring their organisations to be computer-friendly, eliminating
traditional managers and workers alike’.. he says. He quotes an estimate
made by management guru and former Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Professor Michael Hammer, that re-engineering can typically
result in 40 percent reduction in jobs in a company.
A recent will Street Journal article projects that one-and-a-half to
two-and-a-half million American jobs could be lost each year for the
foreseeable future. Out of 90 million private sector jobs, 25 million could
be eliminated. The manufacturing sector is fast eliminating human labour
from the production process. Computer technology is also causing job loss
in the service sector: in the past 10 years, three million white-collar jobs
were eliminated in the U.S.
In agriculture, farm mechanisation had already drastically
reduced the farm labour force. Computerised robots are also now being
used in farms. And soon, new plant-breeding techniques, particularly
tissue culture and genetic engineering, will be able to produce substitutes
for outdoor farm products in the laboratory. Hundreds of millions of
farmer’s livelihoods around the world are under threat.
In Rifkin’s analysis, the loss of jobs and persistent unemployment
in the industrial countries is due mainly to changes in technology “It is
industrial countries to the Third World, as this is only a secondary factor,
misleading to blame job loss on the shift of corporations from the
and minor compared to the elimination of jobs by technology”, he says.
The present technological developments amount to a Third
Industrial Revolution, according to Rifkin. The first industrial revolution (in the 19th century) was characterised by coal and the steam engine, the
second (in the 1920s) by oil and the electro-dynamo. The third is driven
by information technology and the new biotechnologies.
Rifkin sees a fundamental weakens and contradiction in the new
industrial revolution, “The technology is advancing so fast and
productivity is rising, but as jobs are being lost, there are not enough
people to buy the products. The capacity to produce will expand
tremendously, but there is also a growing lack of purchasing power and
effective demands. So there is overproduction and recessions.”
Within this analytical paradigm, Rifkin explains the Uruguay
Round process (conducted under GATT auspices) as a `market extension
of the Third Industrial Revolution’. Owing to the expanded production
capacity of the big corporations, he says, they urgently requires new
markets to absorb their output and thus prevent or reduce the pressures of
overproduction. The growth in GATT’s power and reach through the
Round would, the companies hoped, open up new markets and in new
sectors to help overcome this threat of overproduction.
In Rifkin’s view, liberalised markets cannot be a respite because
world-wide, the loss of jobs will create a lack of effective demand.
“The only way out of this growing jobs crisis is to eliminate work
and not the workers”, says Rifkin. He proposes a reduction of the working
week from the present 40 hours (in the US) to 30 hours, so that more
workers will be employed. At the same time, the rate of pay should go up,
although perhaps the average volume of pay may not increase.
“In the past, every worker’s movement that has been effective,
has succeeded in fighting for the belief that the workers have the right to
enjoy the benefits of productivity increases, through lower working hours
and higher wages”, he says.
“Now we are seeing significant productivity increases, but the
hours of work have not declined and wages instead of going up have
actually gone down.”
hours.”
He suggests a three-prong approach for society to deal with the
problem. Firstly, the working week should be reduced to, say, 30 hours.
“We should have more people working, with each person working less Secondly, the benefits to the labour force should improve, wi
higher rates o’pay and other benefits.
Thirdly, with the increase in free time, people should be
encouraged to participate in the social sector or the voluntary sector, being
involved, for instance, in welfare, education, and community work. As a
incentive, volunteers could be given tax deductions. The unemployed
could be given a ‘shadow wage’ or allowance.
The scheme could be operated by community-based citize
groups and facilitated by the government, which could finance it through
higher taxes and voluntary contributions.