The most significant domestic issue of the 2004 elections is unemployment. The United States has lost nearly three million jobs in the last ten years, and real employment hovers around 9.1 percent. Only one political analyst foresaw the dark side of the technological revolution and understood its implications for global employment: Jeremy Rifkin. The End of Workis Jeremy Rifkin's most influential and important book. Now nearly ten years old, it has been updated for a new, post-New Economy era. Statistics and figures have been revised to take new trends into account. Rifkin offers a tough, compelling critique of the flaws in the techniques the government uses to compile employment statistics. The End of Workis the book our candidates and our country need to understand the employment challenges-and the hopes-facing us in the century ahead.
Global unemployment has now reached its highest level since the great depression of the 1930s. Technologies which have brought miraculous improvements in efficiency and productivity have also slashed the numbers employed in manufacturing and agriculture, while the service sector is quite unable to take up the slack. While a tiny elite of knowledge workers -scientists, entrepreneurs an consultants - will still be in demand, most jobs are disappearing fast, resulting in the creation of a morose underclass, caught between apathy and criminal violence.
Esteemed economist, philosopher, and activist Jeremy Rifkin's critically-acclaimed book addresses what could be the most important issue facing our globaleconomy: the wholesale loss of jobs to new technologies. Sophisticated computers,robotics, telecommunications, and other cutting-edge technologies are fast replacinghuman beings in virtually every sector and industry. Now in paperback, this disturbing,mind-opening, and ultimately hopeful book illustrates how new technologies, coupledwith a worldwide drip in purchasing power, threaten to repeat the conditions that lead tothe Great Depression. The author argues, however, that there is still times to avoid economic collapse. Hesuggests that we move beyond the delusion of retraining for nonexistent jobs and looktoward a new, post-market era. He describes new alternatives to traditional work thatcould liberate humanity and create conditions for a more human social order. The rebirthof the human spirit may be the very thing that saves us from economic disaster.
From the author of Popular Economics comes a surpringly sunny projection of America's future job market. Forget the doomsday predictions of sour-faced nostalgists who say automization and globalization will take away your dream job. The job market is only going to get better and better, according to economist John Tamny, who argues in The End of Work that the greatest gift of prosperity, beyond freedom from painful want, is the existence of work that is interesting.
Surveys twentieth century theologies of work, contrasting differing approaches to consider the “problem of labor” from a theological perspective. Aimed at theologians concerned with how Christianity might engage in social criticism, as well those who are interested in the connection between Marxist and Christian traditions Explores debates about labor under capitalism and considers the relationship between divine and human work Through a thorough reading of Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic, argues that the triumph of the "spirit of utility" is crucial to understanding modern notions of work Draws on the work of various twentieth century Catholic thinkers, including Josef Pieper, Jacques Maritain, Eric Gill, and David Jones Published in the new and prestigious Illuminations series.
Going beyond the how and why of burnout, a former tenured professor combines academic methods and first-person experience to propose new ways for resisting our cultural obsession with work and transforming our vision of human flourishing. Burnout has become our go-to term for talking about the pressure and dissatisfaction we experience at work. But in the absence of understanding what burnout means, the discourse often does little to help workers who suffer from exhaustion and despair. Jonathan Malesic was a burned out worker who escaped by quitting his job as a tenured professor. In The End of Burnout, he dives into the history and psychology of burnout, traces the origin of the high ideals we bring to our jobs, and profiles the individuals and communities who are already resisting our cultural commitment to constant work. In The End of Burnout, Malesic traces his own history as someone who burned out of a tenured job to frame this rigorous investigation of how and why so many of us feel worn out, alienated, and useless in our work. Through research on the science, culture, and philosophy of burnout, Malesic explores the gap between our vocation and our jobs, and between the ideals we have for work and the reality of what we have to do. He eschews the usual prevailing wisdom in confronting burnout (“Learn to say no!” “Practice mindfulness!”) to examine how our jobs have been constructed as a symbol of our value and our total identity. Beyond looking at what drives burnout—unfairness, a lack of autonomy, a breakdown of community, mismatches of values—this book spotlights groups that are addressing these failures of ethics. We can look to communities of monks, employees of a Dallas nonprofit, intense hobbyists, and artists with disabilities to see the possibilities for resisting a “total work” environment and the paths to recognizing the dignity of workers and nonworkers alike. In this critical yet deeply humane book, Malesic offers the vocabulary we need to recognize burnout, overcome burnout culture, and acknowledge the dignity of workers and nonworkers alike.
Labor's End traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. As Jason Resnikoff shows, the term automation expressed the conviction that industrial progress meant the inevitable abolition of manual labor from industry. But the real substance of the term reflected industry's desire to hide an intensification of human work--and labor's loss of power and protection--behind magnificent machinery and a starry-eyed faith in technological revolution. The rhetorical power of the automation ideology revealed and perpetuated a belief that the idea of freedom was incompatible with the activity of work. From there, political actors ruled out the workplace as a site of politics while some of labor's staunchest allies dismissed sped-up tasks, expanded workloads, and incipient deindustrialization in the name of technological progress. A forceful intellectual history, Labor's End challenges entrenched assumptions about automation's transformation of the American workplace.
"An extraordinarily informative scholarly history of the debate over working hours from 1920 to 1940." --New York Times Book Review For more than a century preceding the Great Depression, work hours were steadily reduced. Intellectuals, labor leaders, politicians, and workers saw this reduction in work as authentic progress and the resulting increase in leisure time as a cultural advance. Benjamin Hunnicutt examines the period from 1920 to 1940 during which the shorter hour movement ended and the drive for economic expansion through increased work took over. He traces the political, intellectual, and social dialogues that changed the American concept of progress from dreams of more leisure in which to pursue the higher things in life to an obsession with the importance of work and wage-earning. During the 1920s with the development of advertising, the "gospel of consumption" began to replace the goal of leisure time with a list of things to buy. Business, which increasingly viewed shorter hours as a threat to economic growth, persuaded the worker that more work brought more tangible rewards. The Great Depression shook the newly proclaimed gospel as well as everyone's faith in progress. Although work-sharing became a temporary solution to the shortage of jobs and massive unemployment, when faced with legislation that would limit the work week to thirty hours, Roosevelt and his New Deal advisors adopted the gospel of consumption's tests for progress and created more work by government action. The New Deal campaigned for the right to work a full time job--and won. "Work Without End presents a compelling history of the rise and fall of the 40-hour work week, explains bow Americans became trapped in a prison of work that allows little room for family, bobbies or civic participation and suggests bow they can free themselves from relentless overwork. [This book] is a sober reconsideration of a topic that is critical to America's future. It suggests that progress doesn't mean much if there is not time for love as well as work, and liberation is an empty achievement if the work it frees one to do is truly without end." --The Washington Post "Hunnicutt, with this excellent book, becomes the first United States historian to examine fully why this momentous change occurred." --The Journal of American History "Hunnicutt's achievement is to ask the questions, and to provide the first extended answer which takes in the full array of economic, social, and political forces behind the ‘end of shorter hours' in the crucial first half of the twentieth century." --Journal of Economic History "This thoroughly documented history [is] a valuable book well worth reading." --Libertarian Labor Review "This is an important book in the emerging debate about alternatives to full employment. Hunnicutt is a skilled historian who is on to an important issue, writes well, and can bring many different kinds of historical sources to bear on the problem." --Fred Block, University of Pennsylvania "Work Without End is a disturbing but impressive indictment of both big business and the New Deal program of Franklin D. Roosevelt.... Hunnicutt presents an unusual but persuasive description of a successful conspiracy to deprive American workers of their vision of a shorter-hours work week and the individual and societal liberation which would flow from it." --Labor Studies Journal
In this compelling, disturbing, and ultimately hopeful book, Jeremy Rifkin argues that we are entering a new phase in history - one characterised by the steady and inevitable decline of jobs.
Work Want Work considers in captivating detail how a logic of work has become integral to everything we do, even as the place of formal work has become increasingly precarious. With reference to sociological data, philosophy, political theory, legislation, the testimonies of workers and an eclectic mix of cultural texts – from Lucian Freud to Google, Anthony Giddens to selfies, Jean-Luc Nancy to Amy Winehouse – Pfannebecker and Smith lay out how the capitalism of globalized technologies has put our time, our subjectivities, our experiences and our desires to work in unprecedented ways. As every part of life is colonized by work without securing our livelihoods, new questions need to be asked: whether a nostalgia for work can save us, how ideas of work change conceptions of political community, how employment and unemployment alike have become malemployment, and whether the work of our desire online can be disentangled from capitalist exploitation. The biggest question, at a time when the end of work and a fully automated future are proclaimed by Silicon Valley idealists as well as by social democratic politicians and left-wing theorists, is this: how can we propose a post-work society and culture that we will actually want?
