2023-04-28 22:03:50
The debate has started. Not only in Spain. How many hours and days will we have to work in the future in order to guarantee a minimum adequate standard of living? Four days a week? And why not three or two? And that, who and how is paid? Who will be affected and what will be the final productive result?
In 1930, one of the most influential economists in history, John Maynard Keynes, wrote a light and provocative seven-page document entitled: “The economic opportunities of our grandchildren.” In a stable world, without wars or excessive population growth, he predicted that scientific advances could allow work 15 hours a week.
Of course, in this Keynesian ideal world, realized from the perspective of that time, the sense of money as an instrument to accumulate wealth and patrimony will disappear. In his text, he bets on the existence of a world closer to the ‘teletubbies’ or, of course, to the idyllic region of the ‘hobbits’. Science -understood today thanks to robotization and artificial intelligence- will end up being the active principle of work. Considering Keynes’s style and high standard of living in interwar London, good English irony shines through.
References to the Keynesian forecast will be used by the new left who, even by hearsay, have the economist as a reference. Mentioning his last name always gives a certain aura of authority, although nothing has been read about him and little is known about the context in which he deployed his theories.
For union representatives, who have watched over workers’ rights in their different forms since the end of the 19th century, the task is complicated. Also to the obsolete employers, who observe how the employees of yesterday will not be those of today or tomorrow. The new professionals and workers more than prepared demand and decide. The competition to attract the best talent in any industry is fierce.
Flexibility
Framing a fixed labor perimeter with concepts defined by the old workers’ statutes will not make sense in the world to which we are heading. Flexibility at all levels will be essential and within the same business organization -private or public- open labor frameworks must be generated. As robotization continues to replace them -it has been doing so progressively since the industrial revolution-, all basic manual and operator jobs will gradually disappear. Not just these. From the Administration it will be necessary to begin to consider why ancestral figures such as notaries and property registrars they must continue to exist the day a machine can endorse a document.
Work two, four, five or seven days a week, with the hours distributed as desired and from wherever? Naturally. And also pay according to objectives met and level of productivity. The jobs of the future, as they are beginning to be, must be treated ‘à la carte’. Inflexibility and ideological clichés are the enemies of progress.
#day #work #day