Extract from Rethinking Work, by Eric Britton (EC, Brussels, 1994):

After several years of study, networking, brainstorming, and international exchanges involving a wide range of individuals, institutions, disciplines, nationalities and points of view, we have reached the following ten conclusions which, in our view, provide a convincing argument for the need to take a radically different look at the issues and the remedial policies we should be considering:

1. The Present Crisis Is Profound, Structural, and Society Threatening
   Unemployment rates are inexorably inching up across the OECD region, crossing thresholds first double and now triple or more the long accepted norms for "frictional" or "normal" unemployment, creating new magnitudes of hardship and suffering for individuals, families and institutions alike. The problems associated with "running out of work" are not only very grave already but also are steadily getting worse. When we say very grave, we mean not just uncomfortable or transient -- but fundamental, structural, long term and, ultimately if unmet, society threatening.

2. The Paradox of Progress: We Have Successfully "Saved Labor"… Now What?
   The measures currently in place are not doing the job, because there can be no easy or quick fixes to these problems. The harsh reality is that the circumstances before us are neither temporary nor the result of some hapless accident; they are the direct outcome of the social and economic system we have set in place. We have deliberately created all the preconditions of a "labor-saving" society -- and are now somehow flabbergasted that there are increasing numbers of people "out of work". Our dilemma is precisely this: with the long long arm of technology, we can now produce virtually everything we need with only a small fraction of the labor force we historically employed. So the real question is: how do we organize our daily lives under these radically different conditions? This absolutely vital question is not receiving the attention that it deserves.

3. Growth + Fine-Tuning Are NOT The Answer!
   Confronted with what is clearly a major watershed issue of technology and society, our politicians, administrators, industrialists, labor unions and the rest are by and large giving their time to considering "remedies", most of which in the final analysis consist of little more than marginal adjustments of existing policies, practices and institutions. The presumption appears to be that there is nothing basically wrong with the "machine that is the economy", and that all that is required is a bit of fine-tuning and an upturn in the economic cycle. This is in our view a cosmic mis-match of medicine and disease. Growth as we know it will deal with only a small part of the problem, and all of the rest remains to be addressed.

4. We Have a Grossly Inadequate Understanding of What Work Is All About.
   Clearly the point of departure for any serious remedial program cannot be to treat work as if it were only "labor", i.e., just one more freely substitutable part of the process of production. But in our society work is a great deal more than that. In addition to its purely productive role, it is also the main vehicle that puts into the hands of citizens the means to obtain the goods and services they want and need in their daily lives. It is thus the vital motor (through demand pull) for keeping the productive side busy. But work has many other important functions too, of a psychological and social nature, none of which are getting sufficient play in the present debate. Moreover, it is clear that what we call "work" in the 21st century is going to differ as notably from what we have come to know over the last two centuries as did the model of the Industrial Revolution from its predecessor. Complicating all this yet further is that the transition from ‘old work’ to ‘new work’ is already well underway, and that this transition itself poses a large number of major challenges to policy makers. These various differences need to be factored into the debate (which till now has been remarkably "retro-oriented" in its vision of what work is all about.)

5. The Time Scale of the Analyses Is Profoundly Wrong.
   The problems before us are not cyclical or short term in nature, but structural and long term. We cannot simply wait for that next upturn in the current economic cycle. The time horizon of study and policy is thus not the old familiar one of months or a few years, but closer to generational. Our frame of reference cannot be the blips of the latest NBER figures or quarterly indicators, but the realms of Adam Smith, Marx, Kondratiev, Keynes and Schumpeter. Our dilemma in front of this unfamiliar situation is a double-bind: not only do we need to sharpen and develop analytic tools which can deal with these deeper horizons, but also the institutional and political arrangements which will permit us to make better decisions against this necessary long term frame.

6. We Are Looking at the Wrong Indicators
   How do you get out of the woods if your compass is broke? In examining the issues we are consistently looking at the wrong things (and often measuring even those wrongly). This is disguising the true dimensions of our dilemma. Thus, for example, the real dimensions of unemployment are in most places at least half again more than what is usually admitted or discussed. If that is true, of course, it changes everything. Furthermore, what we call work is a rich and complex phenomenon which has many important qualitative aspects which are by no means reflected in the usual indicators and in the discussions that ensue. The day of single indicators (and single factor causality) needs to be put firmly behind us. Progress is needed in developing new indicators that can permit us to understand better where things stand, in all their human and natural complexity.

7. We have a Major "Tools Problem".
   We are struggling with these problems using analytic tools that are ill-adapted to the challenges of a post-industrial, mature, "post-capitalist" economy. Most of them were by and large fashioned at a time when scarcity was the driving factor in society, not plenty. Economics, for instance, is often defined as "the study of the allocation of scarce resources between various and competing ends". But if resources are available in great abundance—as they are! -- aren’t entirely different analytic tools required? How does one factor in the externalities of work, including those that are positive? What are these new tools? Who should be trying to develop and refine them? Where is promising work going on along these lines which we all should be trying to follow? Furthermore, and not without irony, it needs to be mentioned that our analytic tools themselves are part of the problem. Therefore one of our first steps must be to develop the new tools that are needed and to refashion the best of those we have to accomplish the job that is needed in their new environment.

8. Many of Currently Proposed Measures May Make Things Even Worse
   The crowning news of our dilemma is that, as a result of a badly wrong-headed understanding of the basic "problematique", many of the measures presently being discussed or enacted run the risk of being directly counter-productive. Some are likely to lock in parts of the problem. Others, yet more perniciously, risk to create situations which could be substantially worse than what would have resulted with no policy at all. We must develop a much clearer view, first of the problem, and then of the policy options which are available under the circumstances we actually face.

9. Radical Rethinking is Called For
   A critical read of the evidence makes it clear that the entire "work system" that we presently are living with (both in our daily lives, but, even more important in this case, the one we have in our minds) is no longer doing its job. Not only is there something that is already quite wrong, but, whatever it is, it is only going to get a lot "wronger" in the years ahead. The system we are stuck with and frantically trying to fix comes from another time and an entirely different set of circumstances. It is changing massively in front of our noses and needs to be completely rethought and radically over-hauled.

10. The Age of Plenty Paradox: The "Problem" Holds the Solution
    Because of the accumulated impacts of technology development over the last decades, we have entered an age of plenty -- without really recognizing it. But for some unfathomable reasons we insist on approaching the challenges before us as if we were paupers. Here is what countries within the OECD region now have in untold historical abundance: labor, capital, natural resources, physical and other support infrastructure, organizational and management skills, access to markets and huge numbers of people around the world who need goods, services and a higher quality of life. But no one appears to be taking this great abundance into account. We somehow stubbornly refuse to acknowledge what is going on. Technology -- embodied, usable knowledge -- is at the heart of our dilemma, but in a highly ironic way. On the one hand it is a critical part of the problem, on the other it is at the same time an absolutely vital element of the solution. This point, which is not being adequately brought into the debate, needs to be targeted, verified and then broadcast. To the best of our knowledge no one is giving this thesis the attention that it deserve -- and yet all the germs of the solution are there!

• Build up a flexible state-of-the-art network of people and institutions from many places and backgrounds to review and comment on this critical assessment — and in general to join forces to widen and deepen the debate.
  
• Develop a collection of working papers which set out these "alternative considerations" and circulate these widely for comment.
  
• Put the network to use to generate not only ideas and studies, but also actions and projects of a sort that will improve the base of information and experience available on the full range of available approaches.
  
• Solicit ideas and support for one or more pilot projects which might provide a solid micro level base for testing and applying some of the ideas that are resulting from this collaborative investigation.
  
• Lay a base for additional meetings, projects and events which will further query and develop the most promising of these ideas and materials over the next several years.
  
• Develop funding and institutional support for continuing this program and developing new projects and activities within these broad policy areas.
  

This first stage of this process was completed in November 1994 with publication by the European Commission of the first edition of the report Rethinking Work: New Ways to Work in an Information Society (which can be obtained either in print form from DG XIII/B of the Commission or in electronic form here from the New Work Library that has been established in conjunction with this forum. Today, six full years after these observations were first set out, there appears to be little evidence of any real progress on most of these scores. We are still trying to work our way into the future of work,as you will see here from the latst cut of the Rethinking Work web site.

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