WORK
[Effort, creation, production, struggle]
«So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.» ~Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879
In the process of globalization, humanity passed from the technological to the information age, as did our work pass from the paradigm of linear accumulation to de-territorialised outsourcing, intended to increase profits and reduce costs. While economic and labour sciences are still trying to understand the interrelations and factors of the development of economic landscapes – including the virtual idiom of speculation – experts of all fields are inventing terms to describe the “complexities,” without admitting that perhaps we already lost track of the seemingly exponential growths of possible movements. In such complexity, morality, common sense and human conditions are often made a concern at the end, if at all. Meanwhile the aging demographic puts pressure on the social systems, which are – in the contemporary frame – inevitably linked to work and production in order to contribute care services through taxes. However, in the most opportune sectors of employment, machines took over the power of men, with reduced investment: is the future production of jobs dependent on the creation of an artificial function to maintain the balance? The personal feeling of liability gets intensified by the pressure of the societal moral, expressed mainly through the popular media.
The spatial division between production- and knowledge-based industries, and outsourcing on global scale, grew to a scale not previously experienced, and transformed our “work spaces” from the local organization in offices to the restructuring of whole regions. While we are still dealing with the cemeteries of our «big machines» – the industrial towns – which are remaining as shrinking cities and nostalgic memories for the Henry Ford-derived paternalistic structures, we find ourselves in the middle of a new era: the era of precarious and unstable working conditions between boom-towns and unfinished, abandoned build-ups. As the recent crisis has demonstrated, the global economy and the development – or non-development – of regions are intimately connected, and thus influence the global construction of the urban and rural.
With the slogan “We are the 99%” of the Occupy movement, the “working class” proved not only to have found its common awareness of these economic, social, and spatial transformations, but to create a common ground for new debates. But the problem of how to distribute the global capacity and how to structure the future of work is still unresolved.
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The psychological dogmas that formed the industrial society many decades ago, such as loyalty and lifelong commitment to an enterprise, were replaced with the fear of losing work, the guilt of not having work, or the question of how far would you go – geographically and ethically – for a job? Does our urban future lie in each becoming self-entrepreneurs, or to all share collective knowledge in forms of Open Source projects? Can we find new ways of producing and working?How will the global enterprise be able to produce sustainable levels of work through motivated workers, when nowadays humans are seen as resources and not
workforces? How will the work of the future be measured, when the production of perceived, speculated value has no theoretical limits? Can work finally be released through technology? And finally: What are the possibilities for our cities? Apart from “job-sharing” and co-working spaces, what could be transformed spatially to change towards a sustainable working culture?
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>>> Now it’s your turn! Show us your ideas to re-think the work, the way we produce and a city with another system of working culture!
