#title Technology’s effect on jobs scrutinized
#subtitle As early as 1925, the Senate held hearings about the increasing number of people being displaced by new technologies and rising productivity.
#author Robert W. Allardyce
#date 21 May 1995
#source The Berkshire Eagle, Sun, 21 May 1995, page 42. <[[https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-berkshire-eagle/126260994][newspapers.com/article/the-berkshire-eagle/126260994]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-08-13T20:40:21
#topics technology, news stories
#cover r-w-robert-w-allardyce-technology-s-effect-on-jobs-1.png
THE END OF WORK The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Post-Market Era. By Jeremy Rifkin. G.P. Putnam’s Sons. New York. 350 pages. $24.95.
On Oct 2, 1944, Jeremy Rifkin reminds us, an estimated 3,000 people crowded onto Howard Hopson’s cotton field near Clarksdale, Miss They were there to watch the first successful demonstration of a mechanical cotton picker. A hard worker could hand pick 20 pounds of cotton an hour. The new machine picked a thousand pounds. Each machine would do the work of 50 farmhands.
Within eight years, 100 percent of the cotton in the South was picked by machine. Practically overnight, the sharecropper system, composed mostly of African-Americans, became obsolete.
*** Homeless, jobless
Tenant farmers were evicted from the land, leaving them homeless and jobless. More than 5 million black men, women and children migrated north in search of work.
As the first wave of this black labor force arrived in the industrial regions of the North, the factories had already begun laying off workers as the effects of automation began taking hold. Black families, once tightly knit, began to disintegrate. The third industrial revolution was under way.
Early on, Rifkin describes the first and second industrial revolutions and why British economist John Maynard Keynes — during the depths of our Great Depression — coined the term “technological unemployment.” Rifkin points out that, as early as 1925, our Senate held hearings about the increasing number of people being displaced by new technologies and rising productivity.
Optimists argued, and still argue, that our economy would change in ways that would absorb workers unfortunate enough to lose their jobs to our never-ending press for greater efficiency. There was even a cult-like belief in a utopia where people, happily freed from labor by machines, would occupy themselves with play.
No one explained how this imaginary cadre of skylarkers would obtain money to spend. Rifkin updates the subject in a subchapter, “Retraining for What?”
*** From ‘vice to virtue’
The “nitro” (i.e., technological unemployment and underemployment) of Rifkin’s treatise becomes explosive when mixed with the “glycerin” of consumerism. Rifkin writes, “The metamorphosis of consumption from vice to virtue is one of the most important yet least examined phenomena of the twentieth century.”
The metamorphosis did not come about accidentally. “Converting Americans,” Rifkin explains, “from a psychology of thrift to one of spendthrift proved a daunting task.”
“For most Americans [in the 1920s],” Rifkin continues, “the virtue of self-sacrifice continued to hold sway over the lure of immediate gratification in the marketplace. The American business community set out to radically change the psychology that had built the nation — to turn American workers from investors in the future to spenders in the present.”
As Rifkin puts it, “Early on, business leaders realized that in order to make people ‘want’ things they had never previously desired, they had to create ‘the dissatisfied consumer.’”
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith put it more succinctly years later, observing that the new mission of business was to “create the wants it seeks to satisfy.” Easy credit made the task viable. Once the genie of consumerism was out of its bottle there could be no controlling it.
Having carefully guided his reader through what might otherwise be a bewildering array of information, Rifkin prepares for the final stage. Noting the public’s growing dependence on low-paying service jobs, Rifkin offers a chapter titled “The Last Service Worker.” There he points out how “computers that understand speech, read script and perform tasks previously carried out by human beings foreshadow a new era in which service industries come increasingly under the domain of automation.” This reviewer can easily imagine an automated hamburger stand.
In the chapter “Requiem for the Working Class,” Rifkin notes, “The profound psychological impact on the American worker of the radical changes in the condition and nature of work is being viewed with alarm by industry observers. Americans, perhaps more than any other people in the world, define themselves in relationship to their work.”
Buried in an earlier chapter, Rifkin observed, “Politicians everywhere have failed to grasp the fundamental nature of the changes taking place in the global business community.”
And businessmen, generally, don’t see the working man’s plight as something they need to worry about Even if the business community wanted to ease the potential problem, the stiff competition of the global marketplace severely limits, if not erases, its options. With this in mind, Rifkin turns to “The Dawn of the Post-Market Era.”
*** Up to the reader
Here, this reviewer defers to the reader to study Rifkin’s proposals. His suggestions seem to make good sense. Nevertheless, I fear they are more wishful thinking than real potentialities. Why? We our currently busy demonizing our poor. We blame them for their unemployment. Welfare safety nets, job training and loans for college educations are being reduced or eliminated. All of this is being accomplished through the use of reductionist rhetoric (e.g., bleeding-heart liberalism, socialism, etc.) by both politicians and talk radio.
And as the actualities of technological unemployment and underemployment become unignorable, I can’t imagine our current breed of politicians doing anything other than searching for scapegoats. From this perspective, Rifkin, wittingly or unwittingly, has described the formula for Kristallnacht, U.S.A.
Who should read “The End of Work”? Every parent who hopes to advise his or her children how to navigate through the rocky waters of tomorrow’s economy.
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*Robert Allardyce, a retired airline pilot, is an occasional Eagle contributor and lives in Pittsfield.*
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