WORDWAR

The Work Force in Transition

Where Have the Jobs Gone?

Not so many years ago, no passenger elevator moved without an operator. Utility services needed sweating men to dig ditches for phone, water, and sewer lines. And what about gas station attendants, streetcar conductors, typewriter repairers, stenographers, train firemen, printbox typesetters, linotype operators, and hydro meter readers? Most are going, or have gone, to that big unemployment center in the sky.
What has replaced them? Computers, automated teller machines, fax machines, and other machines. Even machines are being replaced -- by machines that do multiple jobs, such as the E-mail modem/fax/answering machine that does three jobs in one, at half the price of last year's single-unit fax machine. If your job can be replaced by a machine, even one not yet invented, start retraining now. Global competition dictates it. If your company cannot match the productivity of overseas robots on the dull, monotonous, repetitive jobs that still exist, be assured some foreign operation has already got that market targeted.
If your work is tied to what used to be called a "natural resource," don't expect to be working at your present job until you retire. Your job or even the industry itself won't be around. While Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten presided over the end of the British Empire. Today union leaders in the forest industry are in a similar position -- the army of lumberjacks is shrinking rapidly. Even the word is now outdated. No amount of promotional "creativity" can make these jobs come back again.
Plastic is replacing steel. Ceramics, vinyl, and new materials are replacing wood, steel, and other building materials. Molecular engineers are developing materials that never existed before, materials that will be "assembled" molecule by molecule, with a strength that will make steel look weak. New materials can now be created, much like nylon replacing silk in stockings, from atmospheric materials at a much lower cost than the natural way of the past.
Postal delivery, which once dominated the day's office work, is fast being replaced by E-mail, faxes, and telephones. The answering machine is replacing the receptionist, the automated bank machine is replacing human bank tellers, and voice navigators are replacing secretaries. No job is sacred. Even the Vatican now broadcasts messages via satellite. It is hard to believe, but jobs are following the same path as slavery, child labor, and indentured service as a way of using human energy to provide a service, enhance a culture, or provide an income for the population.
For years now the official (and memorable) logo of the Japanese Industrial Robot Society has been an image of a stainless-steel-gloved robot hand releasing humans from their position as a lowly caterpillar into a creative and beautiful butterfly. That indelible image may mean more than initially intended.
Almost everybody today, with the possible exception of some government and union leaders, is aware that our old skills cannot command the respect and pay levels they did in the past. They just are not salable anymore. No matter what training we take, our skills will only be viable for a short period and then we will have to retrain for something else, quite likely something radically different. Although I am a futurist today, if I don't continue to change, by tomorrow I will be a historian.
Flexibility is the key to tomorrow. Constant retraining will be essential. Tomorrow will be the age of task forces, a time when groups will gather to work on projects and then disband. Such groups already work around the world on major construction projects, putting out oil fires in Kuwait, setting up Expo sites, or creating movies.
Since the fall of the Hollywood studio, new, more adaptive producers have bypassed the old way and now assemble the talent and the organization to make one movie. After it is over, whether it be a hit or a bust, everyone scatters. The next movie may or may not have some of the players that produced the last epic. The latest buzzword for this type of instant "rise and fall" organization is "virtual corporation."
The rush from the past to the future is constantly shortening the time before anything current becomes a historical artifact. The average shelf life of any consumer electronic product in Tokyo is now a mere ninety days. What used to take five years now occurs in one.
Every technological invention, along with the innovative ways in which it is used, changes the world around it -- not only technologically, but also socially, economically, and personally. Many people trying to survive on unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, and welfare are on a downhill slide -- into the land of the techno-peasant. Once there, they become outcasts because they are resisting tomorrow, grounded in the past. The devastating net result will be reminiscent of the turn of the century for people who did not learn to read and write.
Yet with all the unemployment in the fading industries of yesteryear, there is still action in the growth fields of tomorrow. Most of this new energy starts on a small scale. Often a few coworkers, partners, or shareholders produce remarkable sales volumes. Many small companies with a staff of only ten are knocking out $5 million worth of product a year. That's $500,000 per employee or partner. With that output, the company can afford to pay up to $100,000 a year to productive knowledge workers. And these people are developing the personal confidence to go almost anywhere on the planet and earn a comparable income. They are highly mobile, flexible beyond belief, and not bound by nationalism -- they are truly planetary citizens. Every country needs them and the virtual corporations they create, and smart countries are out prospecting for them.
You may think it is impossible to have a company where the average employee can produce $500,000 a year. Well, it's almost being done today at Apple Computers. Revenue per employee is $437,100. That's twice what IBM is accomplishing and four times what competitor Digital Equipment Corp. has been able to produce. If Toyota can handle the planet with fewer than a hundred thousand workers, why does General Motors need more than that to handle just the United States?
Look at the government financial aid supplied every year to developing countries (or to Indian reservations). It is like providing fish instead of fishhooks, and enslaves the recipient in servitude forever -- or until the rules are changed. More sophisticated givers provide the fishhooks, encouraging independence and a continuing supply of fish.
Once you learn how to swim, the acquired skills work in rivers, lakes, pools, quarries, and oceans. Those who can't swim quickly encounter aquatic hazards. The same applies to salable personal skills for tomorrow. The difference between the "knows" and the "know-nots" is not a matter of race, color, formal education, or even economics. It is attitude. Information can lead to knowledge. Knowledge can lead to wisdom. And wisdom can lead to power. Information is easier to access now than at any time in human history. But without the right attitude and the energy to go out and explore, present-day prospectors will be like those who sat at home and missed the adventure, the danger, and the glory of the Gold Rush.

Retraining

In 1978 Digital Equipment of Maryland built the VAX 780 minicomputer. It was about three feet high, three feet wide, and six feet long, and it cost $30,000 to manufacture. Six years later the same company came out with a microchip the size of a fingernail that cost $300 and replaced the VAX 780. The highly skilled, highly paid workers who produced and serviced the VAX 780 were no longer required. They were obliged to retrain. Since they were in the vanguard of the computer business, retraining in the computer industry wasn't too stressful. But for someone coming into computers cold and having worked perhaps only three months on a VAX 780, it was stressful to have to move to another segment of the industry.
When airlines flew internal combustion engines with propellers, the engine mechanics worked about one hour for every hour of flight time per engine. In the dying days of the prop business, the early 1960s, most airlines were flying four-engine aircraft. So every four-engine airplane that flew eight hours required thirty-two hours of maintenance. Four skilled mechanics each put in eight hours on an engine to keep the aircraft fit to fly the next flight.
Then one day the jet engine appeared. It flew and flew and flew, and its engines required little maintenance. Because it was almost never "down," it kept flying -- sometimes up to twenty hours a day. Maintenance costs dropped, and many highly skilled engine mechanics had to retrain. The same thing has occurred now that fuel injection has replaced carburetors in automobile engines. With fuel injection, it is easy to change the computer card that regulates fuel injection and send the defective unit back to the factory, where a robot reconditions it. A skilled mechanic is not required to do that.
Today change comes with the whirling wind. In a swift-moving small company, one staff member might have ten jobs in five years. These are not just variations of a job but distinctively different jobs, because traditional jobs have been vanishing as computers and software have replaced manual bookkeeping, dictation, filing, and operating Gestetner machines and typewriters. Even the switchboard operator once employed by every fair-sized firm is gone.
Telex machines usually had operators who processed everyone's messages, as they had earlier processed cables and telegrams before handing them over to others trained to dispatch them around the world. Now people not only send their own faxes and E-mail, they also compose what they send -- without a secretary. Middle management executives, unfamiliar with many of the new techniques, find out one day that retraining is necessary -- their old jobs have disappeared too.
And this is just the beginning. Every technological change changes some type of job somewhere. It also causes sociological change. The switch from postal service to courier and fax has been reducing daily trips to the post office, facilitating more rapid communication, and putting stress on postal workers. They must retrain.
Since newly required skills are scarce, workers trained for the future command top money, better working conditions, and various fringe benefits. Some companies, such as those in computer software, may have to cater to the type of worker that is now in demand. Otherwise business falters. This is the other side of the unemployment picture. Business owners have to change too and perhaps relocate to somewhere that might not be their first choice. That move might be across town, to a faraway city or, more likely, across the world.
Something else is happening amid this rapid change in the workplace. Since anyone trained for the past possesses outdated learning, of little value in the global marketplace, the basic requirement when hiring a new employee is attitude. Potential employees (from janitor to president) with the right attitude can rapidly absorb new training. If they have the wrong attitude, hiring them just brings endless headaches. In my seminars around the world I tell companies: "Hire on attitude alone. Credentials are from the past, and past skills are obsolete, as we all witness every day." For example, in the new field of virtual reality there are, as yet, no experts, except the few inventors, innovators, and developers working on the early prototypes, just now emerging. This field will be as big as oil, steel, and aviation have been in the past. This new Orville has just made the first flight -- and no one else in the world knows how to do it! Imagine the opportunities.
The only constant is change. Learn to love it. As the rate of change accelerates, the result will appear chaotic to the uninitiated. But there is elegant order in chaos. Few so far have learned to recognize it and profit from it. This is where the future lies.

A New Caste System?

In the 1880s indentured laborers were imported into North America to build the transcontinental railroads and to provide labor for the forest industry. Immigrants from such countries as India and China got their first view of North America via the west coast ports of North America.
It took many lumberjacks to produce what today would be considered a small output. By the 1950s a typical west coast sawmill employed up to a thousand people, considerably fewer than in earlier times. A modern mill, cutting perhaps twice the volume of an earlier twentieth-century operation, may employ only a hundred people. The reduction in work force resulted from the rather rustic "automation" introduced between the two world wars. World War II provided the era of high-speed, high-volume production.
With the high cost of raw materials today, companies are forced to focus on value instead of volume. What steps are required to make this possible? Sounds like going into reverse, but the solution in this case is to add more labor. Since our Northern American labor rates are among the highest in the wood world, how is it viable when several factors make Americans and Canadians poor candidates for globalization?
Answer: set up a two-tiered labor structure. The original highly skilled operators of the automation equipment do what they do best and stay at the high (perhaps $30) hourly rate; the added-value activity takes place in another company's plant that handles subcontracting (at around $10 an hour). Higher value-added, higher productivity, but at less cost. It keeps the companies viable, but it also brings back indentured labor.
What are the social consequences of such a twin-level society? What is the next step? Will such operations follow the Japanese model where the main contractor, say Toyota, pays a high wage-and-benefit package to core employees, but outsources jobs requiring lower skills to subcontractors who pay their workers a considerably lower rate?
This has great potential for people in higher wage brackets. The new system allows the company to once more become economically viable, but on the backs of the lower-paid, less-educated, unskilled employees. Fewer union members with more protected benefits have stability and a secure future, but the smaller numbers reduce union strength.
It was once believed that a high-speed, high-volume process was the answer. Now it appears that smaller volume with higher value-added input is the road to the future. It's interesting to ponder the implications for towns with such an obvious chasm between different sets of workers established next door to one another. Could this be the caste system of tomorrow?

The Old Caste System

North Americans pride themselves on their version of democracy. "Everybody is equal" is the political cry. That simply isn't true. Indeed, our caste system may be the cause of our decline in the new world order. Consider how we view people by job classification. The factory sweeper is a "common laborer" and gets paid minimum wage or close to it. People on the factory floor are "blue-collar workers," paid an hourly wage. Office workers are "white-collar" or "pink-collar" workers and receive a fixed salary. Engineers and computer programmers are viewed as "nerds." Without any of the above, the operation would quickly come to a halt, yet that vision doesn't seem to penetrate management. Management sees that work force as flexible, meaning that the number in the work force can be increased or decreased as demand requires -- much like increasing or decreasing the plant's electrical power requirements. The effect on attitude is disastrous.
In North America it is more lucrative and long-lasting to move into management, finance, or marketing. Increasingly the best minds have been traveling in that direction. It wasn't always thus. During America's best times -- the 1950s and 1960s -- veterans from World War II, in many instances, chose engineering. A victorious nation rewarded them by plowing vast sums into educational opportunities that gave the cream of the survivors opportunities never before available. They produced innovative products and systems, not just on earth with unmatched highway systems, but also in the air and beyond. These were directly attributable to that investment in the new education of the day. It provided the intellectual thrust that propelled the Industrial Age.
In North America today there are more lawyers confronting, delaying, obstructing, litigating, and destroying what that earlier group built up than there are engineers trying to build anew. When there are more lawyers than engineers in any sizable political district you can expect more trouble than triumph. And that's what we are reaping now.
When a lawyer can pull in an annual salary of $200,000, it can't help affecting young high-school students considering a career. Imagine those classy offices, a corporate Mercedes, partnership bonuses, and unlimited expense accounts, along with what (up to now) has appeared to be a more socially acceptable pedestal. It's an environment that is ruled by the precedent of the past, that resists new intellectual thinking, and where the heaviest physical thing ever lifted is the phone or an American Express card. How does that look compared with actually getting your hands dirty while working in merely adequate quarters and being paid the "industry standard"? North America is now paying, and paying dearly, for this economic caste system.
Management raised in such a system forces engineers and designers to listen more to marketing forces than to creative ones, more to bottom-line results for the next quarter than to long-term success and survival of the company. Dumb. Especially when, with proper social incentives and availability of training, that floor sweeper can come up with another $7 billion idea equal to the one Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak developed in their garage.
Are any North American companies seeing the world through this type of visionary eye? A few. In Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, the Weyerhaeuser Corporation plant has introduced "the fifth shift" system. One week out of five, a shift of the entire production labor force attends in-house classes to update training, not just for their present job or the next one they may be promoted to, but also the one after that. It is done in-house because no academic institution has the equipment to train workers for the new fields this company is moving into. Wait until the company's competition feels the results of that investment.

The Changing Work Force

In recent years there has been a trend for big-city residents to move to less densely populated areas. Today's technology, which allows many workers (especially in the communications segment) to operate from almost anywhere, is accelerating the migration. Those moving may be the elite of tomorrow.
"Community" is taking on a new connotation. We used to think of that word as meaning "people living in a particular district" or "a social unit within a larger one and having interests, work, etc., in common." Geographic proximity is no longer required. Now members of a social unit may be scattered around the globe. As electronic nomad Steven K. Roberts, head honcho at Nomadic Research Labs of California, says, "As long as your head is in cyberspace it doesn't matter where your body is." Roberts, usually "on the road" with his bike, is in touch with the world via satellite, radio, computer modem, cellular phone, and three computers. He even types as he rides. His is an example of one of the new lifestyles. He is also an example of how the centrifugal forces that once bound societies together are now tearing them apart. But he has found how to create a lifestyle both rewarding and profitable by doing what was, until recently, impossible.
Miners, who dig into the earth, and farmers, who till the soil, now make up a mere 2 percent of the U.S. work force and 3 percent of the Canadian work force, down from 98 percent two hundred years ago. Workers who still make things, conducting repetitive movements for high-volume manufacturers, compose about 10 percent of the current labor force in the United States (25 percent in Canada). Those highly skilled blue-collar workers from the Industrial Age, because of downsizing and advancing technology, have not been able to retain their previously high-paying occupations. Their future is uncertain.
Such service personnel as maids, waitresses, janitors, taxi operators, and store clerks are also performing repetitive tasks, but generally on a one-to-one basis; they now form 30 percent of the work force. Eventually, almost everyone who manufactures a product or performs a service that can be replaced by a machine will be replaced by a machine. With inflation, about a third of these people already are falling behind in their standard of living.
That still leaves almost 60 percent. The rising, and in many cases rapidly rising, segment is the top 20 percent of the work force that perform analytic or creative services for the Communications Age, services that can be sold worldwide and consist of problem solving or problem identifying or brokering of strategic activities. This field favors writers; video producers; scientists; engineers; free or abstract thinkers; people willing to risk, experiment, or collaborate; legal or banking executives; and eclectic consultants. Their skills are portable and in demand everywhere.
Those who learn to operate in a vastly changed and still-changing global environment; those who can walk on quicksand and dance with electrons; those who amass an array of varied experiences; those who see connections where others see chaos -- they will flourish and find opportunity in every disturbance. These people are usually from families with parents interested in their development and progress. They closely safeguard their health, travel widely for both work and learning, read a lot, and comprehend the benefits of computer literacy. These people have nowhere to go but up.
The almost 35 percent who can't find employment in the fast-fading industrial marketplace will become a subclass of techno-peasants, politely called unemployables. This group has increased rapidly in the last few years. They may lack education or skills or be socially unacceptable because of their attitude, alcohol or drug dependence, or basic ignorance of what is happening around them. Many do not show up on unemployment rolls because they have given up or think they are too old to retrain. One recent report says that today 60 percent of North Americans are not carrying their own economic weight -- they take more out of the economy than they put into it. This would mean that Japan is in control of a larger productive working population than the United States, even though the United States has twice the population of Japan. Techno-peasants will face bleak futures. They will inherit what's left of most big cities.
Current population growth projections show techno-peasants increasing at a rate double or triple that of analytic/creative workers. One surprise: Those with degrees are 2.5 times more likely to be laid off than the average worker (this includes service workers). Ten percent will never work again.
Here's a social economic breakdown of the work force in transition:

Earth workers 2% and falling
Production workers 10% and falling
Service workers 30% and rising slowly
Analytic/creative workers 20% and rising rapidly
Techno-peasants 35% and rising rapidly
Moving between worlds 3%
Total 100%

"Home" Companies

Two decades ago came the cry "Small is beautiful." By 1988 Statistics Canada reported that 62 percent of all new net jobs in Canada were coming from companies with five or fewer employees. A year later 82 percent of new jobs came from companies with ten or fewer employees. There is a similar but more gradual trend in the United States. At this rate, in ten years more than two-thirds of the work force will work for very small companies. With today's technology, companies require few employees to produce a high dollar-value of business.
Meanwhile, what is happening to the large companies that used to hire thousands, make large contributions to political parties, and provide the foundation of union strength? Everything now seems to be moving to empower small companies and weaken these large ones. Technology provides laser beams to small, gazelle-like companies. The big outfits, illiterate to the new times, end up able to use only bows and arrows.
Even as governments pass new legislation to "protect" failing large companies, that same legislation works toward the fracturing of the business world and the benefit of small companies that can be run from the home. When proposed legislation states that all companies with twenty or more employees must be unionized, for example, that gives rise to small companies with, say, fifteen employees, below the threshold of the new law. There are now dozens of such legislative incentives to stay small. It wasn't the way government expected the law to work, but governments aren't into reality.
Small companies can move fast -- in or out of any community, province, state, or country. Electrons traveling at the speed of light make it possible. Meanwhile the old system of government, requiring ever more taxes, piles on more burdens for those that still play the old game. Large companies, old political parties, and old executives who still play the same game find empires disintegrating under their feet.
Small companies don't have to carry the union costs of unrealistically high wages, rigid working regulations, and the disruptive and financial burden of strikes. So the small company is continually in a position to steal some of the large organization's customers every time a problem arises. How many times can this occur before the large company becomes bankrupt? But more than that is happening: as more people become "clients" or "partners" they become interdependent. They become nicer to one another. Service improves. Big business can't do that.
There are other invisible effects. Money moves rapidly via electronic winds to gentler lands. Entrepreneurs so urgently required to instigate and maintain a vibrant economy depart for more attractive environs or are persuaded to move by the inducements offered by learning how the new game is played. Small is beautiful, and it's getting more beautiful all the time. To ignore what is happening, to think that the old ways will eventually return, is the route to economic suicide.

The Fifth Sphere

One of the barometers helpful in spotting trends is the emergence of small newsletters dealing with one topic. A new one has just hit my desk. It's called "The Fifth Sphere" and it deals with "telecommuting," the buzzword for moving work to the workers (as opposed to moving workers to their work).
The definition of the Fifth Sphere was originally conceived by the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), the government bureaucracy generally given credit for the rise of "Japan Inc." This is its vision of twenty-first-century life:

-- Age of the First Sphere. Before the transition to modern society, there was but one human environment. The home and the workplace were combined in one place and formed a single sphere. The age of the First Sphere continued for a long time.
-- Division into the Second Sphere. As industrialization and modernization progressed after the industrial revolution, separation of the workplace from the home accelerated, and the workplace became an independent Second Sphere; that is, home and workplace were divided.
-- Emergence of the Third Sphere. As the modernization of industry and society advanced, a Third Sphere, recreation, emerged as an independent realm in addition to home and work, distinct from those two and functioning in its own right. The importance of this sphere is rising steadily in everyday life. This sphere, in some ways, typifies the modern urban environment.
-- Increasing Demand for a Fourth Sphere. Developed nations that built sophisticated, industrialized societies were able to attain great convenience and comfort in life but, at the same time, suffered the drawback of centralized control. Urban residents now find it necessary to liberate themselves from psychological and physical stresses and to restore health by escaping from everyday life and immersing themselves in nature. Combined with the diversification of lifestyles and values, the need for resorts for extended stays is rapidly growing.
This new development can, however, be interpreted as only a transfer of the Third Sphere in time and location and an extension of conventional lifestyle -- not really a Fourth Sphere in the true sense.
-- Leap to the Fifth Sphere. The attainment of a twenty-first-century lifestyle requires an environment that is not residential or industrial in function and is not convention- and resort-oriented. It must have all the elements of the four spheres but at the same time be a city not classifiable under any one of them -- in other words, it must be a Fifth Sphere, a new type of city.

After setting the above definitions, the Japanese are moving ahead with plans for such a new $50 billion city. They call it a "multifunctionopolis" and it will be located near Adelaide, Australia. This is the grandest scheme for this concept, but Chiba Prefecture in Japan already boasts an established research and development park of 250 acres with Fujitsu, the largest computer company in Japan, setting up a million-square-foot facility to accommodate ten thousand new-age workers. This and all such future developments worldwide will likely be linked.
When a concept like telecommuting starts out, growth is slow at first. Then it explodes. It is another example of an economic effect that perhaps does not slip into public consciousness for years.
As of 1993, I have been telecommuting for seventeen years. For me it is definitely the way to go. When I started, few people except artists and writers were doing the same. Now a reported 17 percent of the working population in western Canada and 10 percent in eastern Canada are telecommuting.
And it is developing in ways many people would consider strange: New York Life Insurance Company is having application and claim forms processed by telecommuters in Ireland (the company can't find enough people who can spell in New York). Large credit card companies are having client chits processed in the Caribbean. You can get income tax and accounting done in Madras, India, for a fraction of the cost here. Those who operate in this way realize their market is no longer merely local or regional, but the whole five billion people on the planet.

Teleworking

If you are already working from home or planning to do so, your future is probably bright. Recent studies indicate that "teleworking" appeals to forward thinkers, who already have higher status and visibility than in-house office workers and show higher productivity. As well, they are reported to be happier, living higher quality lives, and -- in companies that have productivity bonuses -- making more money. Many consultants, writers, computer programmers, financial analysts, researchers, and desktop publishers are rapidly climbing the economic totem pole.
Teleworking covers many categories of "remote" work where individuals conduct their duties away from a permanent location. As we enter the Communications Age, a substantial segment of the work force, especially in knowledge industries, will be operating from other than the traditional office location. The implications for everyone will be enormous.
About 10 percent of the work force operates from home full time, with another 10 percent operating from home part-time. This does not include executives who may bring home their "office-in-a-briefcase" every night. It seems almost assured, partly because of the drop in the cost of telecommunications, that teleworking has nowhere to go but up.
Occupations most suitable for teleworking tend to be information-intensive rather than capital-intensive. They are particularly evident, at this early stage of the Information Age, in the financial, computer, research, and publishing sectors.
Teleworking provides employers with greater access to a wider talent pool. By using scarce resources more effectively, companies improve profitability. Theoretically, teleworkers could be employed half a physical world away from where they live. This can be either frightening or attractive, depending on your confidence.
Flexibility in home and work relationships and the substantial reduction in travel time and expenses are the main advantages for the employee. It becomes questionable just how much of an employee the worker-at-home becomes, as he or she requires more self-discipline -- usually associated with the self-employed. Studies indicate that teleworkers enjoy the independence and freedom of working at home and the resulting closer family relationships. Many seem to prefer or not to notice the lack of conventional social contacts that a regular nine-to-five office regime offers.
Some sales people, auditors, building inspectors, and others were conducting work-from-home operations even before the Communications Age began to blossom. Today laptop and plug-into-the-nearest-phone computers, worldwide 800 numbers, and communications networks can broaden their field of coverage. When computer communications via direct-to-satellite connections became available on Japan Air Lines in 1992, another whole field of accessibility opened. We now have foreign opportunities for accessing information and dispatching it to the home office, from sea level or from 36,000 feet in the sky.
Some fifty American companies, several belonging to the Fortune 500, have so far instigated formal telework programs. You can bet that many others will soon follow suit.

The One-Person Office

Statistics Canada has revealed some astounding facts. Almost 90 percent of all new jobs in Canada are being created by new companies with twenty or fewer employees. About 62 percent of the total work force works for companies with five or fewer employees, and 82 percent for companies with ten or fewer staff. It's not only computers that are getting smaller.
But how many operations have only one or two staff? They may be tomorrow's surprise. Why? Because they may be doing a greater dollar value of business and showing more net profit per person than companies only slightly larger. A surprising number of very small companies have "gone global" -- a possibility never even considered in the past. They are able to do this because we have reached a level of technical competence today that allows us to perform with so few people. This is another reason why large companies have to downsize to survive. Smaller companies will steal away their business.
That this number of solo entrepreneurs could possibly increase or even raise the per-person productivity level seems incomprehensible. But with today's technology and what is already in the pipeline, it appears likely. Government action is the cause of the speeded-up process. This wasn't the way it was planned, but then governments are the last to recognize what I call The Law of Unintended Results: Any law, rule, regulation, or sanction conceived with Industrial Age thinking reverses itself in a Communications Age environment.
Governments, in a move to appease workers in failing old-style factories, try to support such companies financially, even though such companies are no longer viable. In so doing, governments pass such laws as making company officials responsible for separation pay, vacation pay, pension payments, unpaid salaries, and taxes. Governments lay down laws about who shall be unionized. They put into effect a permanent hiring freeze. Net result: they stifle jobs, instead of saving or increasing jobs. But this makes small companies very efficient.
In Germany there is the mid-size equivalent, the Mittelstrand, similar to our small companies in Canada. All these companies have fewer than five hundred employees. The Mittelstrand produce 67 percent of the German Gross National Product (GNP) and 30 percent of the exports. Their portion of German exports totals $421 billion, topping exports by mid-size companies in both the United States ($394 billion) and Japan ($286 billion). The Mittelstrand spend 20 percent annually on research and development and up to $18,000 a year to train each apprentice for four years. Apprentices are selected and hired while still in school.
What is about to happen will be a boon to one-person companies. It is something that until now was just not possible -- to input direct thought into a computer. One person will soon be able to use the mind alone -- along with a bit of technology -- to edit videotape or printed copy.
Those who first latch onto this emerging technique will have unbelievable power, certainly more than a larger operation not aware of how to capitalize on the marriage of mind and technology. Production by such a person will exceed anything known in the past. Decision making will take microseconds and the finished project will take a fraction of the time, cost, and materials formerly required. Profits will be astronomical but the market price will be lower than what would have to be charged to produce the same product with our present system. Such effective one-person operations will have virtually no competition.

After Retirement? Work

Remember when you first got hit with reality? After working hard all your life, you dreamed of the day when your kids would be old enough to get a job, leave the nest, and let you retire in justified leisure. In fact, more than two million retired North Americans are now back on the job. A U.S. News & World Report poll shows that 45 percent of respondents either already are or expect to be working after age sixty-five. That means almost half of that population segment won't be in the leisure class as soon as they originally anticipated. One benefit: working appears to keep you healthy much longer. And many retirees quickly tire of experiencing just another day like Saturday used to be. Six months of doing nothing can be dangerous for many retirees.
In the United States this issue is climbing up the political agenda. Social Security recipients may soon be allowed to retain a much larger portion of benefits while tackling the back-to-work trail. At the moment people in the age bracket sixty-five to sixty-nine have $1 in $3 clawed back when they earn more than $10,200. (It's much, much worse in Canada.) But recent legislation will move the exemption ceiling up to $20,000 by 1997. A pending Senate law would abolish any ceiling.
The elderly aiding the elderly appears to be one of the hotter markets for back-to-workers. World Report says home health aides can expect a 92 percent increase in demand for services by 2005, the largest increase in any field. Retiring health-care workers won't have to miss a day between working/retirement/working again. Some retirees are setting up their own companies in the health-care supply field, finding, screening, training, and placing retirees.
Another hot spot is to fill gaps in corporations that have unexpected employment holes. They would rather hire temporary help at slightly higher wages than have more staff on a permanent payroll that is becoming harder and harder to reduce. Also some companies that downsized in panic are now forced to rehire. They are now taking on two part-timers instead of one full-timer. Such part-timers are easier to find, require fewer benefits, and appear to be more industrious when working for shorter periods. Older part-timers can hack the shorter day, whereas they may be pushing it to go back full-time.
Others in the over-sixty-five age group have started new businesses, such as delivering a two-week supply of frozen packaged meals to those over eighty-five, now the fastest growing segment of the adult population. These older people are still healthy, but constant shopping and preparing food is a bit much. With this service and a microwave they can enjoy proper nutrition with minimum effort. I could use this service myself. One woman in Hudson, Indiana, grossed $55,000 in one month from her six hundred clients.
One of the easiest opportunities, but one that requires an alert mind, is the business of information brokering. Executives require summaries of trade journal and other articles related to their work. They simply don't have time to read everything that is happening. Working retirees skim everything and provide customers with a condensed version. It does require computer literacy to acquire the speed and breadth of information needed. And an in-depth knowledge of the industry you have just left is, of course, a great help.
Is there life after retirement? You bet. It's called work.

The End of Unions

From 1910 until well into the 1930s, labor unions, especially in the United States, grew at record rates. For the first time since the formation of guilds in Europe between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, common workers were able to assemble in massive unions for protection against the practices of huge companies, mainly those in the production-line manufacturing of products or in coal mining. John L. Lewis, the militant and dominant labor boss who was elected president of the United Mine Workers of America in 1920, controlled 300,000 well paid coal workers across America, the majority in the anthracite coal mines of Pennsylvania.
The demands of John L. Lewis for higher wages for his hard-working miners (usually obtained by long, bitter strikes during cold winters when coal was the basic heat source) may have inadvertently ignited the spark that exploded the dormant powder keg of technology, whose force is still spreading in ever-widening circles around the planet.
As a direct result of a series of strikes, coal-mine owners, seeing the eventual failure of their mines due to high labor costs, started what has developed into the research and development movement of today. One of the first big payoffs was the automatic coal miner -- a mechanical monster with whirling horizontal, then vertical, then fully pivoting blades -- that could mine a vein of coal dozens of times faster than pick-and-shovel miners could. In a short time, during the Depression of the 1930s and the universal introduction of the automatic coal miner, the United Mine Workers lost half its members. The price of coal dropped, and mining efficiency and consumption of coal went up, until union strength was no longer a major blockade to production. That also started the end of the glory days of anthracite coal mining. World War II and the rapid search for, and development of, oil fields produced a more easily handled and transported fuel. Coal went out of fashion. With the exception of workers at open-pit mining of the less fuel-efficient bituminous coal, mined with even higher productivity because of technology, the previously dominant mining union faded.
The same pattern is visible in the logging industry today. Technology in the form of the mechanical "tree-farmer" now requires no timber-topper, the highly paid lumberjack who did the dangerous job of topping a tree and then swaying back and forth until the cut portion crashed to the ground. Huge radio-advised bulldozers with blades, mechanical arms, and massive winches and saws now convert trees to logs in minutes.
Today one skilled operator can do the work of several dozen workers, and the transported tree moves automatically through a computer-controlled sawmill at a speed that makes the whole process look like magic. Highly paid computer operators (some from the ranks of early computer "nerds") now chalk up salaries of $100,000 annually. In one modernized plant, I noticed that the crew in the computer operations room were still wearing the traditional blue shirts of their counterparts of yesterday.
That intrigued me. When I looked closer I could see that they were blue, all right, but made of silk. When I investigated further I found that these workers went to an in-house school one day a week to learn how to keep up to the increasing intellectual demands of their new positions. Meanwhile, the head of one west coast woodworkers' union admits that 40 percent of his remaining members are illiterate.
Today technology makes the laws and breaks the laws, civil, moral, and economic. If you keep up with change, the future is ever bright. Stick with the past, the old ways, and things not only look awful and demoralizing, they will be. Similar changes to those in mining and forestry are happening on the factory floor, in department stores, and offices. The labor union as we know it is doomed.

Universal Language

Some years ago researchers found that we can control our mental alpha and beta waves by directing our thoughts. This control was used mainly for meditation and relaxation. We have since learned to use such "thought waves" in conjunction with certain switching devices to control and command computers. For the past ten years I have been using such a "hippie headband" device to turn my computer on or off, run a program, or instruct the printer to print. It may not be much at the moment, but neither is a child at conception.
Here is what I think will shortly be possible. We all have thought waves. The signals are very weak; however, there has been rapid increase in amplification techniques in a dozen fields. For example, a device, reduced by modern technology to the size of a hearing aid, could soon be planted in my ear. It would contain an amplifier modeled after the low noise amplifier now used in almost all satellite dishes. There the amplifier takes the very weak signal received from a communications satellite hovering over the equator at an altitude of 22,300 miles, and it increases the volume and the picture signal perhaps 200,000 times. Now imagine this for the future. You wake up one morning wondering what to do. You remember, "Oh yes, today I was going to run Program 7001," a landscaping program. There is this device in your ear that can amplify the thought wave signal two million times. The hearing unit passes on that amplified thought wave via an infrared signal (similar to what you now use for your TV) to your "smart" bulldozer outside. The bulldozer's memory unit contains Program 7001, so it starts up -- and moves that mountain. Untouched by human hands.
For years people have claimed they can see auras. Russian Kirlian photography showed that every person emits an energy force. These unknowns are to the mindlink era what radio and television waves were to the early industrial world.
Fujitsu, Japan's largest computer company, now has a "universal translator," which translates Japanese into English and vice versa at a thousand words a minute. A video I play at many seminars shows a Kenyan speaking Swahili from Japan via satellite to a Canadian Inuit in the Northwest Territories who replies in Inuktitut.
Using the translation program, the people speaking different languages can understand one another. Since the dialogue has been digitized it can also be voice-synthesized. Think of the implications for international business. What will it do to translators in a bilingual country such as Canada, or at the United Nations? What will it do to school boards and countries that have scheduled billions of dollars for language training? Will anyone want to learn another language when there is no longer any financial incentive to do so?