Has anybody thought of jobs?

Let's be frank. There is something terrifying about the fact that the president of the United States and the speaker of the House of Representatives rely on popular, best-selling socioeconomic gurus for guidance. None of these gurus seems to have much formal training for the subjects on which they expatiate. But they and the leaders who seek their guidance seem to have unlimited faith in technological change as the key to the complexities of the future.

It is dismaying to hear the president describe himself as the first post-cold war president, the president elected to effect change at the end of the no-longer-relevant Roosevelt era, and to hear him discuss change in terms of class--distancing himself from fellow-citizens no matter how compassionately, by referring to them as "the underclass," talking about "expanding the middle class," etc.

It is more than dismaying to hear the speaker of the House hailing himself as a revolutionary and labeling all those who differ with him as the enemy. He welcomes "the information age" which we have supposedly entered, as the means of down-sizing government and eliminating centralized authority, and he sees little place for anyone not able to cope with the new technology. If, in fact, the governments and the organizations that currently help us form community are on their way out, one of the first fruits of the change seems to be--if the speaker is the exemplar--incivility as the norm of discourse. A return to every man for himself.

Certainly we are facing change. Certainly it is important to define that change and to prepare ourselves to deal with it. But can we not hope that our leaders would rely for guidance on more serious educators than the Gilders and Tofflers who inspire Speaker Gingrich, and the so-called motivational experts--Marianne Williamson, Anthony Robbins, and Steven R. Covey--who were called to Camp David by the president?

Even casual observers can see that the effect of the information age is not so much to inform government officials of the needs of their constituencies as to make them subject to pressure from group after group conveyed by fax, E-mail, what-have-you. As columnist David Broder says, electronic democracy is "not all that new; it's a new chapter in an old struggle."

But change there has been, and we must understand it. According to the international businessman's guru, Peter Drucker, who has somewhat better credentials as a social scientist than the president's and the speaker's favorites, our century has indeed been an age of social transformation (Atlantic Monthly, November 1994). These transformations have altered not only the society "but the economy, the community, and the polity we live in." And they have been brought about without violence or even much public awareness.

Drucker points out that at the beginning of this century the two largest single groups in developed countries were farmers and house servants. Today, he writes, "productive farmers make up ... no more than 2 percent of the work force," and they are associated more with agribusiness than with traditional farming. Drucker hazards that by 2000 traditional farmers will be "little but objects of nostalgia," and domestic servants not even that.

Between the beginning of the century and now we have had the rise and the fall of the blue-collar worker. Drucker writes:

The workers of 1900--and even of

1913--received no pensions, no

paid vacation, no overtime pay, no

extra pay for Sunday or night work,

no health or old-age insurance (except

in Germany), no unemployment

compensation; they had no job security

whatever.

Fifty years later, in the 1950s, industrial

workers had become the

largest single group in every developed

country, and unionized industrial

workers in mass-production

industry ... had attained upper middle-class

income levels. They had

political power....Thirty-five years

later, in 1990, industrial workers and

their unions were in retreat.

Industrial workers have been replaced by "knowledge" workers, a term coined by Drucker in 1959 in his insightful book, Landmarks of Tomorrow. Despite all the optimistic talk of retraining, industrial workers are not able to move into the world of knowledge workers in the way that farmers and servants were able to move into industrial work. For one thing, knowledge work, even at the simplest level,requires a good deal more formal education than can easily be acquired by an unemployed industrial worker.

Moreover, in this globalized society, despite the vaunted drop in unemployment figures (where do they get them?), jobs are disappearing. In the global economy all the factors of business production cross borders--capital, investment, plants, management-all except labor, the people who need the jobs.

Richard Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies wrote in the September 1993 Harper's, "The global job crisis is so profound and its interrelated causes are so little understood that the best of the currently fashionable strategies for creating jobs just nibble at the problem; others are likely to make it worse."

Consider only a few of the facts marshaled by Barnet. Between 1979 and 1992, Fortune 500 companies let go 4.4 million of their employees (italics mine)--the equivalent of 340,000 a year. Not only workers suffer; the unemployment rate for managers rose 55 percent in 1991 as the result of "down-sizing." Human-displacing automation is progressing at a rapid pace, in automobile, electronics, and printing plants, for example. The billions of unemployed worldwide will soon overwhelm us.

If jobs are disappearing, still the real work the world needs done increases. We have to revise our whole view of what work is necessary or valuable. According to Barnet, "There is a colossal amount of work waiting to be done by human beings--building decent places to live, exploring the universe, making cities less dangerous, teaching one another, raising our children, visiting, comforting, healing, feeding one another ... inventing things, and governing ourselves." To save ourselves and the world we must rethink work. For that we need more than the help of second-class gurus enamored of technology.