Why talk about work? My take.

As we start the second series of Penny U conversations, I’m prompted to pause, take a deep breath, and ask myself why I wanted conversations about work. Everyone starts where they are, and my interest in learning more about work definitely began with my own experience.

For one thing, I wanted to step beyond seeing the “trees” of my work and livelihood and try to understand the “forest” of how my work compares with a societal sense of what work looks like. I want to understand how the way we get a living is changing and why it so often seems like such a struggle.

I could do this by reading, going to lectures, or talking with people who study these things. And I do. But I also want to learn from others about their real-life experiences. I want to hear how you see your work, whether the nature of it is changing, and how you see it fitting into a larger world. And I want to discover new ways of thinking about work and jobs and the economy that could be useful both to me and to others.

Work beyond jobs

When I say “work,” I’m not simply meaning work for pay, important as that is. I mean it more broadly than that. Perhaps my view comes from my early days as an artist when the artists around me made a distinction between “jobs” that paid the bills and their “real work,” that is, their painting or poetry or music. Their work was what they were driven to do, whether it paid or not. Of course everyone wanted to reach a point where the work also put food on the table, but we knew that didn’t happen often. Some time later I realized that many kinds of work – very real and sometimes very hard work – also didn’t pay, or at least didn’t pay well.

Over the decades, I’ve wondered why so much important work is not well paid in our economic and political world, not only artists’ and poets’ work, but the work of caring for young children and aging parents, of coming together to solve community problems or to celebrate, of protecting our common resources, of independent research, philosophy, and invention. Why, when there’s so much work to do, are there so few jobs that pay to do it?

“The end of jobs as we know them”

As soon as I started carrying ideas about work around in my head, the topic seemed to be everywhere.

“The entire concept of  ‘work’ will undergo a significant shift in the next decade,” according to an August 2014 PewResearch study of the impact of technology on the future of jobs. Carl Camden, CEO of Kelly Services, wrote last year, “Some 43% of working Americans don’t have a ‘job’ – they have work and they’re employed, but they don’t work as a traditional ‘employee’.…The way we think about work, and in particular how we define a job, is changing – and it’s changing fast!… Job security is an oxymoron.”

Andy Stern, former president of the SEIU, now at the Columbia Business School, is part of an initiative with the Open Society Foundations that is exploring the Future of Work. In 20-30 years, he says, we’re apt to see “the end of jobs as we know them.” Among other things, we need to “align our economy toward work that is needed and valuable to society, like child care and reducing our carbon footprint.” Paul Mason, economics editor at the UK’s Channel 4 News, also recently said an alternative to our current economic system is needed, “because populations armed with smartphones and an increased sense of their human rights will not accept a future of high inequality and low growth.” 

And certainly in today’s world the dramatic and increasing inequality between the highest and lowest earners and wealth holders is affecting, or will affect, all our lives. A new report from Oxfam [Oxfam news] finds that the combined wealth of the richest 1 percent of the world's population will be greater than that of the other 99 percent by 2016 – that’s just next year!

All in all, there’s much to learn and lots to talk about!