Employment

Most of the time, we’re looking at figures for the title of this blog post with the added “un-” in front of it. Again, in keeping with my aim towards a world at 100%, I’m turning this number around to reflect a more positive stance towards getting to that 100%. (I’m using figures for unemployment again from the World Bank, and yes, I know, this is probably not the best way to get anything approaching accurate but until I figure something better out, this will have to suffice! As always, if you have an idea on how to do this, I would love to know.)

One commonality of the current worldwide economic turmoil of protests from the U.S. Occupy Wall Street to the streets of London, Cairo, even near Beijing, is dissatisfaction with working conditions, wages and/or availability of jobs. We seem to have a “Workers Revolution” on our hands despite the fact that Communism and Marxism pretty much went out of fashion in 1990.

A lot of this is actually not a protest about either jobs or unemployment, but really a massive popular outcry against corruption, both on a government and corporate level.

I do believe that we are making some headway against corruption worldwide, but I am also concerned that, with all the focus on whatever the quick fix of the moment for our economic and political problems is, we are missing something rather important.

That’s the simple fact that the world is changing in ways we can scarcely comprehend, and that the same old-same old economic modeling we have been cruising along with, will just not work.

The biggest problem we face is not that we don’t have jobs, it’s that we don’t have careers. Jobs can be performed by robots and more and more frequently, are. When people complain about how all the manufacturing jobs are going overseas, I am always baffled that they think we can “get them back” somehow. Those outsourced jobs are eventually — and I’m talking 10 – 20 years — going to be gone forever. You do not need to pay for health insurance for robots.

What we need to do as a world is re-tool for the next-gen evolution of work. Some countries are doing extraordinarily well at this, others not so much. In the end-up, though, I do believe that humans are remarkably adaptable and we will adjust to this new way of being. This is truly an exciting time — education will become more of a necessity than ever for moving ahead; people may work fewer hours and from home, but they will be doing more creative and mentally stimulating work; and with increased connectivity, we will be innovating and problem solving with new technologies that we can’t even imagine.

Thanks for stopping by,

Heather McC

PS. I haven’t updated my numbers recently but this story showed up today on Afghanistan and a wonderful improvement in their maternal and infant mortality numbers. They’ve been on the bottom of the Wikipedia page on infant mortality so this just made my heart sing. (I also have a special place in my heart for this country but I won’t go into that now.) So updating the numbers with that special addition, we’re at: 58.6083241657513 (Up .010020000006 from my last update.)

PPS. Transparency International just updated their corruption index numbers for the year so I’m looking forward to updating those numbers soon too and keeping my fingers crossed that they’ve gotten better! (The TI numbers are the ones I use for my “Good Governance” indicator.) India apparently has not, though, according to this article. Although that’s not exactly a good thing, it does make me wonder if, with the recent drive on corruption, more people are aware of the problem, so the TI numbers may not mean actual corruption has increased just that people are more fed up with it. And that would be a great step in the right direction.