What is the atom of labor?
My colleague, Betsy Masiello, already postedthis weekend on the future of work. I concur with her reading recommendation.
In addition I just finished Jim Clifton’s The Coming Jobs War. It is a thought-provoking book about what people want and what is needed, for the US, to beat the prediction that in 30 years China will have the largest GDP in the world. Clifton argues that what everyone wants, across the globe, is “a good job”.
A war for good jobs where none are to be had?
He defines this later as a formal job with a good company, that employs you 30 hours a week at least and pays the bills. But also as a job that makes you feel engaged and valued. A very reasonable ask in a sense. But there is something that worries me about the framing here.
I think Clifton essentially has hit on one of the biggest challenges in the next 30 years. But it is not the challenge he believes we face. It is not the challenge of creating, as he says, 1.8 billion jobs. Or 10 million in the US. It is the challenge of explaining why the concept of a job is changing.
My generation has been very lucky, and I myself am very fortunate in having a “good job” as defined by Clifton. “Good jobs” represent the top accomplishment of the industrial economy, and the company such as we know it the undisputed engine of that ecopnomy. But what if that is changing over the coming 30 years?
After all, the notion of what a job was in agricultural society was radically different than that we now have. Why would jobs stay the same as our society changes production patterns and economic foundations shift?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe in jobless growth. The amount of work is not decreasing, but the chunks of work are getting smaller, shifting. In itself this is hardly surprising, nor a new insight. Part of Adam Smith’s genius was to see that division of labor is the key accomplishment of technology, and that we are dividing work more and more over time
From the 70s to now we have thought of this as specialization. We have lamented the heavy specialization of the economy, since it makes it brittle and difficult to retrain. But specialization is only vertical division of labor. We still end up with chunks of work that lend themselves to “real jobs”. What if technology’s next move is to horizontally divide labor, so that we have even smaller chunks of work to go around?
Some can be outsourced, some not, but the chunks get smaller. The possible development here is that as division of labor continues the resulting chunks are not equal to what Clifton envisions would fill a “good job”.
A “good job” is not the atom of division of labor produced by the on-going technological revolution.
What is the smallest chunk of work we can imagine? A processor cycle? What is the atom of labor? We don’t know. And whether the universe of work will still be divided as to allow for a jobs structure that we have now taught everyone to desire seems to be an open question as well.
Clifton’s book becomes a brilliant example of how important real jobs have become to our civilization, at perhaps the moment where they will no longer be a meaningful way to organize the market for work.
Don’t get me wrong. I am still an extreme optimist when it comes to the future (and some will rightly laugh at that and say that it is because I have a very good job indeed), but I believe that whatever the future market for work looks like, the bundle offered as a “good job” will become more scarce. And acquiring the skills to act in that new market will take time for everyone.

