Disrupting Unemployment

The sinister notion that machines will someday kill all jobs has been around for at least 200 years. Yes, machines can replace people at work or change the work that is needed, and they always have. At the same time, the labor force participation in the world has remained quite stable for many generations, and on the whole, the middle class has been growing worldwide. Innovation can both kill and create work. i4j-Innovation for Jobs-is a leadership forum discussing how to disrupt unemployment and eradicate joblessness. All people can create value-but for that to happen, we need to develop a people-centered, rather than a task-centered, economy. Today, we are very far from that. According to Gallup, of the five billion people on this planet aged fifteen or older, three billion work in some way. Most of them want full-time jobs, but only 1.3 billion have them. Of these, only 13 percent are fully engaged in their work, giving and receiving its full value. This terrible waste of human capacity and mismanagement of people's desire to create value for each other is more than just very bad business. It is an insult to ourselves and to all human beings. We believe there are ways to move beyond the habit of rejecting and mistreating ourselves in this way. The good news is that this is an epic opportunity for entrepreneurs. Soon, virtually everyone will have a smartphone, allowing innovations for the first time to compete for the value-creating capacity of people everywhere, around the clock. We can begin to focus on raising the value of people, rather than only lowering the cost of tasks. All people can be offered jobs that are tailored to match their unique sets of skills, talents, and passions with the most valuable opportunities. People need jobs to raise families. Gigs are too unpredictable. Innovators can find new ways of satisfying the need for jobs-it does not have to be employment.i4j visions: Toward an Innovation-for-Jobs Economy by Vint Cerf and David NordforsChapter 1: The Bifurcation is Near by Philip AuerswaldChapter 2: The First Software Age: Programmable Enterprises Creating New Types of Jobs by Robert B. CohenChapter 3: Mobilizing Ecosystems to Drive Innovation for Jobs by John HagelChapter 4: Innovation Dynamics: Analytics Based on Big Data and Network Graph Science- Implications for Innovation for Jobs (i4j) Initiatives by Daniel L. Harple, Jr.Chapter 5: Accelerating Toward a Jobless Future: The Rise of the Machine and the Human Quest for Meaningful Work by Steve Jurvetson and Mohammad IslamChapter 6: How to Disrupt Unemployment Policy? by Sven Otto LittorinChapter 7: Developing Middle Class Jobs in a Digital Economy by Geoffrey MooreChapter 8: The Supercritical Human Elevated [SHE] Economy by Monique MorrowChapter 9: Innovation for Jobs with Cognitive Assistants: A Service Science Perspective by Jim SpohrerChapter 10: Creative Learning and the Future of Work by J. Philipp Schmidt, Mitchel Resnick, and Joi ItoChapter 11: Can the Health Industry Cure the Ailing Job Market? by Joon YunChapter 12: Creative Learning by Esther Wojcicki

"This book presents i4j visions for an Innovation-for-Jobs economy, based on ideas from the i4j Leadership Forum and its founders. It is accompanied by chapters by selected i4j Leadership Forum participants."--Page 4 of cover.

The last decade has witnessed a conspicuous alteration in policies protecting unemployed people in modern welfare states. Social policies are increasingly designed to encourage economic independence. Policy makers have introduced a wide range of reforms linking disability, unemployment, and welfare programs cash benefits to work-oriented measures.Welfare policies are being framed by a new emphasis on recipients' obligations, emphasizing that the receipt of benefits creates a responsibility to take action towards becoming self-reliant. The objective is to minimize the duration of dependence or improve the well-being of family or community. Activating the Unemployed addresses this growing interest in work-oriented measures. This represents a shift in the dominant discourse on social welfare from focus on the citizen's rights to social benefits to emphasis on their responsibilities to work and lead an active life. In this volume, a distinguished array of international contributors provide cross-cultural perspectives to analyze recent diverse policy initiatives to activate the unemployed in nine countries-Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. Each provides a systematic account of the background, design, implementation, and results of employment-oriented measures. Collectively they permit comparison of organized responses to common problems in the areas of public assistance (welfare), unemployment, and disability, among others. Further chapters seek to broaden perspectives on policy options, the issues raised, and lessons learned in the course of activating the unemployed. This thorough and insightful account addresses significant contemporary issues and concerns about welfare, social security, and unemployment. It will aid policy makers, professionals, and scholars in assessing current trends in welfare in various countries throughout the world.

There is a specter haunting advanced industrial countries: structural unemployment. Recent years have seen growing concern over declining jobs, and though corporate profits have picked up after the Great Recession of 2008, jobs have not. It is possible that “jobless recoveries” could become a permanent feature of Western economies. This illuminating book focuses on the employment futures of advanced industrial countries, providing readers with the sociological imagination to appreciate the bigger picture of where workers fit in the new international division of labor. The authors piece together a puzzle that reveals deep structural forces underlying unemployment: skills mismatches caused by a shift from manufacturing to service jobs; increased offshoring in search of lower wages; the rise of advanced communication and automated technologies; and the growing financialization of the global economy that aggravates all of these factors. Weaving together varied literatures and data, the authors also consider what actions and policy initiatives societies might take to alleviate these threats. Addressing a problem that should be front and center for political economists and policymakers, this book will be illuminating reading for students of the sociology of work, labor studies, inequality, and economic sociology.

This book examines the topic around the issues of the global problem of unemployment, the victims of unemployment, the causes of unemployment, and the solutions to unemployment. Primary sources, including speeches and government documents, join essays from international magazines and news sources for a truly panoramic view. Helpful features include an annotated table of contents, a world map and country index, a bibliography, and a subject index.

Drawing on the emerging field of narrative theory in sociology and psychology, this book argues that an individual’s response to job loss is a product of the shape of the story a person tells about their experience. This, in turn, is a product of both individual creativity and the structuring effects of their social location. Based on a qualitative study of the experience of unemployment in Australia, three main types of job loss narratives are identified. First, romantic narratives describe job loss as a positive experience of liberation from an oppressive job, leading to a gradually improving future. Second, tragic narratives describe job loss as undermining a person’s life plan, leading to a phase of depression, anxiety and self-deprecation. Finally, job loss narratives may be complicated by marital breakdown or serious illness. The book breaks new ground in its use of narrative theory to account for the variations in responses to unemployment.

This book tackles the issue of involuntary employment, examining the issue in the light of Keynesian and Post-Keynesian theory.

About the Book This book does not take a neutral stand on the issue of mass unemployment. It is an effort to expose capitalism's most outrageous feature - its compulsive need to use unemployment and the fear of unemployment to ensure the docility and subservience of its workers. Under the capitalist system, the stick of the fear of unemployment is necessary to keep workers' noses to the grindstone and make them perform to the satisfaction of their employers. The stick is needed because much work is boring, the carrot paid is less than a living wage, provides workers very little or no control over the work process, and stifles creativity - in short because the total carrot offered to numerous workers is so woefully inadequate. Under a different system, one in which working people participated fully in the decisions affecting what, how and for what purpose goods and services were produced; if we had a system based on economic democracy, there would be no need to use the stick of the fear of unemployment. The creativity of most of the millions of working people, now mostly dormant, would be awakened and the volume and quality of improvements and inventions especially in housing, energy, transit systems and health care would be so great as to tower high above and completely overshadow the number and purpose of the innovations created under the present system. The issue of unemployment is shrouded in half-truths and outright lies. As a result, there is almost total ignorance about the real causes of unemployment and worse still, about its very serious consequences. Many claim that there are enough jobs but that the unemployed are lazy and would rather be on welfare. While this may be true of a very small fraction of the unemployed, it is not true of the overwhelming majority. There have been numerous instances in which whenever advertisements calling for applicants for relatively well-paid jobs or for jobs that paid better than the minimum wage, the number of applicants that applied for those jobs were ten or more times greater than the number of jobs that were advertised. In September 26th of 1984, to mention just one instance, the Associated Press News Agency reported that "50,000 people lined up for 350 jobs." The report went on to say that "the applicants, some of whom waited in line for two days, hope to land a longshoreman's job paying $15.45 an hour or a marine clerk's job earning $17.45 an hour... However the fact that only 350 jobs are currently available didn't dismay the crowd, which queued up in a line in the San Pedro district [of Los Angeles] that stretched for 13 mile..." Clearly, the majority would rather have gainful employment at a living wage and live a life of dignity and integrity. Furthermore apart from the simple need to earn a living, productive employment is an indispensable part of the psychological makeup of human beings. Simply put, people want to feel useful. Prolonged joblessness is a serious threat to a person's self-esteem and destroying that self-esteem has appalling consequences. The ugly truth is that the system under which we live will not or cannot provide jobs for those who need them. The business class is simply not interested in full employment because mass unemployment provides them with many benefits. Among those benefits: a large pool of unemployed workers drives down the wages employers have to pay.