By Jason Worth
(Note: If not specified otherwise, any quotations in this book review refer to text by the author from the book being reviewed.)
The Precariat: The Dangerous New Class is a sociological study of a large and emerging class of downtrodden and exploited laborers worldwide. It is written by Guy Standing, a professor at the University of London.
The Precariat takes its name from the merging of the words Precarious and Proletariat. I think it is beautiful word in its ability to convey a number of complex concepts so succinctly. Anyone who has read Marxist literature probably recalls that in the Marxist view of the Capitalist system, the Proletariat was an exploited working class toiling away in depressing and dirty factories for low wages. Although their life was difficult, they managed. In part, they managed because industrialization had not yet led to computerized automation, so their labor input was still very much needed by their capitalist employers. As depressing as their factory work may have been, it at least provided a reliable income upon which to live, even if it didn’t lead to excess for savings, vacations or luxuries. And, the Proletariat of the Industrial era still lived in a more communal-oriented society, and could therefore fall back on certain protections that style of life afforded. Wives were generally more available to look after their young children, grown children looked after and provided for their elders, and neighbors or communities came to the aid of families who had fallen on hard times and needed assistance beyond their family unit.
But take that scenario of the toiling poor and fast forward a few generations. Things are much different now. Life for the working poor is more precarious. Job security, and hence income stability, are non-existent. Today, the working poor drift from job opportunity to job opportunity, not because they are unable to hold a single job for long periods of time, but because the economies around them have evolved to the point at which labor is a commodity to be called up and deployed as needed, and furloughed or terminated when no longer convenient for the employer. They also may not be able to hold onto the job because migrant workers, either legal or more commonly illegal, are willing to step into their position for less pay. And globalization has made it very convenient for employers to terminate jobs in the pursuit of profits, as entire factories and office functions can now be shipped to lower cost countries such as Mexico, India and China. These were developments with which the Proletariat largely did not have to contend.
But it is not simply the prospect of a job going oversees that threatens the job security or income stability of a worker. Jobs are at threat domestically to lower-cost regions, to computerized automation, or simply because the employer decides to implement new labor processes that favor part-time or sub-contracted input in place of previously full-time positions. And the implementation of Obamacare gave a major impetus to the latter, since part-time workers clocking in less than 30 hours per week are not required to be offered increasingly expensive healthcare or other benefits which are mandated for full-time workers.
Let me step back for a moment and put the Precariat into a broader perspective. According to Standing, at the top of our economic pyramid you have the Elites. They are “a tiny number of absurdly rich global citizens lording it over the universe.” Below that is the ‘Salariat’, who, by virtue of working in full-time, stable employment, “enjoy the trappings of their kind, with their pensions, paid holidays and other enterprise benefits, often subsidized by the state.” The Salariat is comprised not only of well-paid workers in large corporations, as you would expect, but also workers in government agencies, public administration and civil service. Alongside the Salariat are ‘Proficians,’ a smaller group of highly-skilled individuals possessing either professional or technical skills which enable them to be highly mobile and well compensated, often working for themselves as independent contractors or consultants. “Below the Proficians, in terms of income, is a shrinking ‘Core’ or manual employees, the essence of the old ‘working class’.” It was with this ‘Core’ group of manual laborers in mind that the welfare state was put into place, where they would pay into a Social Security or unemployment benefits fund with their stable income and expect to receive it later, when needed. “Underneath those four groups, there is the growing ‘Precariat’, flanked by an army of unemployed and detached group of socially ill misfits living off the dregs of society.”
So, to be clear, someone who moves around a lot or works from home is not, by definition, a member of the Precariat. A radiologist getting paid to review x-rays from his home office is a Profician, as would I assume a generalist doctor, dentist or veterinarian who could set up a small clinic just about anywhere they moved. Likewise, a skilled blue collar worker fortunate enough to have a full-time income, perhaps even with labor union representation, would likely fall into that ‘Core’ category just above the Precariat. But all too often, that ‘Core’ group is diminishing and those workers increasingly sliding downward into the Precariat, which has been steadily growing in recent decades.
If you were to attempt to isolate the point in history at which the Precariat class emerged from the Proletariat, it might best be marked at the time in which Neoliberalism reemerged as an economic theory in the 20th Century, and was put into practice in the 1970s and 1980s, by scholars such as Milton Friedman and dictators like Augusto Pinot. The underlying tenets of Neoliberalism are, according to Wikipedia, “privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending.” And, as we saw in Martin Ford’s book Rise of the Robots, it was in the early 1970s that nearly all of the increases from productivity improvements were directed to “capital” (i.e. the business owners) rather than to “labor” (i.e. the workers.) (For a much more in-depth review of Neoliberalism and its impact on the working class in Chile and Argentina, where it was first deployed on a large scale, I highly recommend Naomi Klein’s excellent book The Shock Doctrine.)
“The pursuit of flexible labor relations has been the major direct cause of the growth of the global Precariat.” Making it easier to fire workers has been advocated for three decades as a way of boosting jobs, since, it is argued, corporations will be more inclined to hire workers if it is less costly to be rid of them. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank have joined this bandwagon, saying that “weak employment security… [is] necessary to attract and retain foreign capital.” So, we have seen a trend by corporations to increasingly hire part-time and contracted labor, over full-time employees. And, during economic downturns like the Great Recession of 2007-2009, corporations take the opportunity to rid themselves of full-time employees only to rehire part-time employees or contractors once business picks up again.
Corporations are also using growing ranks of part-time workers to extract concessions from their full-time workers, who are warned they will be displaced if they don’t adapt. One example Standing gives of this is housekeepers working for Hyatt Hotels in the United States. The labor contract for full-time housekeepers stipulated that they work eight-hour days and regular routines. They found themselves working side by side with agency temp laborers Hyatt brought in that were working 12-hour work days and had quotas imposed on how many rooms they were supposed to clean per shift (which was higher than the full-time housekeepers.) The message to Hyatt’s full-time workers was keep pace or you’ll be replaced.
Walmart was also cited as an example in Standing’s book. The vast majority of Walmart’s employees are part-time in nature, so it doesn’t need to replace full-time employees with temporary ones, as so many other companies are currently doing. Instead, Walmart is requiring scheduling flexibility among its part-time workers not unlike the just-in-time delivery requirements it imposes on its product suppliers. Standing referred to this as “extreme labor flexibility” and cites it as one of the reasons Walmart’s processes have made it “one of the most detested models in the world.”
These are not problems faced solely by American workers. It is a global phenomenon affecting workers in every country, either because U.S. multinational firms of the Neoliberal persuasion exported the labor practices and economic philosophy there, or because indigenous firms emulated some of these policies simply to remain competitive. Japan represents a good example. Japan is the world’s third largest economy, and the uniquely strong and long-term relationship its companies had with their workers was legendary. Until the 1980s, it was common for a worker to work his entire life with one Japanese employer. These workers were called “salarymen,” and they enjoyed significant income stability. “But since the early 1980s, the share of the Japanese labor force in the Salariat has shrunk dramatically.” They are being replaced by younger workers and women who have no employment security. Youths are no longer hired into lifetime positions, like those the salarymen used to have. And since it is considered a loss of face for a salaryman to leave his employer, those remaining salarymen hanging on to their positions are doing so under great pressure, often overworking and sacrificing in a way that makes their position more akin to that of the stressed out Precariat than stably employed Salariat. And an alarming rise in suicides and social illnesses among the salarymen show that their stable paychecks are coming at a high price. Work-related suicides have increased in other countries, too, notably France, across Scandinavia and the United States. More than a dozen workers at the Chinese factory, Foxconn, jumped to their deaths from the factory’s roof in 2009 and 2010 in the face of inhumane working conditions.
The shift to temporary labor by corporations has resulted in the explosive growth of temporary labor agencies. Switzerland-based Adecco employs 700,000 people, making it one of the world’s largest private employers. “Pasona, a Japanese staffing agency set up in the 1970s, sends out a quarter of a million workers every day on short-term contracts.” And which firm is ultimately is responsible in the event a worker is misused or harmed in these situations also adds to the precarious nature of temporary employment. Is it the end-user firm that hired the temp agency and directly benefits from that person’s work, or the temp agency that by law hired the employee and pays his or her salary? The precariat employee knows that he reports to two masters in these situations, and that only adds to his or her job complexity and stress.
We live in a society that encourages material accumulation and pushes credit card loans and home equity lines of credit. It is very likely that many American workers forestalled their own ‘precariatization’ through ballooning personal debt, enabling them to live beyond their means throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. But the Great Recession of 2007-2009 hit the reset button for a great many, and in doing so probably pushed a new layer of workers into the Precariat.
There is no demographic group (other than the insanely rich) that is immune to falling into the precariat. These include women, men, the elderly (who should be enjoying their retirement years, but aren’t), the young (who, like all youth before them, should find an apprenticeship or a toehold somewhere on a corporate ladder, but increasingly are not able to do so), and migrant workers entering countries legally and illegally in search of a better opportunity. Because there are a finite number of jobs available, all of these groups are effectively in competition with one another. The youth, by and large, appear to be paying a heavy price for a variety of reasons. This doesn’t bode well for the future, as our leaders of tomorrow are not gaining the skills and experiences they need today, and, in fact, may be receiving distorted and perverse messages about how economies should work and who should be responsible for paying for certain social obligations. Let me attempt to briefly summarize what Standing had to say about each of these groups:
Men: Our society has historically been a male-dominated one, whereby men were expected to earn a “family wage” sufficient to provide for a nuclear family consisting of bread-winner, wife and one to three children. This is no longer the case and hasn’t been for some time. As women entered the work force in large numbers beginning in World War II to support the war effort, and increasingly throughout the remainder of that century, the traditional model is now antiquated. Family wages have given way to individual wages, and labor law now makes it illegal for an employer to systematically pay men more than women. Some sociologists refer to the workplace as having become “feminized,” “in a double sense of more women being in jobs and more jobs being of the flexible type typically taken by women.” The increasing percentage of jobs in the service sector, where manual strength is not a factor, and the commodification of jobs, whereby long-term apprenticeship training are no longer necessary, all serve to strip away advantages that men historically held in the workplace.
“The Great Recession has been dubbed a ‘mancession.’ Men have borne the vast majority of job losses, as the core (industrial working class) jobs have disappeared. In the United States, the proportion of men in jobs fell to below 70 per cent in 2009, the lowest since records began in 1948. By 2010, one in five American men aged between 25 and 55 was unemployed. In the European Union, three-quarters of the jobs generated since 2000 have been taken by women.”
Women: Having been a late entrant into the labor world, women have often been more willing to take lower paying jobs than men. This made them attractive to employers wanting to get the same labor output for less wages. And, fearful that they might become pregnant and stop working, women were more frequently offered and accepted jobs that were either part-time or of short-duration in nature. Given the propensity for employers in recent decades to shift to more flexible labor conditions whereby more part-time or short-term jobs are being offered, women have been available and willing to take up those positions.
But being a member of the Precariat isn’t simply about accepting part-time or short-term jobs. There is an element of precariousness that goes along with these jobs, and discussing the plight of the female Precariat will help to convey this. Precariousness comes from instability and instability comes in many forms. It can, obviously, come from having your income stream terminated on short notice, because your employer no longer wishes to employ your services or has found someone or somewhere willing to do it for less. But instability can also come from other life situations, such as an illness or casualty for which you don’t have adequate savings. Precariousness can also come from the instability of not being able to meeting all of life’s other pressures, for which you’d have more time if you didn’t have to toil in a dead-end, low paying job. This is where women come in, especially.
Standing talks in the book about the “triple burden” placed on women. The same woman who in decades past looked her young children, is often the same woman who provided care within the family structure for elderly parents. While the men were off at work, the woman tended to home, and this included cooking the meals, doing the wash, doing the cleaning, and tending to the children and elderly. Layer on top of these heavy chores the need to go out into the work world and bring in a second (or sole) salary now needed by many families to make ends meet, and you can appreciate all the pressures and stresses placed on working women. They may be simultaneously torn between a sick child that they feel obliged to stay home with and recognition that their job or promotion is on the line if they are late to an important meeting or miss one more day of work to be with their child. The precariousness of the Precariat is just as much about keeping all the balls in the air and meeting all other obligations as it is simply about showing up on time and doing the low-paying job. It is no wonder that women, far more commonly than men, will focus on a job’s ability to provide an appropriate work-life balance, since they typically have much more to balance than men.
One more thing regarding women, and this is very distressing: “Ironically, women’s increased ‘public’ involvement in the economy has been accompanied by a rising fear of failure due to multiple forms of precariousness. This has gone under a chilling name – ‘bag lady syndrome’ – a fear of being out in the streets due to job failure. In 2006, a life insurance survey found that 90 per cent of American women felt financially insecure and nearly half said they had ‘tremendous fear of becoming a bag lady.’ This was even more prevalent among women earning over US$100,000 a year. ‘The inner bag lady, wrinkle-faced and unkempt, is no joke. She’s the worst-case-scenario-failure.’ This was taking place in the world’s leading economy. And it has grown worse since the crash.”
Elderly: The presence of the elderly within the Precariat is interesting on a number of fronts. It used to be that the elderly could expect to retire in some level of comfort after years of savings, and rely on the income from the Social Security safety net as well. But lack of meaningful standard of living increases in social security payments, combined with real and shadow inflation, have resulted in social security not being sufficient for a great number of retirees. And even those who had saved diligently during their lives may have seen their nest eggs wiped out in one of many stock market crashes and financial swindles. So, economic necessity is driving a meaningful percentage of those in their golden years back into the workforce. In addition, since people are generally living longer, there are many elderly that still feel younger than their years and wish to remain in the workforce, to stay active and social. Because of their other life savings or retirement income, they may not need a particularly large paycheck to supplement what they already have coming in, which enables them to enter the world of the Precariat somewhat by choice rather than necessity. Working for minimum wage, and part-time, might be just fine for them, whereas it would drive others needing to support a family to despair.
Some employers are quite happy to employ the elderly in these situations. They realize they’re often getting far more experience and wisdom from these older employees, for perhaps the same or even lower wages, than they would from other workers. And, many of the jobs these elders are taking are ones that might otherwise have been suitable for younger and less experienced workers trying to find their toehold in the working world, which brings us to our next demographic.
Youth: The youth, which currently number more than 1 billion worldwide between the ages of 15 and 25, have found the job world particularly unwelcoming in recent years. “Youths have always entered the labor force in precarious positions, expecting to have to prove themselves and learn. But today’s youth are not offered a reasonable bargain.” This is especially true when considering that there is increasing competition for the jobs available from older and more experienced workers, and that by virtue of their inexperience, the youth are typically unable to bring anything comparable to the position that their older competitors can. This is leading to increasing numbers of youth remaining at home with their parents in their 20s and 30s. Without prospects for a stable income, youth are delaying marriage and getting married at older ages, if at all. None of this can be good for societies already struggling with low birth rates and which need increasing numbers of citizens to keep their economies growing. (It is probably for this reason that Elites like George Soros petition for open borders and may be covertly funding efforts to ensure mass migrations into Europe and the United States from places like Northern Africa, the Middle East and Central America. … But I digress.)
Standing talks at some length about the commodification of education which not only is failing the youth of today, but also driving them to resentment and anger. Expensive college degrees are being sold to enterprising youth as an investment in their future and a way to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive job market. But too often those youth rack up enormously expensive student debt loads to find their job prospects unfulfilled. “To give one example, 40 per cent of Spanish university students a year after graduating find themselves in low-skilled jobs that do not require their qualifications.” In China, since 2006, “more than a million graduates each year have become unemployed after leaving university.”
In an effort to gain “useful experience intended to provide, directly or indirectly, a potential gateway to a regular job,” youths are pursuing unpaid or very low-paying internships with companies. These positions are highly sought after, in some countries even being auctioned, and serve as yet another means for companies to exploit workers. “Internships are a threat to youth in and around the Precariat. Even if a payment is made, the interns are doing cheap dead-end labor, exerting downward pressure on the wages and opportunities of others who might otherwise be employed. An internship might give positional advantage to a few young people, but it is more like buying a lottery ticket, in this case involving a private subsidy, usually paid for by the intern’s family.”
Migrants: “Migrants make up a large share of the world’s Precariat. They are a cause of its growth and in danger of becoming its primary victims, demonized and made the scapegoat of problems not of their making. Yet, with few exceptions, all they are doing is trying to improve their lives.” It is easy for us in America to think that migration only occurs from poor nations to rich ones, but this is true only in about one-third of the world migration movements. Another third is movement from one rich country to another rich country, and the remaining third is from one poor country to another poor country.
Migrants can be described as denizens as opposed to citizens, which is a term that dates back to the Middle Ages in England and Europe when a monarch or ruler would grant certain, but not all, rights to an alien that was not a full-fledged citizen. In our modern parlance, we might call them a “resident alien.” The point, here, is that migrants are often considered second class in nature, and therefore much easier to exploit or abuse.
At the very bottom of this migrant pole are asylum seekers, who have practically no rights at all. “They may try to survive by living a Precariat existence. Many simply languish, seeing their lives wasting away.” Above them are undocumented migrants, “who have civil rights as human beings but lack economic, social or political rights.” Many eke out an existence in the shadow economy, working off the books and living in constant fear of deportation. There can perhaps be no better example of the precariousness of the Precariat than this. And, above the undocumented migrants are those granted temporary residence but restricted by their visa status in what they can do legally.
Migrants, especially asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, are the light infantry of the Precariat. They are the easiest to exploit, through illegally low wages (or ones not even paid at all) and assigned to dangerous or demeaning working conditions, because they have no other options. If they protest or prove unreliable, they are threatened with being turned in to the state for arrest or deportation. Increasingly, migrants are being identified and vilified as the primary reason why others have not been able to find jobs. And Standing cites the rise of political figures such as Berlusconi in Italy, Sarah Palin in the United States (reminder: this book was written in 2010), “and neo-fascists elsewhere” as capitalizing on the demagogic trend to demonize outsiders and those that are different in order to promote their own agendas and build their base of power. In doing so, these poor migrant Precariat, looking to just build a better life for themselves, serve to be doubly exploited, first by those from an economic nature followed by those of a political nature.
Are There Solutions?
Guy Standing makes reference throughout the book for the need of the Precariat to have “a Voice.” It would help the Precariat if a firebrand politician took up their cause and championed their rights and needs, not unlike what Dr. Martin Luther King did for the civil rights movement. The problem with this is that the Precariat cannot be neatly summarized into an identifiable ethnic, political or voting class. The Precariat is comprised of men and women. It is comprised of nationalists and migrants. It is those working legally and those working illegally. The Precariat is young and old. It is married and single. Just about the only thing you can truly say about the Precariat is that it is not wealthy, and it doesn’t take vacations on its own yacht. Otherwise, it is difficult to build a political movement around something so nefariously defined, and therefore, it is difficult for it to build “a Voice.” But, were it to find its voice, Standing says the Precariat should demand full labor commodification (so that jobs and market wages clear without government interference or subsidies, ensuring that wages accurately reflect the value of the work being demanded) and establishing certain other workers’ rights and labor reforms.
Standing also talks about our need as a society to reconsider what is work. Work, too often, is defined as labor, and measures output of economic goods. It doesn’t consider all of the unpaid care given inside families, to growing children and through elder care. As a society, we should more properly value and cherish and promote the value of work that is done in these other important endeavors. Standing says: “Now is the time to assert that pushing everybody into jobs is the answer to the wrong question. We must find ways of enabling all of us to have more time for work that is not labor and for leisure that is not play. Unless we insist on a richer concept of work, we will continue to be led by the folly of measuring a person’s worth by the job they are doing and by the folly that job generation is the mark of a successful economy.”
And, finally, Standing makes a vigorous case for the need, worldwide, of a Basic Income. We already looked at this concept previously in our review of Martin Ford’s book Rise of the Robots, so I will give it shorter mention here. The concept of a basic income payment, also known as a “citizen’s grant,” “social dividend,” “solidarity grant,” and “demogrant,” is that all individuals in a society receive a certain, regular payment sufficient to meet bare minimum living needs. The payment would be made to all citizens unconditionally (provided they haven’t committed a crime for which they’ve already been told their basic income would be revoked.) This would ensure fairness and equality, and receipt of the basic income would not be conditioned upon other income, so there would be no disincentives to work or labor.
Along with Rise of the Robots, this is the second book I’ve reviewed for the Solari Report which has described the basic income as a potential solution to the problems our societies face. This was interesting to me, but what I also found interesting was something that was not mentioned in The Precariat. Unlike Rise of the Robots, The Precariat did not discuss artificial intelligence, robots or computerized automation. I might be wrong, but I’m not even sure I can recall an instance of the author using the word “computers” in this book (except perhaps in the context of education and acquiring skills.) The absence of these words is relevant to me because all of these items are being discussed currently as the reason humans will be losing their jobs in the near and not-too-distant future. AI will take your job! Robots will throw you out of work! Driverless cars will increase unemployment! They are the boogeyman threat for our future employment not unlike the manner in which migrants are the current boogeyman threat causing low wages and lack of job opportunities. Build the wall! Throw the bums out!
But singling out AI or robots or driverless cars is just about as wrong as singling out non-English-speaking migrants. They may be part of the problem, for sure, but Standing’s book points out that they are not the primary issue. We and the Precariat find ourselves in this predicament not because of computers or what they will soon morph into (robots and AI), but because of sheer, plain, human greed. We are in this mess more so because supervisors and business owners had access to calculators, pads of paper and pencils with erasers, who looked at the bottom line and scratched out and rewrote numbers, and then got on the phone with their human resources and legal departments and outside lobbyists to figure out how they could get more of the lower cost bodies onto the assembly line and into the call center chairs. Humans outsourced our jobs to India and China, and imported H-1B visa holders, not computers. Greedy humans are doing this right now to the Precariat, not AI and robots. Please remember this in the years to come as robots and AI take the place of migrants as our new boogeyman villains.
Parting Comments: … On Thomas Friedman
New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman was on the political TV show Meet The Press the morning I was finishing this book review. He has delved into these kinds of topics for years, especially though his column articles and books on the globalization trend, most notably his book The World is Flat. Tom always seems to come out in favor of globalism with what I’ve often felt was a forced and unsupportable optimism that the common worker will somehow come out ahead in the end. He did so again this morning, albeit with a little less optimism than usual, when he said:
“I think we’re in the middle of the single greatest technological inflection point since Gutenberg invented the printing press. I think the workplace is fundamentally being transformed. And what Bill Clinton said back in 1992 just doesn’t apply anymore. What did he say in that convention, ‘if you work hard, play by the rules, you should be in the middle class.’ Well, good luck with that. Today you have to work harder, relearn faster, retool, reengineer…. I always used to say, ‘When I graduate from college, I got to find a job.’ When my daughters graduate from college, they have to invent a job. That’s what’s new. All right? And then, you may get lucky and get your first job, you’ve got to invent, reinvent. And nobody wants to trust the people with that truth. Because it’s really scary.” (Meet the Press, October 23, 2016.)
I think this quote nicely summarizes Guy Standing’s book. The Precariat is being squeezed. They must “work harder.” Surrounded by a failing, ineffective and prohibitively expensive educational system, how can they possibly hope to “relearn faster” and “retool?” Their hopes of landing a decent job are so dismal, that they must first “invent” their own job. Think about that sentence for a second. Although there’s a shard of truth to the point he’s trying to make, it is utterly absurd when you stop, deconstruct the sentence, and give it careful consideration. And then, only then, after you’ve “invented” your first job can you then “get lucky! and get your first job.” And, covertly embedded in the mandate to “relearn, retool, reengineer…” is the implied criticism that those not successful in finding jobs haven’t done enough to relearn, retool, etc. They are to blame for not trying harder, learning faster or being more flexible.
I translate “nobody wants to trust the people with that truth” to mean one of two things. Either, he’s saying “I and journalists like me, not to mention politicians, can’t tell the people that truth, because we will lose our jobs or career progression or political offices if we let the Precariat in on the secret that they just don’t stand a chance with the current economic system, labor laws and taxation policies (among other things) arrayed against them.” Either that or “the Precariat must not be informed about the predicament they are in, or we will surely have a revolt on our hands that would undermine the wealth and power we Salariat and Elites currently enjoy.” In either translation, pro-globalist Tom Friedman continues to squander or suppress the excellent insights he has into this problem by siding with the globalists against the workers. His monologue also points out Guy Standing’s observations that the Precariat, as a socio-economic group, does not have “a Voice,” or a collective viewpoint, much less one embodied in a central figure who could speak on their behalf and fight for change. Tom Friedman, with his obvious insights into the problem and years of research on globalization is someone who could do more to provide that needed Voice. Instead, it appears he continues to line up with the Capital Class and receive his Salariat paychecks from Globalist Elites. No doubt, he’ll exercise his political and journalistic connections to get his daughters choice internships which will lead to attractive entry level jobs. That’s how their jobs will be “invented.”
Tom Friedman is right about one thing: “It’s really scary.” (Happy Halloween everybody!!!)
Related Reading:
Book Review: The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
Book Review: Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare
Book Review: Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
Book Review: Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era