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21.2
The importance of meaningful work
 
     
  While in western cities, few people walk around in rags and without shoes, up to one in ten of the world’s population still do not have adequate shoes and clothing. For the luckiest people living on planet Earth, the memory of the industrial revolution and permanent enslavement as serfs to wealthy landowners seems a distant memory.  
  Yet the history of work for most of the people in the world has been and largely remains, dull, repetitive and with little reward for effort.  
  Slaves to the system  
  Whether a person is technically free, or not, the general availability of work and the terms of employment permitted by the government largely determines the quality of work for most people.  
  In recent years, large multi-national corporations have successfully lobbied the wealthiest governments to cut back on workers rights in order to make employee costs “more competitive” with the rest of the world. As a result, professionals in Sydney, New York and London are working fifty hour weeks and sometimes even longer to get the same levels of pay (in real terms) they were earning ten years ago.  
  In many respects, the trade-offs that were hard fought and gradually introduced for workers in developed industrialized nations have been willingly given up by workers on the “promise” of better pay conditions and job security.  
  The growth of self employed  
  On the bright side, changing technology and “downsizing” has seen a dramatic growth in the “self-employed” professional sector whereby skilled individuals work part of their day from home or from small businesses.  
  The lack of clear quantifiable improvements in the general nature of work  
  Contrary to corporate claims and economists, there is not clear quantifiable evidence to suggest the general nature of work has greatly improved for most people over the past fifty years.  
  Indeed, all indications suggest a “stalling” in the improvement of work, with computers far from improving the quality of work have added another lay of administration and time loss.  
  In fact, for many large corporations who had perfected their system by the 1950’s and 1960’s, the advent of self publishing, of the internet and of the mountain of electronic documents have seen clear drops in effective result orientated productivity compared to much higher levels of activity.  
  We are doing more, we are working longer hours, but in many ways we achieve far less than our fathers did without computers.  
  No clear solutions  
  Rather than seeking clear solutions to meaningful and effective jobs for the 21st century, there appears a general lack of honest recognition just how unproductive modern work practices have become.  
  On the contrary, corporations continue to invest more and more capital into new computer systems and software and an entire multi-billion dollar industry lives off permanently servicing patches, errors and computer mistakes.  
  In many respects, the Information Technology (IT) industry has become a sector dedicated to perpetuating problems and isolating clear technical solutions that eliminate errors and massively improve reliability and productivity. This is because big software, big consulting means big budgets and often very little corporate accountability.  
  We will discuss this in more detail, including clear solutions later in this chapter.  
     
 
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