Future proofing work (partial cross post)

This is a partial cross post from one of my other blogs.

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  ... If you’re not involved in these things for the right reasons – i.e., the ideas and principles – get out of the way before you do real damage.

And on such things, I recently caught up with a friend of mine, J. J’s a very experienced political woman, having stood as a candidate at all three levels of government in Australia and having given the lobby (sorry: community activist group – I loathe the loss of the term lobby to commercial influencers) I was involved with the late 1990s invaluable advice, and I had – some time ago – arranged to catch up when I was thinking about standing as an independent candidate for the upper house in my state next year. We’re both busy, and work had intruded on the previous time we thought we’d be able to catch up, so it had been a while, and in the interim, I had decided that I couldn’t, despite it having been on a bucket list of mine, in good faith nominate.

The key reasons for that were, incidentally, that: (1) the company I work for does a fair bit of work for government-connected bodies (water Authorities), so I would have to take extended leave for the election campaign, and cannot financially afford to do that; (2) if I did get elected, despite my chances of being elected being more remote than the Kuiper Belt, I (a) have concerns that my help would not hold up, and (b) I would have to put my psychic and spiritual work on hold because of the demands on elected representatives (80 hour weeks are common); and (3) my families have no real idea what would hit them (and my previous relationship would be an electoral liability).

So, that dream is shot – for this lifetime, at any rate.

Nevertheless, J and I had a good chat, about politics and other matters. J had been giving a few advice about standing for election, as it turns out, and maybe she should set herself up doing that as a business :) We also chatted about work, and J commented that, in the last few years, everyone she knows is feeling stressed about work, which wasn’t the case when she was younger.

That is also my experience, and I made a comment at the time about the effect of the GFC, but, now, thinking about the matter, I have remembered that it goes back further – to the proto-neoliberals called “economic rationalists”. Of course, they, to some extent, arose because of a combination of abuses of power by parts of the union movement (e.g., the BLF [which also did a lot of good], the rampant misogyny towards women of parts of the CFMEU and the rabid homophobia of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, all of which has done ENORMOUS damage to the union movement – and thus workers’ - and other - human rights), the general decline of awareness of “soft” social issues since the end of the Victorian era, and the rise of business propaganda (aka “marketing”) and the massive increase in consumerism that has happened since the early 1900s.

In any case, what it all boils down to is that, socially, as well as economically and environmentally, we are in trouble.

I’ve heard a few politicians in radio interviews talking about this of late, which is good, but we aren’t doing enough. What I consider needs to happen is a sequence of meetings, which can perhaps broadly be conceived as something along the lines of what led to the Hawke  Government’s  Prices and Income Accord:

 - meetings between all relevant parties, initially in each State, and then leading up to a National conference;

 - “relevant parties” includes workers (both union and not), unpaid workers such as homekeepers, big and small business groups, consumers, health services, education, academics, relevant commentators (if I could, I would include a few philosophers), etc;

 - considered discussions are held beforehand via email, etc, with time enforced for thinking and, if necessary, researching before replying;

 - at the conferences, the same avoidance of time limits and focus on thinking, knowledge and knowledge gaps, etc to be maintained;

 - aspects to be covered include the imminent crisis owing to automation etc, needs to enable all people to adapt, support services required for all people (at present, thinking usually cuts out for older people), social impacts equally as much as how to finance, and so on.

In referring to needs, one of the things I have in mind is that if more business people had better emotional intelligence and treated their workers as human beings instead of economic units, they would probably be able to get the flexibility they want with far less social disruption and personal damage to their workers: businesses are not the army – giving orders is NOT the best way!

(Another issue here is cycles in the business world: I’ve now seen several new, young leaders come in enthusiastically promoting the simplistic ideas of their progenitors as they had come up with it themselves – and that, in addition to the obvious refusal to learn from history, also shows a failure of business schools to admit that there are greater forces in the economy that they cannot control. This failing also includes pressure to cut out procedures and simplify ways of working, which then lead to problems that the previous generation fixed by the procedures etc that had just been cut out or cut back, and these are then excitedly reinstituted under a new name as if they are new. I had a great talk with a colleague this week who had attended an excellent lecture on this in the bridge engineering sector.)

This idea – future proofing work - was one of my main motivations for considering being elected: I’ll now have to find another way to get it to happen :)