“Imagine what your workplace would be like if half of the folks contributing to your projects were temps and freelancers. Would you have to compete even harder than you do now to hold onto one of the few full-time jobs with benefits–so your company would not decide it was more cost effective to “contract out” the work you do?”
Unfortunately, the article’s author does not addressed a significant cause of the trend to reduce labor worker input to part time, cheaper outsoucing, and flexible contingent workers, to save labor costs and paid benefits and overall maximize profits: the non-human factor of production or productive capital exhibited in superautomation, automated factories, computer systems and operations, etc.
It simply won’t be enough to become an entrepreneur, freelancer or other member of the “contingent” workforce in the future, when the business corporation will ALWAYS seek to reduce labor costs and shift production to non-human assets to maximize profits. The American workforce will continue to experience instability in their income streams so long as ONLY one-factor economics (labor worker) is practiced in our society and the American population is effectively shutout of participating in the ownership of future productive capital (the non-human factor).
The role of physical productive capital is to do ever more of the work, which produces income. Full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum. Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. The mixture of labor worker input and capital worker input has been rapidly changing at an exponential rate of increase for over 235 years in step with the Industrial Revolution (starting in 1776) and had even been changing long before that with man’s discovery of the first tools, but at a much slower rate. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
The article’s author’s focus is on job survival, not full production. Unfortunately, ever since the 1946 passage of the Full Employment Act, economists and politicians formulating national economic policy have beguiled us into believing that economic power is democratically distributed if we have full employment––thus the political focus on job creation and redistribution of wealth rather than on full production and broader capital ownership accumulation. This is manifested in the belief that labor work is the ONLY way to participate in production and earn income. Long ago that was once true because labor provided 95 percent of the input into the production of products and services. But today that is not true. Capital provides not less than 90 to 95 percent of the input. Full employment as the means to distribute income is not achievable. When capital workers (productive capital owners) replace labor workers (non-capital owners) as the principal suppliers of products and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate. Thus, we are left with government policies that redistribute income in one form or another.
The political discussion in the United States continues to be removed from the tectonic shifts in the technologies of production, which results in the need for less and less labor worker input.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/elainepofeldt/2012/04/03/what-youll-need-to-know-to-be-the-boss-in-2020/
