Where the new jobs are	The future of work Charles Goldfinger, International consultant and author of Travail et hors-travail: vers une société fluide (Éditions Odile Jacob, Paris, 1998) and L’Utile et le futile — l’économie de l’immatériel (Odile Jacob, 1994).
© H. Donnezan/Rapho, Paris Where the new jobs are C.G. The shrinking number of jobs in traditional sectors of the economy seems to be a general and irreversible trend. In rich countries as a whole, the share of industrial jobs fell from 28 per cent in 1970 to 18 per cent in 1994. Meanwhile, the share of the services sector grew steadily. Four major new sources of jobs can be identified: Handling information and knowledge: computer services, research and development, teaching and training account for 40 per cent of knowledge workers. These high-intensity knowledge activities comprised 43 per cent of all new jobs created in the United States between 1990 and 1995, but only 28 per cent of total jobs. Information technology: here there is a shortage of personnel. Professional groups are sounding the alarm and calling on governments to help. In the European Union countries, the imbalance between supply and demand is such that half a million jobs are waiting to be filled. The health sector: the growth of high-intensity knowledge services in this field is related to increased life expectancy and the ageing of the population, and the demand for physical and psychological well-being is also steadily increasing. The growth of expenditure on health is persistent and widespread. For the OECD countries as a whole, this spending grew from 3.9 per cent of GDP in 1960 to 7.2 per cent in 1980 and 8.4 per cent in 1992. The leisure economy: this has triggered the expansion of cultural, sporting and leisure services. It ranges from amusement parks and rock concerts to cultural events such as opera and major art exhibitions. The products of the culture industries have become mass consumer items. Never before have people read so much, listened to so much classical music or visited so many museums. Information technology is also going to add to this vast range of consumer choice. In southern California and New York, the entertainment and multimedia professions are among the main sources of new jobs. In Los Angeles, film- and television-related activities created 40,000 jobs between 1992 and 1997, and Hollywood became the city’s main employer. More and more jobs involve measurement, evaluation and control.	The advent of an ‘intangible’ economy does not mean the end of work. But it does mean the end of familiar routines and rhythms, of job security, of rigid hierarchies and career planning People are worried about the far-reaching transformation of the economy. Are we heading for “the end of work” predicted by the American economist Jeremy Rifkin? He and his supporters say we have reached the end of the road. We are no longer creating jobs in industry and automation is sure to reduce their number in the services sector. The quantity of work is thus inexorably bound to decrease. This thesis may be popular, but it is also mistaken and harmful. History shows that technological innovation has always created jobs on a large scale. In no way is the current trend leading to “the end of work”. Just the opposite: the new economy contains huge pools of new jobs which can more than make up for the inevitable loss of traditional jobs. Dematerialization–the shift away from material products–is revolutionizing all aspects of work–its nature, its organization and its relationship with other activities. Its function is no longer just the manufacture of physical objects but the handling of data, images and symbols. The content of jobs is becoming more abstract. Skilled workers need to know a lot more about mathematics than their fathers or grandfathers did. Even milking cows and manufacturing require more and more calculation, evaluation and control. Financial markets that never sleep The organization as well as the product of work is also becoming increasingly intangible. The unity of time, space and action which characterized work in the industrial economy has disintegrated. Work is no longer a regular eight-hours-a-day, five-days-a-week routine. New rhythms have appeared–the hectic pace of financial markets which never sleep, the ups-and-downs of life in show business and the uncertainties of “just-in-time” production where components are delivered a few moments before the final product is assembled. The new jobs are quitting familiar workplaces such as factories, offices and warehouses. Telework is increasing. Europe’s teleworkers may number 10 million by the year 2000, up from one million in 1994. This upheaval of worktime and workspace is going hand in hand with a functional explosion. The range of skills and types of work is expanding all the time. In the United States, the number of job categories has risen from eighty in the 1940s to nearly 800 today. At the same time, trades are dying out faster and faster, especially in information technology where many jobs have a short life of only a few years. Jobs are becoming simultaneously more evanescent and more pervasive, more dissociated and more integrated. On the one hand, fragmentation in time and space seems to be more extensive than it was in the industrial economy. On the other, information technology is strengthening the links between different stages of work and creating an overall fluidity. Disparities in productivity The new forms of work are non-linear. When handling information, knowledge and feelings, there is no direct relationship between the amount of effort and the final result. This makes for very wide disparities in productivity. In industry, the ratio of the performance of an average worker to that of a good one is no more than one to five. But in immaterial work, an excellent programmer can be a hundred times more productive than an average one. Non-linear work means non-linear organization. The notion of a rigid, formal hierarchy based on unchanging criteria no longer makes much sense. All that matters now is technical, scientific or artistic skill and the ability to establish a solid relationship with the customer. Functional hierarchy is replaced by what Thomas Stewart, a journalist with the American monthly magazine Fortune, calls “brainpower”–authority gravitates to those who create and control the new stock of intangible assets: data, brand image, technological know-how and human capital. The new techniques for managing human resources are individualizing the assessment of performance. Two people doing the same job may have different salaries and different status. Automatic across-the-board pay rises are being dropped and replaced by bonuses linked to results. There are no sinecures in the new business enterprise, either for rank-and-file employees, supervisors or technicians–the supposed beneficiaries of the new knowledge economy. Business leaders are no longer a protected species. The head of a big American firm is ten times more likely to be sacked for poor performance now than was the case twenty years ago. The notions of loyalty and of indissoluble links between a firm and its employees are losing their meaning. The changing nature of work has led to a big increase in so-called non-typical jobs, including part-time, temporary and flexi-time work and short-term contracts. Almost all the jobs created in Europe between 1992 and 1996 were part-time. This trend worries many observers who see it as hidden under-employment or disguised unemployment. But they are overly pessimistic. The growth of non-typical jobs is the result of the convergence of several persistent developments. In the labour market, the increase in non-typical jobs is one of the ways in which employers are responding to the pressures of competition and adapting to a global economy which functions seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. To cope with the new situation, firms are having to figure out how they can use their workers more efficiently and flexibly. The growth of non-traditional jobs is also due to changing demand. Consumers want to be able to buy a very wide range of goods and services at the drop of a hat, or amuse themselves any time, anywhere. To meet this demand, shops and places of entertainment have to be open late at night and on Sundays. Technology encourages this trend: the virtual economy of the Internet never sleeps. The widening range of types of work also reflects long-term demographic trends, especially the greater number of women workers and longer life expectancy. Some see non-typical jobs as a necessary evil, while others, especially women with children, welcome the change. The divide between traditional kinds of work and the new jobs is no longer watertight. People are increasingly switching back and forth between the two categories. In the course of a lifetime, a person may change from full-time to part-time work, from an office job to home office and from the security of a big firm to the adventure of entrepreneurship. Changes in the nature of work are also breaking down the rigid frontiers which marked off the world of work. The traditionally distinct fields of work, education and leisure are now interwoven and coexist flexibly in a kind of triple helix of social life. The emerging intangible and relational economy has a huge potential for growth because it is not bound by the constraints of material scarcity. However, the transition to the new economy is an open-ended process. The state has a key part to play in bringing it about. Governments can slow down the rate of change by making it more painful and more costly. Obstacles to change Pessimistic scenarios are still plausible, such as that of an economy which generates few new jobs and is polarized between a small elite and the rest of the population who are marginalized and live in precarious conditions. There is a big risk that this scenario will come to pass because current laws and regulations, as well as widespread pessimistic ideas about work, are powerful obstacles to change. Optimistic scenarios require a wholesale reform of institutional structures and profound changes in behaviour and attitudes. Such far-reaching changes often run into strong opposition from the social and political establishment and come up against the weight of psychological and social tradition. But the gamble of a new approach to work must be made if the transformation to the intangible economy is to succeed.
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