One key idea explains a large part of the current backlash against tech, both in Europe and in the US: the assumption that all workers need to seek a higher level of skill.
We often hear politicians and economists lecture us on the importance of lifelong education for desperate workers who just lost their jobs. This goes back to the early 1990s, when authors such as Robert Reich (who then became the US Secretary of Labor) and Jeremy Rifkin more or less suggested that globalization and automation would leave the West with only high-skilled jobs. This meant the entire workforce had to be trained and redeployed toward this segment of the labor market.
Bill Clinton became the standard bearer of that ideology. Then Europe worked hard to catch up. In his landmark 1997 campaign, Tony Blair had three priorities: “Education, education, education”. And with its so-called Lisbon Strategy in 2000, the European Union decided to aim at becoming the “the most competitive knowledge economy in the world”, stressing the importance of… lifelong education!
To be fair, Western countries had every reason to bet on education. For them, economic development has always been synonymous with an ever more educated workforce. In the US, the GI Bill of 1944 gave access to education to millions of Americans and paved the way for the post-war boom. It worked then, so it’s no wonder why lifelong education has dominated the political discourse in the following decades.
Yet there are several problems with more education as the solution to every problem. Take Tony Blair's famous “Education, education, education”. Back in 1997, voters were thrilled when they heard him speak, and New Labour won in a landslide. But today, as France’s Emmanuel Macron found out last year on the campaign trail, the people can't stand it anymore. In a way, they’re right: It isn’t working! In most Western countries, unemployment has kept going up. Even where that’s not the case, workers are suffering from decreasing purchasing power (as in Germany) or widening inequalities and a frightening level of economic insecurity (as in the US). And so that’s the first problem: People simply don’t believe in lifelong education anymore. Politicians promote it at their own peril.
Another problem is that even if people believe in a higher level of skill, many see themselves on the wrong side of history. When you've lost your job as a coal miner or a factory worker, it's difficult to imagine that you can acquire the skills to one day become a software engineer. And if those who think “It doesn’t work at all” are disillusioned, then those who think “It works for everyone but me” fall victim to desperation and anger. No wonder why some among them are then attracted to populism and see immigrants as a threat: “Those immigrants are even less skilled than I am, but they have a job and I don't.” (The reason, of course, is that immigrants are ready to accept jobs that most locals won't even consider, particularly jobs seen as being ‘low-skilled’.)
The third problem is that it's simply false to assume that more education for everyone is the solution to massive unemployment and widening inequalities. There will be many jobs in the future for ‘low-skilled’ workers. But they will be very different from the ‘low-skilled’ jobs we’re used to.
In the past, secure, attractive jobs for ‘low-skilled’ workers were concentrated in two worlds: factories (goods) and bureaucracies (services). Alas those jobs are precisely the ones that have been destroyed, outsourced or made less secure by globalization and technology. Instead, most future jobs for those currently seen as ‘low-skilled’ will be in sectors dedicated to a very different set of tasks: providing quality care at a large scale. These are what I call ‘proximity services’, all those sectors that employ what Richard Florida calls the “service class”.
There are various obstacles on the path to redeploying the workforce toward these job-rich proximity services. One is that such jobs are not attractive—yet. And it's easy to sympathize: A middle-aged unemployed factory worker has a hard time seeing themselves becoming a child carer, a Starbucks barista, or a nurse. The solution to this lies in imagining institutions—what I call a ‘Greater Safety Net’—so that proximity jobs become good jobs and it becomes obvious for a growing part of the workforce that this is the segment of the labor market that they should be joining.
Another obstacle is that we're collectively headed in the wrong direction because we're mentally stuck in the past, in the old age of the automobile and mass production. Today most workers are told that they need to go back to school to climb up a Fordist economy social ladder that doesn’t exist anymore. As a result, all those people are missing the opportunities provided by the new age of ubiquitous computing and networks. Again, today it’s not about factory jobs, but about jobs in proximity services: education, healthcare, personal care, retail, hospitality, urban logistics and transportation.
I'm not saying that workers shouldn't pursue the opportunity of becoming developers and software engineers. There are many cases in which such a reconversion can be successfully achieved. Talented entrepreneurs are even creating new ventures to accelerate the process of providing workers with higher skills from a technology perspective—just take a look at Lambda School, for instance.
Yet software workers are for the Entrepreneurial Age what automobile workers were for the age of mass production: they are high-skilled; they have good jobs; they represent our best idea of what work is about; but they will always remain a tiny minority of the workforce. And so it’s high time we cease to see software jobs as the sole horizon for unemployed and underemployed workers. Instead, we should promote new jobs in proximity services and make them more attractive—with a Greater Safety Net.
