Economist Jeremy Rifkin published in 1994 "The End of Work", where he raised, from a provocative title, the problems derived from the well-known process of substituting labor for the ...
Economist Jeremy Rifkin published in 1994 "The End of Work", where he raised, from a provocative title, the problems derived from the well-known process of substituting labor for the automation of production chains, a journey that had its true starting point with the introduction of fossil fuels - the coal of the 18th century - and the lavish list of machines that were designed to channel that bath of energy power extracted from the subsoil, towards the increase of production. From there, and not without resistance of all kinds and conditions, begins an unstoppable process of wage-earning and urbanization, which meant the transition from the rural world to the predominance of the factory.
Several energy scholars have made the conversion of the enormous supplement of power that we have available today, into a figure of what has been called energy slaves: thus, an individual in today's Europe has behind him the equivalent of forty people who would work for him continuously, seven days a week. Machines are nothing more than the instrument we use to channel that figure that was previously only accessible to feudal lords and emperors, yes, in the form of serfs and slaves of flesh and blood.
The massive use of machines - and their tendency towards specialization - is, therefore, a function of the available energy, and the employment that today depends on it - virtually all of it - is also. It is worth remembering because the pretensions of the exponential growth of our services and products have made us quickly forget this simple equation, and we recurrently talk about the medium-term evolution of labor markets, ignoring this fundamental premise.
The energy factor is accompanied by the current demographic inertia, of exponential growth of the population of working age. These two trends - increase in available energy and job seekers - have been able to coexist, with limping episodes, in a continuous upward trend, accelerated especially in the last decade, in an episode difficult to reproduce in the future. Thus, for example, Spain constantly increased its employed active population since the mid-90s, by almost 50%, precisely in the same proportion, and it is no coincidence, in which energy consumption (especially oil) grew in the whole country. This same trend has been reproduced in many economic and labor realities of the Planet, although not in a linear or progressive way, as we sometimes tend to think.
The current crisis has uncorked the unemployment tap in an accelerated way in the World, precisely targeting those areas of more bubbling growth in recent times. The employment - capital dialectic has broken its sutures, as in other times of contemporary history, and wage earners are being expelled by the end of cheap energy and the consequent rickets of lending and the fading of the capital bubble, especially for those who are at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
The obligatory question is what will happen next, something that Rifkin also questions, in a disturbing way, in the reference book. As has been reiterated from international bodies, we are heading without a solution of continuity towards a structural energy crisis that will put limits, probably difficult to overcome, and sooner rather than later, to the expansion of primary energy consumption on the Planet. Of course, that limit, if we make the rule of per capita distribution, seems to be already at our feet (the energy demands of the world population are growing faster than the available energy), so today the expansion of energy consumption of some - and, therefore, the capacity for economic growth and employment - would necessarily be done at the expense of the energy and economic decline of others.
Energy aging will bring with it spectacular changes in the world of work, if the current trend is maintained, especially in the form of precariousness and labor expulsion that the International Labor Organization has warned is occurring in all latitudes. In the medium term, the peak of oil means a peak of incorporation into the more regularized labor market, unless a deep process of work sharing is undertaken together with the consensual reduction of activity and definitive reorientation of its purposes, something that seems very far if we start from the current schemes of economic growth that we want to recover at all costs.
Evidently, the dominant production model today - based on the accelerated growth of consumption - is very difficult to fit into an environment of competition for decreasing resources, and one of the main victims of this conflict happens to be, in the current circumstances, the world of work, clearly disjointed by the sake of global competitiveness and the ties to conspicuous consumption.
What we are experiencing today seems to be, seen in perspective, more than the "end of work", the beginning of a bloody process of increasing the dark side of the acclaimed struggle between markets and position in the social ladder of the most fortunate, which is reflected above all in exclusion and social dualization, a trend that we have the obligation to address and curb, although it is true that trying to do so with the same therapies that created our unsustainable production model may further complicate the vulnerable position of workers.
