This century may well go down in history as the century of the "employee society". It has been an assumption underlying the plans of all governments for the better part of the past 100 years that full employment was both possible and necessary for a decent society, and by "employment" they meant people in jobs of one sort or another, paid by someone else. Those jobs may have changed over time, from mines, factories and mills, to offices and desks for some, and from domestic service, the largest category of work at the turn of the century, to jobs in hotels and catering or secretarial offices for others. But jobs of some sort they still were, people selling their time to others.
It was also assumed that economic growth would automatically lead to more jobs, governments implicitly believing in the truth of Parkinson's law. Prof Parkinson's so-called "law", that work expands to fill the space available, was originally coined as an ironic comment on the British Navy after the second World War, when the number of admirals increased even as the number of ships under their command reduced. As bureaucracies of all types mushroomed in the years after that war, Parkinson's law was observably true of most large organisations, and jobs bred ever more jobs as long as there was enough money to pay for them.
That system underlay the economic policies of most governments, with economists such as Keynes arguing that, if money started running short, governments should pour more in to keep jobs going.
Behind those policies lay another assumption: that 100,000 hours of paid work was the normal lot of mankind, even our entitlement, being roughly 47 hours a week, including overtime, for 47 weeks a year for 47 years. One working person per household, usually but not necessarily the male, would then provide an economic base for the population, leaving a small gap of a few years at the end of a working life to be covered by a pension of one sort or another. The work organisation came to be thought of as the primary community in society, responsible for collecting the bulk of the taxes on income, for providing people with financial security and training for their work, time for rest and recreation, and protection from dangerous or unhealthy work. It all made for a tidy society, with people in predictable boxes, leading tidy lives.
The reality was always a little more untidy than the dream, but the last 10 years of the century have finally exploded the myth. Work has, to a large extent, been reinvented in the industrialised societies, which are no longer, of course, industrialised, even if we pretend to ourselves that little has really changed, that our children will still get jobs with pensions at the end of them and that life can be conveniently arranged as a sequence of education, work, family and retirement, with governments committed to finding ways of providing jobs for all who want them, and even for those who don't want them.
If governments are going to develop economic, social and educational policies that really work in the next century and if we, as individuals, are going to have any chance of a decent life, then it is crucial that we start thinking of work as it really is and not as what it has been for most of this century.
The first thing that has happened is that jobs and economic growth have become disentangled. Largely because of the new information technologies, we have entered a period of jobless growth. In the UK, between 1970 and 1995, GDP per head grew by nearly 60 per cent but employment was 4 per cent down. It was much the same in the rest of Europe. Even in America, which boasted of its new jobs, GDP grew by 50 per cent in this period, while employment rose by only half that. In the weightless world of the new economy, it seems more than probable that countries can now get richer without more people working, or, more likely, with some working more and more working less.
The second change is the dramatic reduction in full-time jobs because of the flexibility that businesses now need to cope with an ever-changing market place. If one adds together the growing number of part-timers, temporary workers, and self-employed, as well as those on employment schemes or looking for work, the dramatic conclusion is that less than half of the workforce in Europe today is in what used to be the normal, full-time job. For more than half the people, a job today is not what their parents meant by a job.
Nor will the new jobs guarantee the kind of retirement that our parents expected and, mostly, are enjoying or have enjoyed. The new jobs are shorter. In France, for instance, only 38 per cent of men between 55 and 64 are in paid employment, and the figures are coming down to that level all over Europe. Proper jobs will end for most at 55, but life will continue for another 30 years, with luck. No pension scheme, state or private, is currently able to provide a comfortable living for those extra 30 years. The hard, or maybe the good, truth is that we shall have to go on working after the proper job ends, but it will be bits and pieces of work, collections or "portfolios" of work rather than the continuation of any proper job.
Portfolio work, or what some have called "women's pattern of life" will, in fact, become the norm for more and more people. They will increasingly combine bits of paid work with other forms of work, in the home caring for children or relatives, in the community for free, study work or even hobby work. It will be more meaningful in future to ask people what work they do than what job they have. More of us will lead "actors' lives", alternating periods of project work with periods of "rest and research", with temporary work or welfare to fill the financial gaps. Added to that and partly because of that, the lives of men and women are gradually becoming more alike, with many jobs in the information world appealing to women, and more men with the time to attend to child care or cooking, whether they want to or not.
Mobile phones, computers and the Internet are also changing not only how we work but where we work. We can work now as we travel, even as we walk, with people striding down the street apparently talking to themselves, earpieces from their phones tucked into an ear and mouthpieces attached to their collars. These phones can now send and receive email on their own or, attached to a laptop, can act as the connector to the rest of the world. As a result, organisations are now working out who actually needs a permanent home in an office, which is, they are uncomfortably aware, a capital asset available for 168 hours a week but often only used for 12 or less, often just to collect their mail.
Bill Gates has predicted that, by the year 2050, 50 per cent of the working population will be working at home. He may be overestimating the homeworker population because it is not to everyone's taste, but almost certainly 50 per cent of workers will not be working from a conventional office.
Expect, therefore, to see more of the new type of clubhouse offices rather than the heap of mini-apartments that we have been used to call our offices if we were lucky enough to have one. Clubs are places where only members and their guests are allowed in, where the rooms are defined by function (eating, meeting or reading etc) and are open to all rather than assigned to individuals. You can book a private room for a specific period or purpose but you cannot, in a clubhouse, put your name on the door, unless you are the secretary or site manager. Members of the organisation will use the clubhouse for meetings, for networking or for some forms of individual work, but they will not have a space to fill with their own personal effects - it is becoming too expensive.
Increasingly, people are living as teachers have always done: out with the customers most of the day, with access to a clubroom, but doing most of their preparation and reporting at home.
People moan about the loss of personal space but can soon become accustomed to the new way of working. They learn to value the freedom and the escape from the need to be seen which is still part of the unspoken contract in many offices.
As compensation, however, for the loss of personal space, we can expect organisations to invest in making the clubhouse attractive and comfortable, even luxurious, with good food, gyms and even overnight accommodation. That means that the architecture of business will gradually change and with it the skylines of our cities. Already, many offices of yesterday are being converted into apartments for inner-city dwellers.
Factories, of course, have not disappeared, but much of the repetitive work has become - or soon will be - automated. In the modern factory, the work has been arranged so that autonomous groups have responsibility for whole sections of the production. Teams have taken much of the monotony and boredom out of the assembly-line culture. In place of the factory, however, we now have the call centre and the 24-hour supermarket. Few would pretend that these offer either fun or personal growth. Work in these places is still a means to an end, not a career. In these areas of work, part-time or shift work is popular because it leaves time for other interests. It is only part of a varied portfolio of activities for many.
At the other extreme we are seeing the rise of the independent entrepreneur or alchemist - those who hope to create something out of nothing. The First Tuesday meetings in some 30 cities around Europe are a manifestation of the new ferment for starting one's own enterprise and have stirred the enthusiasm of thirtysomethings. At these meetings, those who come with an idea or a project wear green stickers on their name badges, those with funds in search of an idea wear red stickers, and journalists or others wear yellow. Anyone can register, and the idea is to provide an opportunity to meet, mingle and make connections. Recent meetings in London attract around 1,000 people each month. For those with the green stickers, work is intended to be their passion, not a means to other ends.
Where does this leave us at the end of what has been, for most of it, the century of the employee? With a much more multi-hued canvas of work, with more choices for more people, but also with more responsibility thrust upon them for making those choices, work has indeed expanded to fill the space available, as Parkinson observed so long ago, but it has done so in a surprising variety of ways, not all of them paid. The elephantine organisations of old are still around, but they are much slimmer elephants now, and they are surrounded by a multitude of fleas, smaller independent suppliers, sub-contractors, advisers, consultants and new start-ups. It is the fleas which bring the buzz that is so evident in some cities at the end of the century, but fleas, we should remember, have short, if busy, lives.
Security, therefore, is now a personal not an organisational responsibility. Governments are more concerned to provide us with a structure for creating our own financial safety net than to offer it as a universal benefit. Education has to be a continuing process, but will have to be initiated by ourselves more often than by any organisation.
The mix of work, including home care and study, will vary over the course of one's life, which creates the opportunity for some to live several lives in one lifetime but can terrify those who feel left behind or left out of what already seems like a torrent of change with nothing behaving as we were taught to expect. Amid the excitement and opportunity of this reinvented world of work, we need to have a constant care for those who are drowning. Organisations won't do it anymore, for they have changed forever.
Charles Handy's book, The New Alchemists, with photographs by Elizabeth Handy, was published this autumn by Hutchinson
