[Video] The Future of Work Looks Rather Negative (and Getting Worse)
Part I
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Workforces Treated Like Dirt
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TODAY'S longest video deals with a variety of work-related issues. It comes at the right time, so to speak...
WeWork has just filed for bankruptcy despite it once being "valued" at more than the price of Twitter" (47 billion compared to 44 for the latter). The thing is, WeWork was never worth that much. It's just part of the "tech" Ponzi scheme, assigning totally fictional values to companies that barely make any money and are deep in debt. We gave quite a few examples of such companies throughout the year. Twitter / X is one of many, including Spotify and Clownflare.
Enron-style accounting has sadly become prevalent and pension funds are tying people's savings to such fraud. Businesses today want us to think that operating at a loss and being deep in debt is totally normal. They pass those costs to the taxpayers and the workers.
Work today is very much unlike what it was 50+ years ago. The same is true for society in general. In recent years people barely got a chance to meet their colleagues, either because they seldom meet in person or because people get shuffled around too much. We'll come to that in a bit and elaborate further in Part II. There are some concrete examples.
There is a big difference between society today and society (at least in "the West") of the "boomers". This past Sunday and Friday I spent a lot of time with an elderly neighbour I've known well for a decade (inter-generational friendship) and she notes a big difference from younger generations (compared to hers). Well, her hard-working husband died as soon as he retired (less than 2 decades ago), so he never got to actually enjoy life. He worked himself to death. The money he saved he did not enjoy. Nor did his wife, who became miserably lonely, still occasionally in tears over the loss, saying "life is cruel" every 5 minutes or so. She soon turns 85 and she is still unhappy with what's happening to society.
Nowadays it's not even simple for anyone to save money (at all), especially young people. Many are encouraged not to save and instead spend as much as possible (and, lacking money to spend, they should borrow). They seek status by virtual things or taking photos of their latest "haul". That's misguided and shallow, to say the least. They fail to understand that when people die nobody will miss them or remember them for some "tweet" or some "viral" video (nor "bank balance at time of death"), but they're made to think they should own nothing, always be in debt, and still be happy (or on drugs, antidepressant "medication" etc). The workers are put on 'starvation wages' with few or no rights/protections/safeguards. The recent strikes and labourers' protests worldwide are a belated response to the erosion, which has gone on for decades already. To some people, the cost of living by far exceeds their income, especially if they have children and/or medical bills.
I can mostly speak of all this from the context and perspective of technical jobs, as pretty much all the jobs I had since age 18 were technical in nature. Even in the late 90s things were starting to deteriorate, but the deterioration certainly accelerated in recent years, as we've shown in the EPO articles (e.g. hot-desking).
Then there's the issue or aspect of commuting. Society seems very segregated in that way, I'm told, and it may be much more segregated than in the past. People used to be able to live closer to home 60+ years ago. Now society thinks it's OK for people to move across the country for a job and still end up commuting 1+ hours each way.
In the past, people knew a lot of their colleagues and could stay in the same job (or employer) for 30 years. That seemed to make workers happier and gave them a sense of security, stability etc. Families could sleep better at night, and for longer than 6-7 hours each night. No out-of-work phonecalls or "we'll call you when we need you..."
How many old people still live where they grew up, went to school, married (a church across the road) and so on? Far more than young people, who seems to be moving all over the place especially because they are being moved, usually because of some job/s. In the case of the EPO, workers are typically required to move to another country with another language, along with their entire family (even children who cannot comprehend a foreign language).
In the old days, people never (or rarely) had to move, they knew all the nearby people in the street, whereas today a lot of people do not even speak to their next-door neighbour, let alone a colleague in the adjacent cubicle (maybe that's just what hot-desking is all about).
Perhaps this is like the public housing "shuffle" method, wherein people are constantly moved from one residence to another. They're preventing communities from forming and uniting and they tell us they do this because of "crime". Perhaps some companies do the same, except to them the "crime" is "form a union" or "show solidarity for a colleague" (horizontal interaction, not vertical as in bossing).
When people have no friends at work they will become collectively divided and weak, easy to exploit and reprimand baselessly. That's detrimental to mental - and in turn physical - health. It's not good for businesses.
Apparently this trend is not limited to the physical world. I'll be covering this separately in another article, maybe later today or perhaps later this week. █