It is this conviction that brain skills are of general use and can be developed in youth that has led places like Taiwan and South Korea, following Japan, to put such an emphasis on the formal, even scholastic, education of their youth. It has been said that every second person in Seoul has either been at university or is currently studying or teaching there, while in the 1970s Mr Goh Thock Tong, then Minister for Trade and Industry in Singapore, was arguing that Singapore needed ‘to step into the shoes left behind by countries like Germany and Japan as they restructure, they from skill-intensive to knowledge-intensive and we from labour-intensive to skill-intensive’. In pursuit of these objectives Singapore proceeded to increase greatly the number of university places and lower the entry requirements. Britain, who needs to be one step ahead of Singapore, has until recently been doing the reverse.
The opportunity, however, remains and is made easier by the vanishing generation. The statistic is also good news for those who want to re-enter or enter late the work of the information society. The squeeze on qualified youth will encourage employers to turn to other sources of skill, particularly to women, many of whom have the necessary early education but have been busy working to raise their families and manage their homes. Less convenient as employees because they want and need more flexibility, they have not been wooed too assiduously in the past. In the 1990s they will be. They do, after all, represent nearly half of all university entrants (over half in 1987 in the USA for the first time). They are a neglected resource which few will be able to neglect once the vanishing generation begins to bite. The NEDO Report cited above estimates that four out of five of the 900,000 extra workers it foresees in Britain’s workforce over the next eight years will be women returning to work.
Women have re-entered the workforce before, but the numbers and the conditions which they will expect in the 1990s turn this into a significant discontinuity which will change the way organizations are run, will affect family structures and living patterns quite significantly – all issues to be explored in subsequent chapters.
The Third Age
In 1988 the Social Affairs Ministers of the OECD met to contemplate the time when one person in five will be a pensioner and one in ten aged over 75, when there will be only three people of working age to support each pensioner and when old-age pensions may account for one-fifth of national income. It will be even worse for Switzerland and West Germany where there will be only two people of working age for each old person.
It will be 2040 before this scenario fully becomes a reality, but the people who will be old then are alive now and unless they quickly change their breeding habits the numbers of their children are quite predictable. This world will happen and it will start to happen before the end of this century.
Once again, there have been old people before, but never before so many of them. I knew only one grandparent – the others had died before I was born. My children knew all four. Their children will almost certainly know a great-grandparent or two. People in their sixties and retired will still be someone’s children. The infrequent has become the commonplace and the world as we know it will inevitably change in some way.
It is happening because, in the richer countries, it is becoming harder to die. Each major cause of death is either diminished, like smallpox or polio and, one day, cancer, or postponed for a few more years or decades, like heart disease. Of course, nature, or man’s tampering with nature, may trigger another plague and some wonder whether AIDS may not be just that plague, but such disasters excepted there seems little reason why many of today’s teenagers cannot expect to live to 100, provided they do not drink, smoke or drive themselves to death.
The question is, will they want to live that long? When death as an act of God seems to be indefinitely postponed will we want to make it increasingly an act of mankind? Euthanasia, already quasi-legal in the Netherlands, may become more acceptable to more societies.
More urgent are the questions ‘What will they live on?’ ‘What will they do?’ ‘Who will care for them?’ By the year 2020, if nothing changes, Italy will be spending over a quarter of her national income on pensions, while Britain’s health service spends ten times as much on a patient over 75 as on one of working age.
Like all discontinuities, however, this one contains opportunities as well as problems if the changes are seen coming and if everyone concerned can indulge in a little upside-down thinking.
They will not all be poor, for instance. An increasing number of them will own their own homes, an asset which can be turned into an annual income provided that they do not intend to bequeath it to the next generation (who will by then be in mid or late career with their own homes bought and paid for). Most of them will be healthy and active. That is, of course, why they are still alive. They are capable of working. One British study found that 43 per cent of over-65s regularly helped other elderly people, 25 per cent helped the disabled, 11 per cent helped neighbours. If we change our view of work to include such unpaid activity then these people are only retired in a legal or technical sense. After all, in the last century no one had heard of retirement – they worked till they dropped, or, as a farmer said once when I asked him what was the difference between farming at 75 and farming at 50, ‘The same only slower!’ Experience and wisdom can often compensate for energy.
So many older people will not go unnoticed, particularly when many more of them will have experienced responsibility earlier in life and will not be used to keeping quiet. If we are sensible we will want to use their talents in our organizations, but not full-time or on full pay. We shall need, then, to re-think what jobs call for part-time wisdom and experience and what work can be done at a distance by responsible people. We shall need to revise the tax rules for pensions to make it economic for such work to be done. Many people, active and healthy, will devise their own activities, organizing around their enthusiasms; we must not let too many rules from the past stand in their way. We will need to change the way we talk about them, words like ‘retirement’ will become as redundant as ‘servant’ today. Words are so often the heralds of social change, the outward signs of a discontinuity at work triggering some upside-down thinking.
Already the linguistic signposts are going up. The Third Age, the age of living, as the French would have it, which follows the first age of learning and the second of working, is already becoming a common term. There is a University of the Third Age, a network of people exchanging their skills and their knowledge. There will soon be more talk of Third Age Careers. Soon, no doubt, there will be Third Age societies and, ultimately, Ministers for the Third Age in all OECD countries! The wrinklies, as my children fondly term us, can be assets as well as liabilities, if we want them to be.
If words are indeed the heralds of change, then the Third Age language suggests that before too long we shall be referring to people’s job-careers as we now do to their education. ‘Where did you work?’ for a 65-year-old with fifteen years, at least, of life ahead will sound much like ‘Where did you go to school?’ It would all sound strange indeed to my father who died two years after retiring, at the age of 74. For him there was no Third Age worth living and the second age, of job and career, had long been a burden before he could afford to leave it.
It will be different for us, his children, and for our children. It is change of a discontinuous sort, but it need not be change for the worse if we can see it coming and can prepare for it.
The changes which are coming to our ways of work and living, indeed the changes which are already here, are conveniently summed up by this strange equation. When it is unravelled, it will suggest that we have, for some time now, been engaged in a massive job-splitting exercise in our society and have not even noticed it.
It will work like this. Thirty years ago when I joined an international company and started my job I signed on, although I never realized it, for 100,000 hours of work during my lifetime, because I should, if I was anything like everyone else in the developed world at tha
t time, be expected to work for 47 hours a week, including overtime paid or unpaid, for 47 weeks a year for 47 years of my life (from, on average, 18 to 65). 47 × 47 × 47 = 103, 823 or 100,000 hours give or take a few.
My teenage son and daughter, a generation later, can expect their jobs to add up, on average, to 50,000 hours. The lifetime job will have been halved in one generation. At first sight this would imply that they would be working half as many hours per week, for half as many weeks and half as many years. But mathematics does not work like that. Just as half of 43 (64) is not 23 (8), so half of 473 is not 23.53. In fact, rather bizarrely, half of the three 47s is three 37s, for 37 × 37 × 37 = 50, 653.
It is because of this statistical sleight-of-hand that we have not noticed this rather dramatic piece of discontinuous change. It is also, in part, because it is only now beginning to bite as the next generation begin their second age of jobs and careers.
The world is not so neat, however, as to switch uniformly from the three 47s to the three 37s. That is where the (4) comes in. My daughter and my son have four principal options to choose from.
In the first option they will follow in their father’s footsteps and look for a full-time job, or at least a sequence of full-time jobs, in the core of an organization or perhaps as a professional of some sort. In this case their working week will not be that different from the one I knew. Statistically it will average 45 hours per week, with rather less overtime for the hourly paid and fewer Saturday mornings for office workers. Nor will their working year be much reduced; longer annual holidays bring it down to 45 weeks rather than 47.
What will change, however, is the length of their job life. To get one of those increasingly rare jobs in the core or the professions (less than half of all jobs by 2000) they will need to be both well-qualified and experienced. In Germany today, a six- or seven-year university course is piled on top of eighteen months of military or community service so that the average entrant into the job market is 27 years of age. In the USA, a postgraduate qualification of some sort, after a four-year degree, is increasingly becoming a prerequisite of a good job, making 24 the normal starting age in a proper job. Britain still has three-year degree courses (except in Scotland) and no military service, but employers increasingly look for further qualifications of a more vocational or professional nature and for relevant experience in vacations or ‘gap’ years. It has, after all, been the established practice in the older professions of medicine, architecture and the law for centuries – a long (seven-year) mix of education, experience and vocational training. We can expect to see it extend to many other occupations, with the result that British parents must increasingly expect to wait until the offspring are 24 or 25 before they are established in a full-time job, if that is what they want.
It is possible that the fall in the numbers of qualified young people in all industrialized countries will tempt organizations and professions to shorten their training requirements in order to get the best of a reducing supply. The form this will probably take, however, will be to finance them, perhaps under the guise of employment, during their studies. It will be education more generously funded, not a job.
The next generation of full-time core workers, therefore, be they professionals, managers, technicians or skilled workers, can expect to start their full-time careers later – and to leave them earlier. This is the crucial point. The core worker will have a harder but shorter job, with more people leaving full-time employment in their late forties or early fifties, partly because they no longer want the pressure that such jobs will increasingly entail, but mainly because there will be younger more qualified and more energetic people available for these core jobs.
It is true that early in the next century the total number of people in the workforce in every country will start to decline and the average age to rise, as the dip in the birthrate of the 1970s works its way through life, but the reducing numbers of the full-timers will continue to place a premium on youth, energy and qualifications whenever they can get them in combination. It will be a shorter life but a more furious one for the full-timers, as the new professionals in business are already discovering.
The nett result of these changes will be a full-time job which, on average, will result in 45 hours for 45 weeks for 25 years, totalling 50,000 hours. Work won’t stop for such people after 50 but it will not be the same sort of work; it will not be a job as they have known it. They will enter their Third Age sooner than others, affluent, no doubt, but still with a good third of their lives to live.
It is happening already. One personnel manager was surprised to discover that only 2 per cent of his workforce were, as he put it, still there at the official retirement age of 62. What he had done was to look back fifteen years to all those who were then .47 and had found that only a few had stayed on with the organization for the remaining fifteen years. Some had moved to new jobs and one or two had died, but the great majority had opted for, or been persuaded into, early retirement in their fifties. ‘We knew that people were leaving us early,’ he said, ‘but we had no idea of the scale of it all until we started counting.’ An advertising agency, aware that creativity and mental energy tend to decline with the years, would like to see everyone under the age of 50. They have not, so far, been allowed by the tax authorities to make their full pension scheme applicable under the age of 55 but they are confident that it will come down to 50 within the next ten years – well in time for the generation now starting their careers.
There will always be the glorious exceptions of course, while those who control their own careers, the self-employed, the professions and, apparently, Heads of State, will buck the trend as long as the clients and their supporters will permit it. It is the bigger organizations, in which most full-timers still work, who will be most choosy about who they keep on their full-time books and they will want the energetic, the up-to-date, the committed and the flexible. Most of those will be in their thirties and forties, putting in their 50,000 hours in big annual chunks.
Full-time work in organizations will, however, be only one of the options and, if the numbers are anything like right, it will be a minority option, perhaps an élite one. Most people will have to find their place outside the organization, selling their time or their services into it, as self-employed, part-time or temporary workers.
For them the pattern of hours will be different. They may find themselves working 25 hours a week for 45 weeks of the year (part-time) or 45 hours a week for 25 weeks a year (temporary). In either case they will need to keep on working so long as they can, for 45 years if possible, because they will not be able to accumulate the savings via pension schemes or other mechanisms to live on. This will suit the organizations who will, in their temporary staff, look for experience and reliability rather than the energy and certainty of youth. Whether it is temporary work or part-time work, the sum is still 25 × 45 × 45 = 50,000.
We may, therefore, see the notional retirement age going in two very different ways at the same time. Whilst for the core workers it will gradually come down towards 50 over the next twenty years, for most of the workforce it will go up. For them the questions ‘What shall I do in the missing 50,000 hours, and what shall I live on?’ cannot be postponed until the Third Age; they need to be answered now. For these people the future is not a generation away – it started yesterday.
My children have a fourth option. They may be able to work full-time for ten years, then take ten years out to raise a family, then return to the workforce at, say, 45 for a further ten or even fifteen years. (45 × 45 × 25 hours of paid work = 50,000.) It is an option that has traditionally been taken up by women, who have varied the pattern by going part-time for some of the intervening years, but it may increasingly be seen as an opportunity by men to vary their lifestyle and to play a bigger part in the home and family life.
Re-entry into the full-time workforce has always been difficult. It will get easier as the shortage of qualified young people begins to bite organizations
in the 1990s. The organization will then turn to that reservoir of talent, the qualified women at home. In order to tempt them back, however, organizations may have to learn to be more flexible in the way they run things, more willing to recognize that they are buying the talents of someone but not necessarily all their time.
The Pressures Behind The Numbers
The equation is, of course, spuriously precise.
The numbers will not work out precisely like that. It is there to make a point. The world of jobs is changing. It is changing more dramatically than we realize because those sort of numbers creep up on one unexpectedly when multiplied out over a lifetime.
No one particularly wants those numbers to happen. They are not the result of any policy decisions by government or boards of directors. They are an instinctive response to a changing environment. There is now some general agreement about the nature of this changing environment and an acceptance that it is not going to change back again. Some of the main features are:
A move away from labour-intensive manufacturing
Thirty years ago nearly half of all workers in the industrialized countries were making or helping to make things. In another thirty years’ time it may be down to 10 per cent (in the USA it is already 18 per cent).
To some extent this is because we have all had to export our factories, instead of our goods, to countries where labour is cheaper and more amenable to factory working. Even Japan has now been forced by the high price of the yen to follow suit. When Britain did not export her factories soon enough they were replicated in the newly industrialized countries and she lost out. Situations such as the rapid rise of the pound sterling in the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s government only accelerated this process, leaving swathes of abandoned factories throughout Britain. It would have happened anyway. The clever thing would have been not to compete with the unbeatable but to join them by exporting the factories not the goods. Discontinuous change can always be turned to advantage with a bit of forethought.
The Age Of Unreason Page 4