Less Mess: How Future Employment May Be Served By Past Efforts

To quote my mother, “We are… in a mess.” The job market is certainly not what it once was. When my mother was my age (early 20’s), she did not go to university because she didn’t know what she wanted to do for a living; a perspective that is still quite common today. But something that is not so common today is that jobs you could make a living on were plentiful back then.

My mother worked a modest job at a Rent-A-Car establishment, and with that, she was able to pay for groceries, gas, car insurance, rent, monthly bills, boarding her horse, as well as pay off the loan she used to buy said horse, and still have some left over to save for a rainy day. All for the grand paycheque of $285 a month. So, what’s changed? How did we get here and where exactly are we headed?

In 1968, the world population was just over 3.5 billion. Today, the world population is over 7.2 billion (with an estimation to reach 8 billion by 2025). Global unemployment in 2013 reached to almost 202 million because a weak global economic recovery failed to lead to an improvement in global labour markets. In just 45 years, our population has more than doubled and yet we struggle to accommodate ourselves with purpose.

In those 45 years, we have made vast advancements in the technological field that have blessed our lives with many conveniences. But what if those advancements have also stunted us? Dozens of typists were once needed in every office, whereas now, a single person can type at their leisure with the comfort of spell-check and then have a hundred copies printed at the click of a mouse. In the 1930s, the beating heart of the mass production industry was the assembly line. Hundreds of thousands of jobs that no longer exist because of the advancements made in technology. For example, products ranging from tap faucets to potato chips, can be made, packaged, and exported with minimal human supervision from a factory because the task at hand…no longer needs as many hands. So, how do we put our ever increasingly idle hands to work?

Perhaps going “Old-School” has always been the best way to go. Perhaps our future generations’ employment lies in reviving jobs from the past. It certainly wouldn’t be easy to convince most CEOs to hire more and pocket less, (and/or find ways of giving back like tentree) but when people work together and teamwork is established, a thriving community is born within a company. Even a simple contribution (like assembly line or tree planting) can deliver a sense of accomplishment and restore our sense of purpose. We all want to be a relevant participant in this world and when we feel that validation, the joy that results is contagious and affects those who surround us positively.

If we do not ensure that future generations are guaranteed a productive and ample living, we will sentence them to a despair that is already fast approaching on the horizon. We must create a job market that supports future generations so that they may support themselves; and give them problems they feel challenged to solve, not are forced to solve. We may be in a mess, but it is not too late to start cleaning it up.

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