A life with less forced labour, but increasingly by work in the broadest sense. Pedro Moura, Head of Talent & Marketing at Future.Works, argues that it is necessary to question old paradigms and consider futuristic ideas, such as Universal Basic Income (UBI), which may allow workers not to opt-in for a salaried job.
It is precisely the current notion of work that Pedro Moura claims must be changed.
“My political view is to have a lifeless occupied by forced labour, that is, wage labour, but increasingly by work in the broadest sense. On the edge, I consider that a person who wants to stay at home writing poems is working”, he says.
While bringing futuristic ideas to the discussion table, the Head of Talent & Marketing at Future.Works also admits that these changes carry huge disruptions and that most people do not react well to change. “Let’s say there is a Luddite within each one of us”, Pedro says, explaining that Luddism was a movement of English workers who, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, were famous for the destruction of machines as a form of protest. These workers — called luddites — considered that the machines were used in a fraudulent and deceptive way to dodge traditional labour practices.
The labour market was already undergoing a digital transformation. Has the global pandemic accelerated the pace of this transformation?
Throughout human history, technology or the various technologies that have appeared have always been major motives for pressure and for changing what is considered labour. Nowadays, what we are observing is, in my opinion, a repetition of a historical pattern, on a large scale, of what has always happened in the history of humanity. We are under pressure to adopt or speed up the use of technology, but what is happening is that Covid is just a force that has been added to others that already existed before this pandemic.
The speed with which the world is changing, and the labour market in particular, also brings inequalities?
Inequality is part of any process in which there is destruction in order to create. What technology often does, namely the most disruptive technologies, such as digitalization, is to call into question a set of occupations, ways of life and cultures, which, on the edge, are destroyed.
In recent years, we have observed that the concentration of wealth — not only due to technology but a lot because of what technology allows — is increasing.
There is more capital/income concentrated in the hands of a few and there is either stagnation or even degradation of revenue and access to work and income by very large segments of the world’s population. However, the role of inequalities is also to motivate people to adapt.
However, there will always be people who will find it very difficult to make this adaptation…
Yes, and from that should result in the other side of the equation, which is the State, serving as a buffer and even a facilitator of transitions when these changes take place and, above all, when they take place in a faster way. Inequality must be fought, not in the sense of preventing technological progress, but of mitigating the risks that technological development entails.
Can Universal Basic Income, which is precisely one of the major trends of the future of work, be the key to less inequality, stagnation and social segregation?
UBI is an idea of the future that must be discussed and that can be considered. Technology has changed the structure of work; it was always like that. There are people who advocate (I’m one of them) that the increasing technological pressure and the increasing automation that arises from this technological pressure, will decrease the need for human work.
Much of the work, when done by machines, does lead to the rise of emerging professions, but I believe that things like maintaining a 40-hour workweek will be increasingly difficult. To give an example, the number of hours worked per year in Portugal is 1700 hours, while in Germany it’s 1300 hours. And, keep in mind that 350 hours represents two months using a standard work schedule. Why does this happen? Because Germany, obviously, has a society that, from the automation, social structure and value proposition point of view, is much more ahead than ours (Portugal).
There will no longer be a need for so much human effort for work, which creates a problem. There are only two options: either the number of people working in a salaried way is reduced, or the average working hours for everyone is reduced. Nevertheless, we must realize that these changes bring about very big disruptions and that most people, by default, are against change. Let’s say that there is a Luddit within each one of us.
I believe that UBI, more than being a measure that allows improving people’s lives, is a definition of a baseline so that everyone can not only be working but — and here we are talking about the future — choose not to have a paid job as we consider it.
Does this imply a change in the notion of work we have today?
It is a change from a basic paradigm that is completely installed. When we talk about labour, we talk about salaried work, but there is a lot of work that is done by many people with a positive contribution to society that is not paid work. And without that work, all of this probably also fell apart. I’m talking about parents, health care providers, volunteering, often even artists… The notion of paid work will not disappear, but it will gradually lose importance.
My political view is to have a lifeless occupied by forced labour, that is, wage labour, but increasingly by work in the broadest sense. To share an edge situation, I consider that a person who wants to stay at home writing poems is working. Work is not only that which puts bread on the table, but it is also, as humans, doing what gives us satisfaction, fulfilment and meaning in life.
Interestingly, when it comes to this, the people who complain the most about their work are the first to say that these people [who choose not to have a paid job] were going to be rogues. This is a bit of a paradox. I usually say that it’s like the slave who, when given freedom, says that wants to stay as a slave, and even argues that those who accept freedom are rogues.
Clearly, we are talking about things that culturally are brutally rooted in the collective psyche of the whole society, and not only in Portugal, but practically all over the world.
Another trend in the future of work is the four-day work week, associated, by those who defend it, to an increase in efficiency and productivity. Is this a difficult practice to implement in Portugal?
I worked four days a week for a long time, I am a living guinea pig for that. What I can say is that when I went from working four days to five days a week, I felt my productivity drop dramatically. The four-day week, or three-day week and so on, is part of the reduction — which, for now, should be optional, but in the future will be practically mandatory — in human, salaried work time.
Jobs will gradually require fewer people to have a fixed schedule and daily synchronicity which, as we know, results in huge problems, both in terms of traffic, at the environmental level, the cost level, travels, loss of quality of life… So, it is something that should be seen as natural.
The disconnection between the notion of time and the notion of production is another paradigm that must change. There is a lot of talk about cost per hour, but this is increasingly less real, it is a legacy from the past. If we continue with “it is like this because it was already like this”, and we do not question basic paradigms, we won’t evolve as a society and as people.
I can’t understand when a person says one has to work five days a week. There was also a time when people worked seven days a week. Why are five days better than seven and worse than three? It seems that we are talking about sacred paradigm cows that cannot be questioned, but we must question them.
With shorter workweeks, remote work, employees working from anywhere in the country or even the world, hired from any geographic location, what are the main challenges that companies will face?
Companies had some remote work policies, for example working remotely one day a week. That has changed. Now the norm is not to go to the office, although you can go there, and before that, it was to commute your way to the office. This is about to change, and people — namely people working in Tech — will increasingly want to be able to work remotely when choosing a job. It will be a factor for attracting talent that has gained an importance that it did not have before.
The management structures of companies, managers and leaders also must adapt to being able to manage a company with Tech professionals in this setup. Unfortunately, there are still many people who are unable to have subordinates without being in sight. There is a very low level of trust and autonomy and this leads to the need to learn to trust people, to give them autonomy and to be able, above all, to create a culture of people’s responsibility for the work that is done. And this implies, at least in our culture, a huge change.
For their part, teams must learn to work remotely. Spending the whole day on Zoom is no solution. This creates a brutal burnout. A more asynchronous culture, based on written language, is crucial for companies that effectively want to take advantage to improve productivity.
We live precisely in the age of burnout, social anxiety and chronic lack of time, and one of the main concerns that remote work carried was the difficulty in disconnecting, in separating the personal and professional environment. Is it a growing problem in the labour market?
Anxiety in our society, from the point of view of the ability to maintain a paid job as a way of guaranteeing not only income but also the social position, is brutally violent. We are at a stage of society where this should no longer be the case. There shouldn’t be so much psychological disorder, so much fear to base people’s decisions or non-decisions about work. There is anxiety about everything that has to do with work, from the way people talk about work to the concerns they have about work, it is not healthy.
When we are in “teleworking”, another element comes in the isolation factor, which is not often optional, but forced. And one thing is optional remote working, another thing is forced remote working. Before the pandemic, coming to the office was also forced because there were people who probably didn’t want to go to the office and had to come without really needing it, as we can see now…
We are talking about burnout in this context, but we can see what it was like before the pandemic. Why were some people forced to go to the office without really needing it? Was it because the managers had to see people? We need to see things from both perspectives.
We are makers of futures!
https://future.works/
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