THE "NEW WORKER"

COVID-19 has already resulted in changes to the way we think about many aspects of life, not least, the way we think of work and workers. While the divide between wealthy management and middle class workers is supposedly widening day-by-day, the COVID-19 workplace situation is pushing back. Executive or middle class (blue or white collar) workers are experiencing the “distributed workplace” in increasing numbers. Japan recently boasted about workations (“simultaneous work and vacation, that is, distributed work in enviable as well as “home” locations). And the idea of physical control, bullying and assault as a means to “keep everyone in line” is already being challenged, narrowing the distance between executives, management and workers (actual product or service producers). But even more telling is the slow but incessant change from salary to income based on success, and most importantly, success in product sales and service provision.

Capitalism can expect to result in overly-well-paid executives and poorly-paid-producers. Increasing Profit Capitalism, a variant where the “value” of a business is based on it’s ability to increase profit rather than to simply satisfy consumers in a supply-and-demand economy, opens the opportunity for gaming and gambling called “Wall Street” trading. But the “New Capitalism” resulting from COVID-19 distancing requirements (which, I believe, must persist after COVID-19 in anticipation of the next pandemic or disaster) is creating what at first appear to be part-time, contract-style, distributed-workplace, pay-based-on-success jobs, is heralding a “new worker,” and equally so a “new management” and “new executive.” The seed are there. The question is if and how it will fit into our overall work-based economy. The biggest challenge is in recrafting the idea, what I call updating infrastructure. The potential effects are staggering.

One effect of this emerging change is that social services like health care, will be pushed even further to be provided by the federal government on an egalitarian, single-payer basis. Another effect is that to fund this and other federal services, there will be a push for capping individual income, and elimination of “deductions” for corporations. With redistribution of work will come redistribution of population, hopefully from centers of increasing concentration to wider distribution of people and households, ushering in the opportunity to rebuild public health services to prevent the spread of war, disease, pestilence and chronic stress. It will also challenge the very nature of the family.

It’s difficult for any one person to fully imagine the extent of “one little” change or shift in thinking, opening the door to a new genre I call SCI-FU or science-based futuring. The idea is to create a mirror for individual readers to “look into a science-based, plausible future” and in doing so, clarify what changes one wishes to embark on. In short, a shift from being victims of change to masters of our fate. A move as a people from adolescence, with its divisiveness to a more compassionate and diverse adulthood. From evolution based on pure competition to a new level of well-thought-out-and-discussed cooperative planning which places in the future for everyone. Even my female protagonist Simi Andry Jan [Jan-Rho], a Wiccan Priestess and professional acronymeur in THE EDGE OF MADNESS (Aignos 2020) by Raymond Gaynor (browser search “The Edge of Madness Gaynor”) available in printed and ebook formats

The Edge of Madness