The History and Evolution of Employment: Learn The Fundamentals of Livelihood to Survive Today

H. Revisiting the Theory of Employment

Let us revisit traditional employment and see why employment became mainstream in the first place.

1. Alone we fall, together we stand.
2. Sense of belonging.
3. Hard to take down a system, and easy to eliminate individuals(no independent has ever ruled any country).
4. Common culture, goal. If struggle=>struggle together, so struggle doesn’t appear personal.
5. Drill, discipline, training, growth.
6. Tools, technology, and assistance.
7. Recognition for the role.
8. Emotion to the brand.
9. Human interactions and exchange of energy.
10. Working towards a common vision in a common mission.
11. Security of the family and children as employment offers a livelihood to the family should any adverse life events happen to the employee.
12. Fair wage, unions voice the concerns of the employees.
13. Extended facilities such as housing, healthcare, education, and infrastructure.
14. Availability of debt capital and payout through easy monthly installments. (Debts have been available to the employees since Roman times).
15. Protection from scavengers, criminals, and other anti-social elements as companies take good care of the safety of their employees.
16. Opportunity to travel abroad, (not that freelancers can’t do, but the employees get all the aforementioned benefits in their foreign duties).
17. Key human professional desires of collaborate, cooperate, coordinate, communicate, create.
18. Multi-culturalism(and we all know the benefit of interacting with people of different ages, gender, culture, and language and how that helps in reducing irritation)

If you think and analyze closely, employment theory doesn’t provide money against labor(physical and mental), it provides far too many additional benefits including all-important safety, security, and stability.

Handling Ups and Downs

Life is never flat and upward-only, and so are businesses. With time every business has to transform and adapt to new situations. For example, IBM was once one of the largest players in the PC market, where many other players like Compaq and Dell entered and IBM’s dominance in the PC decreased slowly.

Similarly when touching screen smartphones entered the hands of consumers through iPhone, a 200-year-old telecom company, and not so long ago 90% of market leaders in mobile phones went out of business.

We are driven by emotions and feelings. No one wants to work only for the money. If humans worked only for money, civilization wouldn’t have grown thus far and this fast.

Every emotions and feelings come from stories and not just events. Stories give us emotions because of the twists and turns, sadness and happiness, fear and relief, and such contrasting emotions. Therefore even the livelihood goes through such cycles of ups and downs(whether at individual levels, company levels, or market levels).

The arrival and popularity of new technology put an existing company at existential risk. The other factors that lead to such challenges are geopolitical changes, population changes, societal and economic changes, and so on.

i) Whether it is the Roman army(272 AD, 408 AD) or Golden Metro, Barcelona FC, Kodak, or Indian army(1961 war), Tata Motors (1994), Air India(2019+), Apple(1994), all employer faced existential challenges.

ii) The employee-employer fought together to overcome the tough times.

It is the difficult times that have strengthened or destroyed the businesses. Every technology gets saturated at one point of time in the future.

By 2000, the television, radio, and electronic goods service and repair industry was extraordinarily huge. Several electronic servicemen didn’t have time to breathe due to the high volume of work. However, with the introduction of single board highly denied PCBs and slot-based hardware units, the scope for individual component repair was gone, taking away with it millions of jobs in the service industry.

Companies and corporations are better at reading these macro technological and macroeconomic needs and they prepare their workforce for the transformation. Electronic servicemen who were employed by the electronic companies were upskilled to adopt new chips and technologies which were not possible by the individual freelance servicemen.

It is very hard to survive and grow at equal speed with the change in technology and market because:

1. Servicing consumers have several layers: Sales, marketing, servicing, customer care, technology integration, education, upgradation, creation, maintenance, accounting, taxation, team, management, research, legal, and financing.
2. Whenever there is a change in the technology or market, several layers of the businesses are to be changed and transformed simultaneously. For instance, the way an early assembled computer was made and sold couldn’t be used for high-resolution TVs.
3. Making so many changes at the individual level appears downing as the individuals already would have spent years mastering the current technology which is getting obsolete now.
4. Even when one has a team, or collaborative network, upgradation and adoption of the new technologies by everyone in the network is hard at the same time and at the same speed.
5. Systems are easy to adapt to changes, individuals find it easier to adopt to the systems. Technological changes force systems to adopt new systems, as well as adapt to new changed individuals, and changes in the individual methods.

Companies do close when the business environment changes. For instance, companies like Moser Bear which once was a market leader in optical storage went out of business once cloud storage became popular. A similar fate was met by Nokia, and Kodak when mobiles were replaced by smartphones, and cameras were replaced by digital imaging.

However, when you compare the amount of livelihood affected by the solopreneur, creator, and freelancers, the ratio is a multitude of times more than the loss of employment.

It is this benefit of a system taking care of us in the adverse and transformation times, it is the togetherness in the battle, it is the protection of livelihood in these ups and downs that has made employment such a desirable livlihood state for over two millenials.

Returning of Mercenaries in the form of Outsourcing

We already have understood that the technology sector in particular is a fast-changing sector. We have also understood that even with robust systems in place, large corporations have gone out of business under technological changes. The rate of change we are experiencing today is too fast even for companies and corporations to keep track of.

Therefore even corporations have had to take the services of other small companies, consultants, creators, and solopreneurs to adapt to the changes faster. Security consultants, and marketing consultants (or agencies), have been two areas where the companies have had to outsource their business transformations.

As more and more employees became less and less interested in investing their emotions into the business, but rather the entire relationship had become “you pay me for my labor“, companies saw no point in keeping a large workforce. They slowly adopted a small number of permanent employees and many suppliers of the technology and business components.

A large number of companies today do not have supporting departments such as accounting, HR, and marketing, and rather prefer to outsource them to other individuals or entities.

Outsourcing labor to third-world countries

Roman masters in the past and their bloodline always took the services of slaves from Africa, and Asia to do their hard physical labor. Most of the Roman intellectual systems like hospitals and schools were run by the Greek slaves. Rulers hate working and instead focus on wealth acquisition through plundering to get more slaves to serve them.

Even though civilization has grown(or so we think), core human behaviors haven’t. Therefore we see the same patterns repeated over and over throughout history. Earlier in the Roman times, then later under British, Dutch, and French colonizers, Africans worked in the mines, Asians worked in production, and Western intellects worked in intellectual jobs like science and technology.

Dubai is a classic example of Master-Slave ruling and work outsourcing. You will hardly find any old citizens in Dubai, and you will not find beggars and poor people in the streets of Dubai. That is because this population is kept miles away from the main city, in the small colonies. Workers are recruited from developing countries like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Soudi’s native population doesn’t work hard in construction, agriculture, manufacturing, and production. All these works are reserved for slaves from third-world countries.

In the technology business “mundane tasks” like customer care are outsourced to Asian countries, which gave rise to an entire industry called “Call Centers.” Manufacturing was outsourced to China from many American and European corporations.

Cheap Labors=Profit.

Such outsourcing opened many employment opportunities in countries like India, Vietnam, Philippines, but the workforce was not part of an end-to-end economy, but rather an outsourced cheap laborforce microeconomy. What we had in these sectors was not employment but a Facade of employment.

The entire outsourcing business, theory, and implementation were based solely on profit by the Western masters. This was a form of slavery, that offered no key employment value to the workforce.

Outsourcing key activities for profit eliminated emotional energy exchange between employees, consumers, service providers, and distributers and disintegrated the entire core system into merely “connected for profit.”

Apple outsourced its iPhone production to China. Chinese workforce is not emotionally connected

Outsourcing the “Outsourcing” to the Machines

The core difference between a machine brain is the following:

1. Abstract Correlation and Lateral Thinking: Combining Knowledge and Information from multiple domains into a multi-dimensional model of the Work (like this article presents history, facts, case studies, economy, and human psychology).
2. Human relationship: We are evolved to care for not only ourselves but people around us. We find it hard to have food when people around us are hungry. Machines don’t have care and social relationships.
3. Emotions: Very much all our relationships(whether it is with nature, other humans, books, our profession, our skills, our knowledge) are bound by emotions. So if one cares only for money, his brain works far less efficiently than another individual who is emotionally connected to his profession.
4. Analog Observation: Human brain can process data from the five senses(touch, taste, smell, vision, audio), correlate them with the context, and therefore are much more efficient in decoding a situation. (For instance when we ask someone “How are you?” if the answer is “Great!,” machines will consider this as “great,” but our brain will look into body language, smell, and eyes, and may interpret “you don’t seem that great”
5. Imagination: Human brains can imagine things that are non-existent yet and can work towards making that into a reality. Machines are just statistical probability.
6. Biological Need: Human brain prioritizes decisions based on biological needs{survive, thrive, reproduce}. Machines on the other hand takes decisions based on quantifiable metrics such as cost.
7. Purpose vs Task: Humans are often purpose-driven. (For example, this article is not like a task for me. I am writing this not to complete a task such as “write on employment”. I want to teach you, and stimulate your thoughts about the idea of livelihood so that you can protect your livelihood under the current times). However, all machines, whether it is a simple calculator or a pen, or an AI is task-based. However, when you provide the same prompt to AI, it has to construct an article from an existing source of information related to employment, and it will do a task.

Machines by definition are the ones that make the human effort less. We are at a point of time where we are not even utilizing 30% of the effort that we can put into things. Our brain and body are already working low. Therefore no machines can potentially reduce the effort anymore.

Now we need reverse machines to increase our effort and not machines to decrease our effort. This is because the less effort the brain and body have to put to survive and thrive, the less effort it put to reproduce, and the reduction of all three efforts by definition is approaching death.

If we pay close attention to this theory, the survival of the race in general would depend upon technology degrowth, rather than technology growth. However, as the capitalists have learned only to replace humans with technology, they have lost the plot of replacing technology with humans.

Therefore the plans of replacing humans with cyborgs (like implanting neuro-link chips) will be growing by the day. Every sane brain knows that AI can not be the future, simply because there are no efforts to reduce it in the first place.

After the smartphone age, constant interactions with the mobiles, and placing technology in between every form of human interaction have literally made humans interact with the technology. From the above table, we already know that interaction with technology has to be task-based, literal rather than lateral, and prioritized based on one metric such as cost, eliminating emotional attachment and care.

Now that capitalists(rather neo-imperialists) have already achieved dehumanizing the population, and there are not many human qualities left in the workforce, the workforce is on the verge of getting replaced by machines, because now companies are to serve the machines and not the humans.

On average when a car is put into the garage, it costs about $100 minimum. When we become ill, the OPD costs $7-$20. So for a very long, cars are being taken better care of than bodies. Humans aspire to own better cars and homes, and no better relationships in life.

Because consumers are ready to spend less time with their family to buy their dream car, and more interested to service the car than their body, are more emotional about their car than the relationships, and are ready to spend more money on the car than the relationships, where you think would technological advancement go? Towards creating better family doctors, or creating better cars, and better service for the cars?

As the focus of corporations is constantly shifting towards the objects you have in life rather than you, their focus will always be to build the machines that can serve your machines better.