The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era

by Robert L. Heilbroner (Foreword), Jeremy Rifkin (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1997

  $4.36

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $3.27

  Global unemployment has now reached its highest level since the great depression of the 1930s. Technologies which have brought miraculous improvements in efficiency and productivity have also slashed the numbers employed in manufacturing and agriculture, while the service sector is quite unable to take up the slack. While a tiny elite of knowledge workers -scientists, entrepreneurs an consultants - will still be in demand, most jobs are disappearing fast, resulting in the creation of a morose underclass , caught between apathy and criminal violence. Such, argues the author in this powerful polemic, is our true situation today. We can either bury our heads the sand or urgently rewrite the social contract by expanding the independent (non-profit) third sector, cutting the working week and sharing out the fruits of progress. The choice will determine the future of us all.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1996

  $5.92

  Jeremy Rifkin argues that we are entering a new phase in history - one characterized by the steady and inevitable decline of jobs. The world, says Rifkin, is fast polarizing into two potentially irreconcilable forces: on one side, an information elite that controls and manages the high-tech global economy; and on the other, the growing numbers displaced workers, who have few prospects and little hope for meaningful employment in an increasingly automated world. The end of work could mean the demise of civilization as we have come to know it, or signal the beginning of a great social transformation and a rebirth of the human spirit.