Laughter, we all know, comes in many forms: belly laughs, chortles, snickers and guffaws. But if you’ve never heard what cynical, resigned laughter sounds like, just do this: Find a group of twenty-somethings somewhere in North America and ask them if they feel confident about their capacity to find stable, high-paying jobs in the next few years. Trust me: the bitter, knowing chuckles will last a solid minute.
As it turns out, though, the general feeling about employment that simmers in conversation across this country isn’t simply anecdotal. According to a recent study by the United Way and McMaster University, those who like the far-out idea of knowing where the next paycheque is coming from are increasingly out of luck. In the Greater Toronto Area, nearly half of all workers are in some form of “precarious employment” in which they lack security, benefits—or as I call it, ‘the kind of stability that helps people not go crazy.’
It’s a change partly enabled by technology. Telecommuting has allowed some people to work from wherever. Technology itself is part of a broad shift toward a service economy and the globalisation of manufacturing. There are even rumblings that technology is to blame for the fact that even as the economy grows, jobs aren’t being created. There’s also that small, hardly-discussed phenomenon in which formerly stable fields like journalism, media, and retail are being severely disrupted by the web. Add it all up and the relative stability of late twentieth century work starts to look positively utopian.
Now, I’m not a religious man, but if there is a God, I’d wager he’s sitting up there having a good laugh himself. After spending a century or so desperately inventing and adopting new tech, we’ve simultaneously ignored the deep, broad effects of a modern technocratic economy. Now, we’ve painted ourselves into a paradoxical corner—except, if we’re honest, it’s really robots that did the painting and then bloggers snarked about it for five cents a word.
Of course, it’s not as if precarious employment is itself inherently negative. As technology journalist Peter Novak argues, the new economy offers a flexibility, challenge and the almost life-affirming idea of constant novelty. As my mother says, change is as good as rest, and when compared to 9-to-5 drudgery, freelancing can seem downright idyllic sometimes. Unfortunately, idyllic is often just the right word. The United Way report makes it clear: For every person making it as a consultant-for-hire, there’s another experiencing the inverse situation of uncertainty, underemployment—or, worse, exploitation.
Novak suggests that the move to precarious labour is part of broader “irreversible structural forces,” and that may well be true. Yet, it’s also an example of what thinker Michael Sacasas calls ‘The Borg Complex’: we recognize that potentially bad things are happening, but simply say that resistance is futile. If you suggest otherwise, you’re just a backward-looking luddite. But if the ‘inevitable’ future involves the often debilitating uncertainty of week-to-week survival—and the erasure of benefits, programs designed to encourage upward social mobility, or who knows what else—it seems we might have to do more than simply say “well, shit is happening.” And if not—if we simply throw up our hands and give in to machines and the market—it’s possible that bitter laughter may soon turn to tears.
