‘Jobs’ Forecast: Working for the Love of It

Listen closely to the fascinating discussions and debates running through “Jobs: Not What They Used to Be--The New Face of Work in America” and a new message can be heard.

Deeply innovative U.S. companies like Ideo in Palo Alto or worker-friendly firms like Atlanta-based Home Depot have seemingly happy employees not because they’re union-organized or the highest-paid in their fields but because the jobs themselves are satisfying.

This report by producer-writers Christopher and Susan Koch and hosted by Hodding Carter suggests that American workers in the changing economy will thrive in quality jobs whose value isn’t measured just in dollars.

Watch the Ideo engineers, sitting cross-legged like little kids on the floor, or the Home Depot workers doing group pep rallies, and you’re not looking at merely obedient worker units following the company line. Ideo’s graduate-think tank atmosphere and Home Depot’s family-style approach are both centered on teamwork, peer pressure and self-motivation, which takes bossy managers and bad stress out of the system.

The stolid Carter introduces us not only to Ideo and Home Depot but also to various team-oriented operations, like car-seat manufacturer Johnson Controls, Konica and BMW, where employees are hired only after a lengthy process of tests and meetings.

This screening system, sifting out people who can’t work in non-hierarchical small groups, is becoming more and more the norm in U.S. firms, according to the Koches’ report. As more than one employer says here, you either fit the culture or you don’t.

Underneath this picture of American workplaces full of elite, working “family” groups is the running debate between economic critics Jeremy Rifkin and Richard Florida. While Florida declares that our inevitable future is in a “knowledge-based” economy, Rifkin charges that such a future will produce a stratified economy of information-age haves and have-nots.

Rifkin, notoriously vulnerable to the label of being the Chicken Little of economic forecasts, says the have-nots may be as much as 80% of the work force. That is probably just as excessively bleak as Florida’s incredibly rosy forecasts of a kind of New Age supply-side boom. The consensus, though, is that without a national drive for retraining people out of obsolete jobs, the lovable jobs of the future will never be theirs.

* “Jobs: Not What They Used to Be--The New Face of Work in America” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.