Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
than one job is likely to expand. Careers will no longer mean one job with
one employer in one location. Over the course of a working life, individuals
can expect a career to involve many jobs, many employers, many locations
and a range of occupations and skills. Such people are currently known as
'portfolio workers' (a term first coined by Charles Handy, 1989) and hold
multiple jobs or contracts in multiple fields with multiple companies - they
are independents with a portfolio of skills ready to be contracted out to
clients on a job-to-job basis.
4 Location of work
Work will continue to spread outside of the traditional boundaries imposed
by time and space such as location and set working hours. Advancing tech-
nology (such as cell phones, modems and laptop computers) support home-
working, telecommuting and 24-hour employment contact. As is already
occurring in some instances, the workplace will shift from city centres and
head offices to homes and into cyberspace. Some work will be continuous
and linked across countries and time zones. The notion of a standard
working day and working week will be increasingly challenged and more
people are likely to become 'portfolio workers'.
5 Unemployment and underemployment
Unemployment and underemployment are unlikely to disappear for the
fundamental reasons that full employment is no longer an outcome
expected from our economic system. Curiously, in the present electoral cli-
mate, politicians are not prepared to tolerate inflation but they will tolerate
unemployment. Economic management is no longer assigned the responsi-
bility for reducing unemployment since unemployment is no longer pre-
sented as a collective responsibility but as an individual responsibility.
Individuals are unemployed since they do not possess the 'right' skills, the
'right' employment record, the 'right' personal characteristics or the 'right'
attitude. In addition, while work remains conceptualised and constructed
around the market, then there will always be those who for various reasons
will be excluded from the market sector.
6 Pay inequities/work-life balance
As Watson
et al
. (2003) comment, the
current system does not fairly reward
effort; instead it unfairly rewards market power. This has been evident with
the unrestrained earnings growth at the top end of the labour market. Unless
