not quite there yet

Futurists once promised an age of leisure but it looks like we'll be working into old age

Technology would give us endless free time, but mandatory retirement is rapidly being phased out

The Vancouver Sun

Monday, September 5, 2005

By Miro Cernetig

On this Labour Day weekend, it's worth pondering this spacey prediction from the Futurist, the respected journal with a penchant for Utopian visions of what's to come.

Very soon, it postulates, we will all have a chance to take family vacations to the moon. Visit the Mare Tranquillitatis! Use low gravity to fly like birds in lunar domes! And then rocket back to Earth on Monday morning. All this by 2020.

This would no doubt beat the family pilgrimage to Disneyland. But there's a question those Phds and fabulists at the Futurist still need to answer for the average salaryman: Just how do you go about getting that much time off work? Will they take credit cards? And, incidentally, whatever happened to that paperless office you were promising back here on Earth?

Let's face it, when it comes to predicting how we earn our daily bread, futurologists have been mightily disappointing, often ridiculous.

Not only is there no sign of the paperless office (judging by the pulp and paper industry's soaring sales our fetish continues unabated) but we're also still waiting for that even headier promise -- near endless leisure time. Baby boomers and GenXers have long heard that fantasy technological liberation, best captured by that 21st-century cartoon family, The Jetsons. (Theme song: "They're the Jetsons! . . . Machines do the working, machines do run, if they need anything they push a button and it's done." )

Well, we're not quite there yet.

"How could the futurologists be so wrong?" wondered Charles McGrath in a recent issue of the The New York Times Magazine. "George Jeston, we should recall -- the person many of us cartoon-watchers assumed we would someday become -- worked a three-hour day, standard in the interplanetary era. Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler predicted that by 2000 we would have so much free time that we wouldn't know how to spend it."

Here's a dose of our real-time reality.

Most of us are so chained to work we don't even dare take the time off we've earned. Canadian workers, on average allowed 21 days off vacation a year, leave about three days apiece "on the table," finds the latest "international vacation survey" from Expedia, the Internet travel service. That works out to about 43 million unused vacation days, worth about $6.1 billion to employers. This, incidentally, puts Canadians in a dead heat per capita with our Calvinistic neighbours, the Americans, who leave behind the same three vacation days per work each year, though they only get an average of 12 days vacation.

There is undeniably something North American about this propensity for vacation-wasting. Europeans don't let time slip away so easily. The average French worker, the world's vacation champ with 39 days off annually, leaves only one day unused. Germans also make sure they leave behind only a single day on the vacation calendar. While British workers, who get 23 days off, leave behind the least of anyone -- only four hours of vacation time goes unused by the average Brit.

Why are we on this continent so obsessed with work these days? A big part of it may be fear. Labour laws here make it easier for North American companies to shed workers than it is in Europe. Globalization, and the prospect of those who work for $20 a week, not an hour, are the new dread of the middle class. And in this age of downsizing, when it is increasingly difficult to glide from one well-paying job to another, people worry that if they leave their cubicle empty too long the boss might realize they're dispensable.

"Many employees say it is pressure or fear that keeps them from using all their vacation, or their workload," concluded John Rossheim, reporting on the findings of another poll commissioned by the job-finding agency Monster.com. "Some 11 per cent of respondents to the Monster polls said pressure from the boss prevented them from using their full vacations; nine per cent said they feared being laid off."

What's more, losing a job is more worrisome a prospect than ever for the average Canadian worker.

It's simply getting harder to make ends meet and losing a steady paycheque, or having wages cut, could be a financial disaster.

The Vanier Institute of the Family, which has been studying pressures on ordinary Canadian families for 40 years, finds that Canadians savings rates have plummeted to record lows. And most are sinking further into the red every year. The average household debt now exceeds $66,000. Two out of every three families, according to the latest survey, spend between $1,100 to $2,300 more a year than they earn.

"Ten years ago, people had savings, as much as $2,500 a year per family," says Alan Mirabelli, the institute's executive director. "Now it's close to zero or in many families it is below zero. An upward movement in interest card or mortgage rates, or an unforeseen emergency, and there's no buffer.

"So you bet the stress level is high."

You don't have to be a futurologist to figure out what this rising debt load translates into for most: yes, working even more and longer. If the downward trend in savings continues, economists predict people will be forced to delay or even give up altogether on the possibility of early retirement.

Signs that working into old age is becoming an accepted future are now unmistakable. Mandatory retirement, once a fact of working life, is rapidly being phased out in North America.

True, this is partially because many want to work past 65. But it's also due to looming labour shortages that are suddenly making older workers more attractive.

And governments have their own reason for wanting people to work longer. Without an older work force, projections suggest there just may not be enough taxpayers out there to pay for aging baby boomers benefits. Many in the United States expect that sometime in the next decade Social Security benefits won't be available to anyone under 70.

So what's the good news for workers on this holiday weekend invented to celebrate their labour? It may be this one prediction from Vancouver's Laurier Institute: It's going to get a lot easier in the future to find work.

"... the number of younger workers entering the workforce will be smaller than the number of baby boomers who will eventually retire," predicts the institute.

"Because the workforce in 2010 will contain relatively fewer younger people, there will be less competition for jobs."

It may not be as leisurely an existence as The Jetsons once promised. Then again, perhaps we shouldn't complain -- we probably can't afford that much free time.

Using a "cost of leisure calculator," created by the insurance firm Allstate, you can now go on the Internet to predict the future cost of green fees for a 35-year-old who wants to stop working at 55 and just play golf: $354,000 US.

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UN list predicts a bleak future

News24

08/09/2005 12:28 - (SA)

Johannesburg - The United Nations development programme's (UNDP) human development index (HDI) for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) makes for grim reading.

A Zambian, statistically, has less chance today of reaching 30 years of age than an English worker of 1840 - when the forbidding circumstances of the early Industrial Revolution consigned many a Briton to an early grave.

The HDI measures achievement in terms of life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income.

It is part of a larger, annual, global human development report, released in New York on Wednesday.

Reduced life expectancy

Report co-writer and statistician Claes Johannson said World War 1 and the 1918 influenza pandemic stripped 16 years off the life expectancy of the average Frenchman.

The Aids pandemic in Botswana has taken 31 years from the Batswana - reducing the time they can expect to live from 65 years to a mere 34.

He said large parts of the world have made significant progress in human development since 1975 - sometimes quite rapidly.

But sub-Saharan Africa remained an exception.

Today 18 countries have a lower HDI reading than in the 1990s. Twelve are in Africa. By contrast, the number for the 1980s was only six.

Commenting on the impact of these realities on the UN's millennium development goals (MDGs), Johannson said 115 countries were off-track on one or more of the goals, that aim to eradicate extreme poverty by 2015, by "more than a generation".

In some instances, set objectives might be reached by 2115, a hundred years later than planned.

Slow progress

He said the basic thrust of this year's report was that the MDGs will not be reached using a "business as usual" approach.

UNDP resident representative in South Africa, scholastica Sylvan Kimaryo, said the MDGs, which will be discussed next week at a special UN summit, amounted to a promissory note to the world's poor.

"The report identifies inequality as one of the key reasons why progress towards the MDGs is too slow. Without tackling inequality, many middle-and low income countries will find it difficult if not impossible to reach MDG targets on income poverty, child mortality and others."

Looking at trade, aid and security, Kimaryo said while much aid was wasted in the past, the right policy environment did in fact create conditions for more rapid human development - as seen in Mozambique, Ghana and Tanzania.

As the cases of India and China demonstrated, trade has massive potential to lift people out of poverty.

But then farm subsidies, tariffs and other mechanisms to stop developing countries from moving up the value chain had to be addressed. For example, 90% of the world's cocoa came from developing nations, but only 30% of the chocolate, as the rich protected their industries.

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