Let's get real. The notion of a job with security, benefits, retirement and health care is little more than 75 years old. That's not very long in human history. Yet, the latest Business Week emphasizes the well-known fact that companies are making the era of the temp more than temporary. So. . . ? What's new? Humans have had to work around those situations for centuries.
When we're gripped by a sense of entitlement generated by a 75 year history, it makes it far more difficult to deal with the realities of today's world. My tobacco farming grandparents had occasional sharecroppers and they all understood the deal. Some of them saved their money and bought their own acreage, and some of them spent their money and did without. And there were plenty of times that my grandmother shared her largesse with the poor and inept. That's the nature of community.
Thankfully, we aren't going back to the dark side of that world. Still, today's world is a lot different than the rich middle class, union driven, auto business that I grew up with in Detroit. So we're going to need to get smarter and take on more personal responsibility. When major economic structures change, the change is usually quite messy. That's what's happening today and it's messy. So for a lot of people it means they'll have to go back to the drawing boards.
Lest there be any doubt,this is a rant! It's a way of saying that occasionally I become rather fatigued when business magazines and media are governed by a newspaperman's sensibilities, more interested in conflict and color than historical perspective, order and synthesis. Over American history, there have been periods when for a number of reasons the media has become shrill. The shrillness we're experiencing today seems to be coming out of the intensely competitive nature of the business and the paranoia some media people seem to think necessary to succeed.
[photo by Christopher Lange, Flickr]