What work?

The crippling reality of unemployment

While the work-family discourse has made as its starting point those already in the workplace, the significant number of those not in the workplace and whose plight ought to inform interventions and policies ongoing in the workplace, has become of pressing concern. Global unemployment numbers, already at their highest in many countries, are projected to inch up by another 3 million in 2023 to total to 208 million. Of this share, the U.S is projected to witness a 1.2% increase in unemployment rates above the current 3.4%, with Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Spain projected to struggle with 17%, 15% and 12.7% unemployment rates respectively. The situation is much grimmer on the African continent, where South Africa leads the global unemployment rates at 30%,1.2 million graduates in Uganda remain unemployed and the Continent’s unemployment rate more than triples global averages. The brunt of these statistics is disproportionately borne by young people, whose unemployment rate is often higher than that of adults, by up to three times. The intersectionality of race, age and gender precipitates an especially disadvantageous employment outcome for African young women. The advent of the pandemic worsened an already bad situation because young people again faced higher job losses or in other instances were altogether barred from entry into the workforce at a time of massive business losses and closures. While studies continue to recommend stronger academia-industry relations, entrepreneurship infused scholarship and diversifications into green, blue and orange economies as a panacea to unemployment, little evidence exists as to the practical reorganizations and resources directed at realizing these outcomes. In the absence of consistently targeted efforts at both the domestic and international fronts in narrowing the youth unemployment gap, poverty, inequality and unsustainability will continue to shape our world.

The contours of the new age of work

Offices, bosses, hierarchies, work hours, and other once easily recognizable work-place features are collectively becoming artefacts of a passing age. The new age of work is largely influenced by the dominant 21st century themes, pluralism and preference. Thanks to the 4th industrial revolution characterized by near real-time cooperation and communication of production systems, work is no longer a monolithic concept. In addition to technological advancement, rapid globalization and changing demographics are shaping the current understanding of work.From digital nomadic workers to crowd-workers, the employment terrain appears lined with plentiful opportunities upon which the employee is to exercise their preference. In order to achieve a coherent classification of the multitudinous work arrangements, categorizes them under three subtypes of work flexibilities; flexibility of work scheduling; flexibility of work location and flexibility of the employment relationship. Flexible scheduling transfers agency to the employee to determine how long and when to work. It encompasses concepts such as flextime, in which employees can vary when they arrive and leave work around a core time band when all employees are present and compressed weeks where employees elect to work longer on some days in a week in order to get longer offs within the week. The flexibility of work location denotes the ability to work remotely or to telecommute, away from the organization’s premises. It was originally thought that remote work translated directly to working from home and thereby only offering temporal flexibility. Now, other possibilities for greater geographic flexibility, detaching the work place from the home are emerging in concepts such as co-shared workplaces and work-from-anywhere arrangements. These location flexible orderings are observed to lower, or in certain instances, eliminate, the costs associated with purchasing, building or maintaining a physical office while at the same time increasing productivity from employees who cut back on commute time and are able to craft work environments that are quieter and more comfortable. However, these arrangements have been observed to cast a dark shadow on work-family balance by blurring the divide, increasing work intensity and employee isolation and hiking home office costs. For employers, managing, monitoring and providing the necessary support for remote workers has been challenging. Hybrid work, in which work is done remotely but with the additional requirement to go to the physical workplace in agreed intervals, has been suggested as a happy middle ground between traditional work arrangements and remote work. Flexible employment arrangements cover concepts such as on-demand platform work, crowd work and jobs haring, all reliant on digital platforms to match workers with consumer demands, provide uniform tools towards the provision of the work and set rules governing the work done by rewarding good services and discouraging poor ones.
The digitalization of the labour market, whether through the incorporation of digital software into current jobs or creation of unique digital jobs is realizing monumental impacts. credits digital labour platforms with the generation of at least US$52 billion in 2019, although 70 percent of these revenues were concentrated in the United States (49%) and China (23%) with Europe’s share coming a distant third at 11%. The rest of the world accounted for 17% . In terms of employment digital workers are comprising a significant category of the labour force, with the jobs requiring digital knowledge more than tripling in the US for the period between 2002-2016, and rapidly rising in Europe. Of note is the fact that digital employment continues to provide employment opportunities for workers who were marginalized within the traditional labour systems such as persons living with disabilities, migrant workers and refugees.
The seemingly endless flexible employment arrangements notwithstanding, trends in the digital labour market are eliciting concern. The unregulated development of AI, robotics and nanotechnology for example continues to heighten the fear of increased joblessness. While this argument has often been countered with the idea that many more forms of digital jobs are in the offing, and that humans are being set free to pursue more creative engagements, the already existent inequalities make the equitable realization of the technological dividends highly unlikely. Some of these concerns are laying the foundation for the next industrial revolution, industry 5.0 aimed at returning the human and his concerns at the center of the industrial revolution . Although credited for great advancements in digitalization and the emergence of AI technologies portending great potentials for production efficiency and flexibility, industry 4.0 paid little focus on sustainability and the welfare of workers. It is hoped that this reorientation will achieve human centricity, achieve sustainability and build a more resilient industry.

The challenges posed by the new age of work within the African context

Numerous studies have already documented the pitfalls associated with the new age of work. Within the African context, participation in the digital labour market remains disappointingly low, primarily on account of the huge gap in digital infrastructure, insufficiency of digital skills and the sparse ownership of personal computers. found that only 17 per cent of the African population could afford one gigabyte of data, compared to 37% in the Latin American region and Asia’s 47%. This reality places the vast majority of Africa’s digital labour participation firmly in the lowest cadre jobs, such as e-hailing. Although unemployment is of pressing concern in Africa, the quality of employment opportunities available, especially in the digital space, is equally unsettling. Because a significant category of people falling within the ‘Millennial’ category, that is ages 28 to 38, usually fall outside the definition of young persons as conceptualized by organizations such as the UN, it is assumed that they are not plagued with the same unemployment hardships as their 15-24 year counterparts. However, just because they are not under the microscope as a specified vulnerable group does not mean that they are faring better. The extensive ILO study on Platform work found that the dominant age group within the digital workforce falls within the 28-35 age brackets. Of this category app-hailing drivers, the segment where most of Africa’s platform workers fall, average 36 years. And because of poverty and limited access to social protection, this category of Africa’s workforce is vulnerable to exploitation. Extant literature shows how the promise of employment has recruited candidates for human trafficking from the continent who are then forced into the highly lucrative criminal web of labour exploitation While app-hailing services such as Uber offer income to a large number of ‘Millennial’ workers, these drivers struggle to reach a minimum income.In addition, platform work is considered mostly as a supplement to other employment engagements in developed economies while developing countries see these opportunities as alternatives to unemployment. In addition, the loosely defined employment relationship means that the App owning companies have no obligation at all beyond provision of the platform. In essence, all the gains made for the benefit of the worker, such as work hours, provision of social protection, provision of occupational safety and health infrastructure are being rolled back on the platform. Often, the combination of constantly battling traffic congestion, irregular job allocations, long working hours, the pressure to drive quickly and constant surveillance takes a toll. And the gender gap in terms of job opportunities and wages has no hope of narrowing, when the women representation in app-based and delivery sectors is less than 10%.
With all the opportunities promised by the new age of work, serious cut backs on human rights in the workplace are taking place on Platforms every day. Slavery and servitude, scarcity of decent work opportunities, privacy infringements, long work hours, gender inequality, little to no social protection and almost no collective bargaining power are the frightening hall marks of the current digitally mediated work.. Although humanity was once in this position, the current situation is compounded by the fact that platforms are privately owned spaces and this shifts the power from governments, as was the case, to absolutely powerful private entities.. And so it is that the current workplace absolutely demands that workers upskill, Chat GPT is a good example of this necessity, but at the same time have to grapple with rewriting the liberties of digital workers, a category all workers will soon belong to in the not so distant future. Within the African context the additional challenge of leapfrogging digital infrastructure and skill endures, as does the struggle against systemic discrimination and inequality in machine learning. And it is the dominant workforce, those 28-38 year-old ‘Millennials’ who are required to lead these interventions.