THE WORK OF LIVING LABOUR “Labour is the living, form-giving fire, it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality as their formation by living time.�
reWork
reWork A STRATEGIC DESIGN STUDIO FOCUSED ON THE FUTURE OF WORK
reWork is a strategic design studio specializing in action-led research and spatial strategies. The studio strives to re-imagine the spatial and organizational logics that steer and complements emerging trends of work. The studio aims to trigger a response to the structuring of spaces across multiple scales to ensure a systemic transformation of the role of work in society today and in the future. reWork uses strategic design as a methodology starting from an understanding of the complex and interrelated systems, which shape our contemporary world of work, to synthesise inputs into action-led research - upon which we develop well-informed design strategies. We actively use a knowledge bank as an archive of information. It is employed as an instrument for working with a cross-scale understanding, enabling us to develop critical and targeted design tools to stimulate systemic change in the field of the future of work. reWork is led by research-driven architects with experience in a diverse range of projects and design methods. We have focused over the years on research and design projects both in academia and in our professional experience.
email: office@rework.work
Partners:
CVR nr.: 39663077
Bruno Malusa tel: +45 27 69 25 52
Adress: Krystalgade 15, 1172 - Copenhagen Denmark
COVER IMAGE QUOTE Karl Marx, Grundisse
Sofie Angelie Hovgaard tel: +45 29 70 75 11
INFORMATION KNOWLEDGE BANK reSEARCH WORK
OBJECT SPACE
rePURPOSE WORK
NEIGHBOURHOOD / CITY
reTHINK WORK
REGIONAL / INTER-REGIONAL
reSET WORK NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL
reLOCATE WORK reDESIGN WORK
GLOBAL
ACTIONS RESPONSE ACTION-LED RESEARCH
reWork deals with cutting-edge empirical and theoretical expertise from other disciplines - political economy, sociology and cultural … - in order to construct critical tools, rigorous diagnoses and alternative models of work.
SOURCE
CITI Research / University of Oxford, 2016
least likely
1
2
most likely
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
No answer
10
11
1
Investment in education
2
Encouragement of entrepreneurship
3
Active labour market policies
4
Funding research to increase employment
5
Lower taxes for low-income households
6
Higher taxes for high-income households
7
Higher taxation of capital versus labour
8
Regulating automation implementation
9
Introduction of basic living incomes
10
Encouraging immigration
11
Policies to stimulate consumer demand
DIAGRAM Policies to deal with automation impact on labour and wealth distribution (Survey of CITI research institutional clients)
THE FUTURE OF WORK INTRODUCTION
Work has become the most essential activity in shaping human lives. With the rise of the work centred lifestyle, society has developed a cultural obsession with work and productivity. Round-the-clock work, Sunday work emails and flexibility have all become conditions of a workforce that live further away from work, are less collectively organised and barely knows if they will ever retire. Incorporated in this formula is the main dominator, that all other factors are a result of, namely that digital technologies have blurred all boundaries between work and leisure. Throughout history, work has taken a series of forms - always rearranging the relation between life and society. Work has been shifting continuously to different gradients of importance, quality and quantity, bringing with it different sets of unfixed relations between individuals. The succession of many forms of work over time shows that the role of work is not fixed. Can new scenarios be thought to actively shape new ways of work and to produce the material and immaterial world we live in? Rising unemployment, automation, climate change and overwork are all issues that will inevitably put pressure on governments, businesses, unions and the individual to change the way work is produced in the future. How do we imagine those issues to be addressed in the future world of work? And most importantly, which kinds of relations and qualities do we want to see emerge in the future role of work in life and in society? Current solutions, idealised by politicians and businesses, only providing limited options that often put too much emphasis on the responsibility of the individual in shaping its own future - removing all responsibility from the collective. However, in order to deeply re-imagine the future of work, there’s a need to rethink it across scales and in relation to a complex set of issues. From an understanding of how global, territorial, regional and local factors defines the role of work, a new spatiality for the future of work can emerge.
reWork
THE KEY CHALLENGES This chapter presents an exploration of the current conditions of employment, work trends, digital developments etc. that has and will continue to have a large impact on the role of work in society today and in the future. The categorization depicts various scales from intercontinental and transnational to that of the office and body. Automation / work substitution
Technological progress has become visible today both as machine substitution and complementation. Jobs gets overtaken by robots, and in other cases, tasks of certain jobs get automated, liberating humans to do more important and valuable tasks. In Japan, caretakers in nursing homes have been replaced by robots. Work complementation makes humans more productive and efficient at their jobs, resulting in a need for fewer people overall. A high unemployment level within a certain field contributes to an unregulated income for those in jobs, as there’s always someone who will do the work cheaper. Though production has increased across many sectors, it wasn’t followed by an increase in workers’ income. Automation will make a business more efficient when the needed technology is cheaper than human labour. The business will be able to make more money by selling their products cheaper, leading a business to get a monopoly on the specific market until all business have converted to machine-driven production.
PHOTO
Japanese care taker robot managing a morning workout in a nursing home in Japan.
300 254
250
221
200
178
166 159
150
100
120
81
112
97
114
SOURCE
IFR World Robotics, 2016
121 113
60
50
0 2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
DIAGRAM Annual supply of industrial robots (in thousands)
Distribution of work
Automation holds the promise of increased free time for all, but already today the world is locked in a convention of badly distributed workload - some people hold a large amount of work, working indefinite over hours while others are completely out of work. Workers on low paid jobs might need to manage two jobs to be able to support themselves and their families, leaving
no breathing space for actually reskilling to be able to take on a better-paid job. Equally, as businesses are commonly strict on employing on 5 days work week contracts, they constrain people who actually only need to work 3 or 4 days a week to support themselves. Until recently, long-term employment was the norm. In the gig economy, precarious working conditions like temporary contracts, zero-hour contracts, self-employment and freelance jobs have become more and more common. A reduction in working hours and a more equitable distribution will allow all to benefit from time saved by productivity gains. Baby bloomers
Generation X
Generation Y
Generation Z
Alpha
100% 80% 60%
SOURCE
PA Knowledge Limited / Eurostate 2016
40% 20%
0% 2015
2020
2025
2030
2035
2040
DIAGRAM Projected generational make-up of the European working population
Work migration / territory
Migrant workers most commonly travel across territories to obtain a job within their field of work that isn’t accessible in their country of origin. These demographic changes pave the way for temporary links to a place with high employment possibilities. Instant cities build up very quickly to meet the consumer needs of mass migration. Though designed as volatile as the city in terms of regulation, these areas can’t compete with the dynamics and opportunities of the city. As employment demand falls, the lack of possibilities for finding new employment in that area leads to the phenomenon of shrinking cities – people migrating again to another area. Another example is the city of Paraupebas, which located in the middle of the Amazonian forest has an ultra-capitalist housing speculative market due to the surge of high-skill migration workers because of newly opened mine, this has lead to the displacement of the previous workers to sub-standard housing outside the city and a rise in unemployment.
Limits of production
The scarcity of resources and environmental damages are two major challenges facing the increasing material production with theoretically limitless demand. There’s a limit on production work as resources are finite and the global need for environmental sustainability become more and more crucial. The need to rethink how we live and work will be paramount to define a more sustainable and lasting approach to production at a global and local level. In the name of green agenda, jobs within both resource extraction and material production will need to decrease, leading to a vast growing unemployment in areas of production work.
reWork
SOURCE PwC 2015
53%
Technology breakthroughs
39%
Resource scarcity and climate change
36%
Shifts in global economic power
33%
Demographic shifts
DIAGRAM Top things to transform
the way people work over the next five to ten years. (Survey of 10.000 global consumers)
Digitalisation
The spatial typology of a workspace used to coincide with the sector of work, but the influence of digitalisation fundamentally changed the relationship between work and space. With the shift from an industrial to a predominantly knowledge-based economy, the dependency of specific spatial conditions has declined. The introduction of the computer enabled the combining of all necessary tools for immaterial work into one single device. Together with WIFI, work is enabled anywhere at any time. The digitalisation also laid the ground for the optimisation of management. Emails, phone calls, intercontinental conferences, communication and planning apps are all part of a new management protocol - facilitating communication between employer and employees, independent of location.
Generation change / Work flexibility
With the generation change, there’s an emergent need to have a high level of flexibility of movement in relation to work. The WIFI has made it possible for anyone to work anywhere there’s an Internet connection. This challenges the conventional working day in space and time as these digital nomads value location independence very highly and their work often takes place in foreign countries, coffee shops, public libraries, co-working spaces or even recreational vehicles. By the end of the 2040’s, most of the baby boomer’s generation will have passed away, leaving a higher percentage of digital nomads with a completely different value system. Positive
Negative
SOURCE ADP 2016
Technology will be used for anything, anytime, anywhere
82 %
Employees will define their own work schedule
78 %
22 %
Employees will do all work from a mobile device
77 %
23 %
Social media will become a collaboration platform
72 %
28 %
Emploees will be paid in real time based on contribution
71 %
29 %
Department and hierarchy will no longer exist
65 %
Automation and AI will replace people for repetitive work
55 %
18 %
36 % 45 %
DIAGRAM Employee opinions of workforce trends
Extreme privatisation
The development of co-working spaces with rental desks is mainly driven the by the private sector. Office hubs are promoted on the promise of community and network that will boost smaller businesses and start-ups. To rent a desk in such work environments is an exclusive act. In Copenhagen’s newly build BLOXHUB building on the harbour front, the choice of desk lies between a dedicated desk (5.995 kr./month), hot desk (4.495 kr./month) and start-up desk (2.995 kr./month). These options are only available with an additional membership fee that depends on the size of the company (1-5 people: 4.000 kr./year). The privatization leads to an exclusion of workers that don’t already possess an initial leverage or income whereas if this took form as a public service, it would be able to reach out to a much larger target group and activate more varied workers.
Leisure / Space for optimization
The work centred lifestyle is based on a cultural obsession with work and productivity. The work sphere infiltrates leisure time through technological devices such as the smartphone by keeping individuals “passively on work” constantly. Emails and phone calls are always at hand. As freelance and self-employment become more and more common, the separation between leisure and work becomes equally more invisible. More importantly, with the glorification of commitment, the nature of leisure has changed so that leisure needs to be productive as well. Leisure is not just a time to rest to be ready to work again, but has become a space for optimising skills to do work better and more efficiently. With the omnipresence of work, one’s personality becomes more defined by one’s professional occupation than anything else. Work becomes fetishised to an extent where one doesn’t simply work to live but live to work.
Domesticity
The home turns into a productive space when work or work-related activities occur. The home is mainly a catalyst for two types of work, namely unpaid domestic labour and home office work. In 2014, the value of domestic labour such as cleaning, cooking or doing the laundry was estimated at £ 1.1 billion, where women carry out 60% more domestic labour than men. Home office work unfolds part or full time in a delegated space in the home. The fantasy of the home office has given way to the reality of the bed office, as the bed is often the chosen space for work, as shown by the Wall Street Journal, which reported in 2012 that 80 % of young New York City professionals work regularly from bed. Without the notion of work, the home would be a space that mainly caters for domestic activities such as sleeping, eating or showering and domestic leisure such as relaxation, contemplation or entertainment.
PHOTO
Hugh Hefner managing the playboy magasine from his bed.
SOURCE
Jonathhan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2013)
The body
The individual performance of an employee is key in the culture of work centred society. Performance drugs are in a hotbed of interest in highly competitive environments, where people try to become smarter than their biology dictates. The well-known “smart drugs” or nootropics such as the prescription-only stimulants Adderall and Ritalin are consumed on a daily basis with the aim of improving cognitive function - obtaining better memory, more clarity and stronger problem-solving abilities. But drugs are not the only way - in the name of higher productivity, sleep and exercise is the way the majority go about to enhance their performance on the job. The psycho-pharmaceutical industry provides endless options for sleeping pills together with an army of sleep experts advising on how to achieve the perfect night of sleep. Body training programs, guides for keeping the right posture together with ergonomic chairs are all part on one cocktail to enhance the amount of time the body can sit at a desk.
reWork
OPPORTUNITY SPACE Work as we know it today is deeply challenged by the decline of productivity, automation, digitisation and many other factors. It will be inevitable to rethink work in order to re-imagine how we, as humans, will live in the future. The way space is designed across different scales has been rooted in new developments in production throughout time. To rethink the spatial dynamics of work is to open up to new opportunities and narratives for ways to address the challenges facing the future of work.
SOURCE
World Bank
Productivity
Hourly compensation
Work’s generic quality and ability to exist in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, allows it to operate seamlessly between the subject and the construction of space. This generic quality of work allows it to take many forms and persist in physical and virtual space in an array of scenarios and scales that might work as a framework to rethink work in the future:
300% 250% 200% 150% 100% 50% 0% -50%
1960
1980
2000
DIAGRAM Disconnect between productivity and typical worker’s compensation, 1948 - 2013.
SOURCE
1-Karl Marx. Capital. A Critique of Political economy (Hamburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1867).
Object / Space
Objects and the way they are organised in space have deeply changed over time to reflect and shape the way things are productive both directly or indirectly. Being so close to the human body and deeply penetrating everyday lives, objects are the first target scale of intervention. One opportunity is to rethink the way types of furniture are designed, how they affect and relate to the way we work in the future. Different kinds of furniture have had an important presence in corporate office life, from the emergence of the open plan to the slow reintroduction of space divisions through new forms of enclosed furniture and separators. It’s an opportunity to re-imagine how furniture could become more multifunctional, be organised differently as well as how lights could be designed to gradually change in response to different contexts. Are there new opportunities for how spaces are organised that will rethink the way work is performed?
Neighbourhood / City
The relationship between the city and its parts has been experimented with widely throughout history. In many cities, the design of its parts is directly linked to work and productivity - so how can those be transformed and rethought in order to develop cities that enable rather than restrict the possibility of working in different ways? A strong historical example was how in Vienna between 1919 and 1934, a series of new courtyard blocks were built to rethinking the connection between public/private and city/building, enabling a series of new activities, learning possibilities and new forms of logistics to be introduced to public life in the city.
Within the city, building typologies have been paramount to bridge the gap between the private and public spheres. Building typologies represent an important opportunity for intervention that can incisively shape the way we work. Nowadays, a starting point could be to rethink the role of the library and other cultural centres to become hubs of activities and intensity within neighbourhood and city, increasingly integrated to the daily lives of individuals. Regional / inter-regional Regionally, work has constructed territories and displaced people. Big infrastructural work presents a challenge to how regions cope with population inflation and deflation over time. One example is how the infrastructural construction of the link between Denmark and Germany will affect the economy of Rødby. This project opens opportunities to design for increased resilience from market fluctuations after the construction work is complete.
National / inter-national
Nations are having pressing challenges in the way work is distributed spatially. In one hand there’s an asymmetry within countries, for example, how the countryside has a different competitive tolerance than the city. On the other hand, there’s increasing pressure on borders and how production chains are dealt between countries, forcing people to flee depleted areas or look for better opportunities in new contexts. The geographical paradox of production can be rethought into new paradigms in the logic and logistics of production. Global
DIAGRAM Centralized, Decentralized and Distributed Networks
Globally, to rethink work is to rethink the set of relations between all other scales. The most pressing issue currently is how the human impact on the globe is the main responsible for geomorphic transformations on the planet. By rethinking work in the light with the limits of production, there might be space to design scenarios for future living and working that are simultaneously satisfying, plural and that can re-imagine the currently foreseeable future laid out by our current ways of working and producing.
SOURCE Distributed Communications, Paul Brian
Systemic Change
In order to be able to rethink work relations and take up the opportunity to redesign human life in the future, it is necessary to take into consideration the whole network of relations between different actors, contexts and spatial scales. Cutting through different scales will expose the operational system of the spatial regime of work. All scales are inter-related. A systemic change is needed at this point to reset the set of relations between different work regimes and how they are spatialised. Through systemic thinking and acting, it will be possible to fathom an optimistic future that enables rather than restricts.
reWork
THE FOUR INDUSTRIES OF WORK The primary industry involves procuring raw materials (e.g. mining, farming, fishing), the secondary industry involves manufacturing (e.g. making cars and steel), the tertiary industry provides a service (e.g. teaching, nursing) and the quaternary industry involves research and development (e.g. IT, consulting).
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office@rework.work