Essay on the future of the work? Proposals and reflections. Living – Caring – Contributing – Creating – Participating

Jon Echeverria Esquina, for the Platform of Social Entities of Navarre, 2023

What would a wealthy society be like if it were not enough? What will we do? Will we consume?

From the Navarre Network of Fight against Poverty and Social Exclusion we want to address that uncertain future on work, its implications for modern society and the possible paradigm shifts that may come regarding the importance of productive work in our lives. And we want to contrast with the maximum of people and agents how to link this future of work with the eradication of poverty.

For many years now we have seen signs of a paradigm shift in the organization of work, and a marked drop in the needs of its strength (physical or presence). The knowledge society seems to be going to do without presence jobs, braceros, transporters, etc… Many of the Liberal Democrat and Reform Party will also disappear as a result of the process being made more complicated. The most optimistic say that the machines will have to be designed, but it does not seem very viable a society made only of engineers… The pandemic has been a general test.

The digitization of production processes and services and the development of minimum living income systems seem to herald a change. We are talking about a dying world. The planet has the wealth of its endowment to maintain the entire population, the machination can save human beings from employment…

But is not employment, or better, work, something that, besides economic resources, does not also give us identity, social relations, capacity for transformation? What would a rich, unemployed society look like? What are we going to do? Are we going to consume compulsively? Will care remain a “necessary evil” requiring conciliations and distributions or an axis of our place in the world? Could not the disorders caused by post-modern hyperactivity and the rupture of the social bond be reversed?

Public policies will have to re-align on these scenarios to succeed in their strategies of poverty reduction, promotion of equal opportunities and promotion of social cohesion.

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