Brave New Work

Workplaces of the future will have to be “anti-stupid,” a near-full audience heard Wednesday evening in Vancouver. And they need to stop wasting massive amounts of talent.

American commentators Van Jones and Anne-Marie Slaughter came together for a keynote talk at this week's Brave New Work Summit, where they offered their takes on the crucial (but often foreboding) question: what needs to change so we can have quality careers in the future?

And both thinkers turned their their attention to the ongoing housing crisis in Vancouver, addressing what cities like Vancouver and San Francisco — both struggling with housing affordability — should do to make sure they remain viable places to live for future generations.

Slaughter referred to Vancouver’s history of strong union-led labour movements, and suggested something different but of a similar scale was needed for the modern world in order to achieve employment stability, given the prominence of temporary and “gig” jobs today.

Beyond that, Jones said bright minds should be able to come together in the city to make housing options available to the workforce, including those who give cities character.

“You gotta have artists and weirdos to be able to stay in the city,” he said.

Jones, well-known for his left-wing political commentary in the U.S. and his social justice advocacy, painted a picture of an American economy he said is currently ill-equipped to harness the talent it needs.

Time, he said, is rushing toward us as technology constantly updates and changes the ways we work and interact with one another. The skills needed to tackle the future therefore, rest in people’s ability to “pivot,” problem-solve, and “hack” society’s problems.

The trouble, he said, is that the economy only rewards a small portion of the population with those skills. Black and other racialized people, poor people, and prisoners who learn to hack common problems behind bars, haven’t been able to break into the lucrative Silicon Valley model of success anywhere near the level white people have.

Think about the invention of hip-hop, Jones argued — it emerged from inner-city youth finding ways to make music without having access to instruments. Or prisoners who fashion lighters out of the meagre materials available to them.

“That genius,” Jones said, “is not being accessed by the technological elite. We’ve got to stop wasting genius.”

A key component of successful workplaces of the future, Jones argued, will be bringing together people who think differently — only “don’t call it diversity, call it anti-stupid,” Jones said.

Meanwhile, Slaughter emphasized the need to re-think the kind of work that's seen as valuable to society. For example, employment such as childcare and elder care, has long gone under-valued and unpaid, something she argued needs to change.

When Jenna van Draanen first became involved with the Basic Income Canada Network seven years ago, she found herself constantly having to explain the group’s purpose to people she met.

Now basic income — a policy idea that encompasses a range of policy options aimed at giving people cash entitlements from the government — is creeping into the mainstream, and the BC government has committed $4 million to explore its feasibility here.

“Now people on the bus behind me will be talking about it,” the University of British Columbia postdoctoral fellow said Tuesday. “It’s been incredible to see the change in the basic income movement in that time.”

Michal Rozworski, a union researcher and economist, cautioned that not all forms of basic income are equal. In what Rozworski calls its “right wing” iteration basic income could mean a negative income tax to redistribute funds to those making less money.

“At the very other end there’s an actual universal basic income: you give everyone X amount of money per year, as a transfer, period,” he explained.

Basic Income Canada Network advocates for the latter, van Draanen explained, citing research showing such systems result in better mental and physical health outcomes, as well as social cohesion.

But as B.C. sets up a basic income expert committee, details of which the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction will release in the spring, some activists warn it could be no more than a tactic for the government to shelve the issue of poverty.

John Clarke, an activist with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty who’s visiting Vancouver to speak on a Simon Fraser University panel about basic income, said the form of basic income being piloted in Ontario right now doesn’t go far enough to help poor people.

“The Ontario pilot provides a sub-poverty payment (75 per cent of the poverty line) that certainly would not reach the objective of a universal basic income that would allow people to live quite well even if robots take their jobs away,” Clarke said.

Clarke called that approach a “subsidy for low wage employers,” that turns people with low purchasing power into “shoppers in the neoliberal market” while providing an excuse for governments to claw back other forms of social assistance like disability supports.

Meanwhile a universal, unconditional, and adequate basic income that, according to Rozworski, would cost 30 per cent of the country’s GDP, is a politically fraught concept.

“If you really gave everyone a universal basic income it would be like the state providing workers with an unlimited strike fund,” Clarke said. “It’s a complete impossibility.”

Universal public resources like child care and pharmacare do a better job of alleviating the effects of poverty than doling out cash, Clarke argued. He also said there’s a need to reform the welfare system so that it’s more humanizing.

Van Draanen agrees that more humanity is needed in Canada’s welfare system and is hopeful that an unconditional basic income existing alongside social programming will accomplish that.

“I see a lot of harmony on the left, a lot of allyship in terms of we want the same outcomes,” she said. “Most changes I’ve seen to fundamental human rights throughout history have been met with fears of impossibility.”

People entering the workforce today will face a complete overhaul of the definition of ‘work’ over the course of their careers, leaders from the public, private, not-for-profit, and academic sectors heard Monday at Simon Fraser University.

Workplaces will change so much due to job automation and growing inequality that the university is moving to form a three-year innovation lab dedicated to the addressing these problems.

“There’s been a lot of reports written. There’s been a lot of research done. And there’s a lot of inaction,” SFU Public Square Executive Director Janet Webber said in an interview with Metro. “The time for action is now and we really create the future.”

Monday’s event was the first mini-conference in a summit called Brave New Work. About 50 summit participants invited from around the world will work together Tuesday and Wednesday to identify problems in Canada’s workplace that could be addressed by a potential three-year “Future of Canada” lab backed by Radius and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

The lab is in the “problem identification” stage for now, Webber said, but will be launched quickly if all goes well at the summit. The focus of the lab will be to prototype and pilot scalable business solutions to impending challenges within work.

The research that concerns Webber most surrounds automation. One 2017 report by McKinsey showed half of the tasks currently done globally by employed humans could be completed instead by technology that already exists. Examples include driverless cars, advertising technology like Facebook’s platform and automated delivery services. 

That’s something experts in the artificial intelligence field told conference attendees is unavoidable.

“Everything is going to be profoundly changed,” said James Maynard, Wavefront Innovation Society President. “You can’t opt out.”

For the first time in history, Maynard said, technology’s role in workplaces is moving beyond making tasks more efficient. The new frontier is employing technology in strategic ways.

It may also mean there will be an increasing emphasis on labour requiring a human touch. As futurist Nikolas Badminton put it, “We used to work with our hands, now we work with our heads, and going forward we’re going to work with our hearts.”

How that shift will manifest remains to be seen, and is raises uncertainties — especially for those already on the margins of the workforce like racialized people and women. That’s a hot button issue for members of the millennial generation, 80 per cent of whom would prefer a more inclusive workplace, said Deloitte’s Tara van Zuiden.

Iglika Ivanova from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said many of those who face significant barriers to entering the workforce, like immigrants, Indigenous people, and people with disabilities, end up in precarious situations like part-time employment and contract work, which may not include health benefits and security.

“Social protection models for workers need to change,” Ivanova said.

One possible solution explored Monday was ‘alternative business models’, like cooperatives, some of which offer benefits and supports to freelancers and contractors. Steve Rio, who founded the consultancy Briteweb, went so far as to suggest a future path where people are considered “team members” instead of being divided into “employees” and “freelancers.”

Briteweb’s team members, Rio said, work from wherever they want, and at various levels of commitment. It’s a new model for work Rio believes will be more inclusive of lifestyles.

“We’re just hoping that regulation doesn’t stomp out what we’re doing,” he said.

Events of the Brave New Work summit continue until March 7.