AI, labour market and social issues

For the past few months the focus of media, government and public opinion has often been on the issue of declining birth rates, gender pay gap and job quality

While the implications in terms of sustainability and economic growth are now clear, along with some of the measures needed to encourage a resurgence in the birth rate and women inclusion at work ( e.g., increasing the number of child care services) , the debate seems not to fully grasp the role of companies organizational frameworks in fostering it, or disfavoring them at scale.

In countries where “Fordist organizations” have grown, in parallel with dual-earner families, the birth rate has begun to fall. If in fact there has been a considerable, and fortunately, increase in the presence of women in Labor , this has occurred to some extent at the expense of the birth rate .

The responsibility is due to a hierarchical work model, full of functions, job roles and credentialism, based on “command and control” principles and office/factory based that structurally puts pressure, due to the strong rigidity, on dual-earner families, and in particular on women who are still assigned a large part of family care tasks.

This phenomenon, is widespread in all developed economies demonstrating that the is the most powerful factor in birth depression effects that can only be partially mitigated by albeit generous public welfare policies.

If we want to maintain a certain rate of economic growth, while increasing female labor market participation, without depressing the birth rate and reducing gender pay gap, and thus social sustainability, we must therefore experiment with and change the ways in which work is organized, developing “social impact” organizational systems . Let’s see how.

The key principle is to put at the center the Freedom of people to adjust their work time according to their personal and family needs, and not vice versa, while still maintaining the possibility of being included at Work with a good level of productivity and high quality jobs.

On this point digital technology and Ai could be decisive if they are directed toward a paradigm shift instead of making the Fordist model even more penetrating and toxic to society .

The technological and organizational objects to support these new organizational models are the new “Ai powered” platforms/platform companies, which must be designed and developed to achieve the following goals:

o Increase asynchronous and remote work arrangements, training and active labor policies so that there are more opportunities for everyone regardless of space and time.

o Enable a faster and more inclusive skills collection channel for companies by enabling more flexibility in managing work and greater access to skills for companies.

o Enable a more fluid internal organization by supporting people to do “on-the-job” training to acquire skills even outside their usual sphere, fostering internal marketplace, horizontal pathways and self-entrepreneurship so that there are contestable roles, more widespread skills available.

o Create work contexts that are transparent, collaborative and based on clear and measurable goals untethered from seniority and position rents.

Using a football metaphor to build a people-friendly but still high-productivity labor market would serve:

o Broaden the playing field by moving from individual companies/labor markets to collaborative clusters that are also open beyond the local and single corporate dimensions,

o Increase the ability to see the field through greater interoperability of data collection and management structures, which could then be used to develop predictive models

o Teach operational teams on how to make longer passages between diferent players, through training on agile and collaborative work models, and how to increase speed in phrasing by breaking down roles into individual tasks and constantly reassembling them into new concatenations.

o Incentivize people to score goals through new long term employment contracts based on pay by objectives.

An innovation of this magnitude is particularly complex to develop given its “systemic” and impactful nature, less interresting for those seeking “product based” innovation, and it must be accompanied with a complex set of incentives for the digital transition of organizational models.

In fact, the issue resembles the environmental transition from fossil fuels ( Fordist organizations) to new renewable sources ( impact organizational models) in which a general interest is often pitted against other private interests.

Europe in this transition to an integrated and ai based labour market has peculiar challenges, including an extremely fragmented national labor laws and a labour market polarized between northern and southern countries. It could, however, derive great benefits from such a change, in addition to an increase in the birth rate and gender pay gap, for example, an increase in productivity, a narrowing of gender, generational and territorial gaps, and a better balance between the attraction and flight of talent.

New policies and actors are needed to trigger such a change, which would potentially resolve social, economic and demographic imbalances.and become a model for the Future of Work

Nicolò Boggian

Founder Whitelibra.com