The archetypal worker in an advanced economy used to be a man on a production line or a salaryman in a city office — a secure, yet repressed, cog in a machine. “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many/I had not thought death had undone so many,” wrote T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland, who once worked at Lloyds Bank.
There are still millions of these, including many women, but the new world of work is both more exciting and less secure. There is greater variety, in both pay and conditions. A job is more likely to be part-time, temporary, freelance or self-employed. It may not be a job at all, in the way it used to be defined.
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, lamented in a recent campaign speech the weakening of the US employment bargain that “built the greatest economy and the strongest middle class the world has ever known” — that “if you work hard and do your part, you should be able to get ahead”. As she observed, the “gig economy”, the growth of online platforms such as Airbnb and Uber on which people buy and sell services and jobs, “is creating exciting economies and unleashing innovation, but it is also raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in future”.