Bob Cotgrove


The following article was published in The Mercury in November 1988. It was written by Bob Cotgrove, lecturer in economic geography at the University of Tasmania and proposed solutions to the high rate of unemployment at the time. His post-industrial model stands in stark contrast to the approach of former union heavyweight and Premier, Paul Lennon, and his industrial-era pulp mill solution.

TWO generations ago, when a man’s son left school, he could expect to follow in his father’s footsteps by working on the farm or down the mine. One generation ago a father’s son or daughter could expect to follow him by taking up an apprenticeship in the factory or a career at the bank. Today’s school-leavers; if they can find jobs at all, are not likely to be working in positions that their fathers and mothers now occupy. The old securities, and with them the old conformities, are fast disappearing to be replaced by a future that is both less certain and at the same time more challenging.

Of course, the future always has been uncertain and it is only with the benefit of hindsight that we can explain the paths that society has followed. Nevertheless it is difficult to refute the claim that we are at present passing through a transition from one major type of social and economic organisation, the industrial society, to that of another, the post-industrial society.

A large proportion of today’s labour force is engaged in jobs and careers that were non-existent 30, 20, or even 10 years ago. As consumers, using our tastes and preferences to generate demands for the products that fuel the economic cycle, we have created new industries in leisure, lifestyle, and recreational activities to complement our traditional demands for food and the material comforts of life.

The industrial society which now is in retreat was based on bigness, growth, and the ruthless exploitation of cheap natural resources. It led to big business, big unions, and big government. It also was a “masculine” society in that it produced the nuclear family in which the man engaged in paid employment outside the home while the woman was relegated to the role of domestic homemaker and housekeeper. Men dominated the public face of industrial society.

Rigid, regulated, conformist

In essence, industrial society was rigid, regulated, and conformist. The five-day week, demarcation disputes, government subsidies, orderly marketing, price-fixing cartels – these were the outcomes of industrial society. This is not to say that those measures were wrong. Within the paradigm of industrial society they were perfectly rational responses to the problems of conflict resolution. However, they are not appropriate today at a time when technology is shedding industrial jobs rapidly and society is struggling to adjust to a service-based economy.

In contrast to the industrial society, the post-industrial society is likely to more flexible, more democratic, and more dynamic. It will be more “feminine” in the sense that not only will women play a more important role in the workforce and in public life but society itself will be more caring of its own members and more protective of the environment.

The industrial society was predicated on the division of the population into two distinct groups – the economically active and the economically inactive, including the aged, the disabled, and the unemployed. By taxing the economically active the welfare needs of the inactive could be met through social transfer payments.

Such a system is fast becoming untenable for two main reasons. The first is the burgeoning cost of welfare payments and the increasing difficulty of funding them through income taxation. The second is the rejection of a mendicant status by the economically inactive groups.

Large numbers of housewives, retirees and disabled people now seek the dignity that comes from having a worthwhile, economically active role in society. Together with tomorrow’s school-leavers and the steady flow of people being dismissed from present employment they will augment the growing pool of people looking for work.

How can jobs be found?

Given the importance of work, the sense of usefulness, status and social integration that having a job gives the individual, how can this growing band of would-be workers be gainfully employed? One way in which they won’t be employed is by government and their advisers looking to old-style industrial solutions to the problem. The shift to a post-industrial society is a shift to a predominantly service-based economy. More and more the things that can be mass-produced – homogeneous food and goods items and many of the business services that go with them – will be produced by machines with less and less human assistance.

A second important point is that employment can only be sustained in those activities for which a real demand exists or can be created – that is, for those goods and services the value of which, measured by consumers’ willingness to pay, exceeds or can be made to exceed the costs of production.
In this regard it is very much crystal ball-gazing to try to predict the future tastes and preferences of consumers. Fashions change, fads come and go, new products continually are being invented, and in a fluid and rapidly changing economy it would be an act of folly to prescribe specific activities as areas of employment growth.

Nevertheless, given those constraints, there appears to be considerable scope for employment growth in Tasmania in each of the following areas:

1. the manufacture of other than mass-produced items, particularly in specialised arts, crafts, and food-processing industries. The product must be of sufficient quality and uniqueness to enable it to command a price high enough to protect it against the competition of cheaper alternatives, especially if the product is intended for export markets. In this regard, the use of indigenous Tasmanian materials and craftsmanship can if promoted properly convey an image of quality and uniqueness.

2. personal services in the fields of leisure, recreation, entertainment, and lifestyle enhancement. One of the consequences of our modern affluent and educated society is the enormous increase in the propensity of people to travel and to undertake a wide variety of recreational and leisure activities. These may range from dining at expensive restaurants to visiting national parks, joining fitness centres, and learning to dance.

3. community services in the fields of health, education, and community support. The skills which need to be acquired in the flexible and active post-industrial society, as well as concepts such as education throughout life and changes in career patterns, will continue to provide employment opportunities in community service industries.

4. government services, particularly in the areas of environmental research and protection and consumer affairs. The role of government services has changed over time from the earlier concerns with protection of property and persons to more recent efforts to effect a more purposeful change to a just and equitable society. Concern for pollution and environmental degradation are sure to lead to new employment opportunities in research and in monitoring the environment.

5. business services, particularly in communications, finance. marketing, and law. There will be a continuing demand for professionally trained personnel in the knowledge-based quaternary business services. Office development, the recycling of old industrial buildings, and the rehabilitation of inner-city areas are likely to provide new opportunities for architects, engineers, and designers in making our urban areas new environments for post-industrial lifestyles.

It is inevitable that many new service-sector jobs will be experimental, part-time, and possibly short-lived. Nevertheless, any job is better than none if it originates from grassroots initiatives. In time as consumer tastes and preferences change to accommodate these tentative experiments new service industries will be established as part of the permanent job market.

Overseas experience in this regard is a valuable lesson. In the United States, 30 million new jobs were generated between 1970 and 1985. Of these, 29 million were in the service sector, largely the result of local community initiatives and self-start programmes. Interestingly, only 3 per cent of new jobs were associated with the much-vaunted high-technology “sunrise” industries and these mainly were concentrated in small enclaves such as California’s Silicon Valley and Boston’s Highway 128.

By comparison, there was hardly any net growth in employment during that same period in the four largest European economies of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy. Traditionally, those four countries look to their central governments to take the initiative in job creation rather than turning to society itself and as a result they now are locked into endemically high rates of unemployment.

The choice for Tasmania, it seems to me, is clear.

We can either accept the new paradigm and encourage job creation by experimental community-based local initiatives or we can sit back, locked into “second wave” thinking, and demand that government create them from above.

The trouble with the second approach is that it is futile, as the European experience and our own recent history shows. The uncertainty of employment patterns in post-industrial society makes it difficult for governments and their advisers to devise appropriate job-creation schemes.

There can be no governmental “big fix” solution to unemployment. Instead, the adjustment will need to come from society itself relying on entrepreneurial initiative and open, less-regulated markets to allocate resources. In times of fluidity and transition, markets are more effective than planning as allocative mechanisms.

The best role for government is to facilitate the transition phase by deregulating outdated industrial structures and by encouraging local entrepreneurial activity. Governments also can provide assistance to specific communities where unemployment is excessively high and where some form of pump priming is needed to get employment schemes underway.

Aged people, for example, can be encouraged to provide child-minding facilities to enable mothers to enter the workforce. Unemployed teenagers can be given counselling assistance to help them provide local services, always, of course, with the caveat that the services provided must satisfy a real demand.
The real challenge to governments, however, is to provide longer-term restructuring through the education system to promote greater individual motivation and self-reliance.

Most of the employment opportunities and the exciting challenges of the dynamic, democratic, and caring post-industrial society require people with educational, entrepreneurial, and personal communicative skills. It is up to governments to promote those skills and to provide the environment in which those skills can be fostered.

If that is done then we can all look forward to a prosperous, caring, and environmentally protective future for our children.

Bob Cotgrove
Thanks for digging it out of the archives Steve!