30 Years After the 'End of Work', Payroll Remains Unchanged

Jeremy Rifkin's 'End of Work': 30 Years Later, We Still Clock In

Why do we still compete for positions that technology could have eliminated three decades ago? In 1995, Jeremy Rifkin published The End of Work, predicting the disappearance of mass employment alongside a hydrogen economy. Nearly 30 years later, hydrogen has not arrived, and work has not vanished. The uncomfortable paradox is this: the obsession with working grows at the same pace as machines' capacity to do that work.

From mechanical looms to expert systems: Unplugged technology

The most repeated comparison is with Luddism. In the 1980s, massive layoffs occurred in factories when automation entered production lines, recalls those who lived it, and the machine asked for no permission. That same leap has not peine in offices. One of the most repeated theses summarizes it thus: the 2020s have much in common with the 1980s of the last century, because the available technology is from the 1990s but is used as if in a telephone exchange.

Against this, some respond with an argument older than the book itself: power without control is useless. Tools are not lacking; what is missing is deciding what to do with them. From this stems the harshest diagnosis: a society that, according to one participant, would be less contemporary than dystopian, with technical development frozen while work organization remains anchored in the factory and the wool sweater.

16 Million Public Payrolls Per Month: Employment as a Refuge

The public sector concentrates the most cited figures. A state paying 16 million payrolls per month is, for part of the analysis, proof that employment has become social policy rather than production. The numbers cited in this line are striking: the average public sector salary is 38% higher than in the private sector, some sources raise this gap to 50%, and only 18% of the 525,000 ministry officials have a university degree. This is joined by the calculation circulating in the thread that Spain accumulates around one million people on disability benefits.

The criticism is not against those receiving the paycheck, but against the design. Positions consisting of moving documents from one place to another, tabulating text files, and enlarging procedures, precisely what David Graeber labeled as bullshit jobs. The breakdown of these tasks—how many hands are needed and for what—is where the data truly stings.

Can an Algorithm Diagnose Better Than a Doctor?

It depends on which part of the process is examined: for reading thousands of tests with consolidated parameters, models point to very high accuracy; for consulting someone who says they hurt somewhere but do not know where, no. Those defending automation argue that expert systems have existed since the 1990s and that, with a good dataset and well-chosen variables, the prediction of certain diseases—including cancers—achieves notable success.

On the other side, the response is that entering a dataset is one thing, but opening the door to a patient is another. There, one must explore, guide, and decide what test to request, and that does not come from any table. Medicine, it is settled, has little of exact science.

The Service Sector Cannot Accommodate Everyone

Technological optimism has a Plan B: if industry expels people, the surplus goes to the service sector and, with automation lowering costs, quality of life rises for everyone. This sounds reasonable until looking at the Spanish structure. Against this scenario, it is argued that the Spanish tertiary sector is tourism and little else, with split shifts, long hours, and low salaries, and that in economies focused on services, unemployment becomes systemic.

There are trades, however, where scarcity is real: plumbers, electricians, mechanics, bricklayers, electromechanics. In hospitality, the problem is the inverse: work is not lacking; what is lacking is compensation.

Universal Basic Income, 48-Hour Weeks, or Something Worse

The scenarios debated for the end of the journey are not cheerful. One: the workweek rises to 48 hours because the salary no longer lasts until the end of the month, with the ECB and its printer fueling inflation. Another: universal basic income as a patch, with the warning that a subsidized existence of basics is perceived as social failure and will eventually be despised. Nor was there anyone who, half-jokingly, half-seriously, dropped the word eugenics.

Meanwhile, the most cited forecast remains that of William Gibson: the future is already here, only unevenly distributed. Reduced employment, precariousness, underemployment, and salaries that inflation eats away are no longer science fiction, they say, but the starting point.

If the end of work ever arrives, it is most likely that one will have to fill out a form to request it, with an online appointment and a queue starting at seven in the morning. Someone will have to attend that counter. And it probably will not be a machine.