Cyclopedia Of Economics 3rd edition

Frederick Frey, of the University of Pennsylvania, disagrees:

Who is right?

The citizens of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu states in India are enmeshed in bloody skirmishes over the waters of the Carvery River. Colonel Quaddafi has been depleting the Iittoral aquifer in the Sahara for decades now - to the detriment of all his neighbors - yet, not a single violent incident has been recorded. In 2001, the Rio Grande has failed to reach the Gulf of Mexico - for the first time in many decades. Yet, no war erupted between the USA and Mexico.

As water become more scarce, market solutions are bound to emerge. Water is heavily subsidized and, as a direct result, atrociously wasted. More realistic pricing would do wonders on the demand side. Water rights are already traded electronically in the USA. Private utilities and water markets are the next logical step.

Water recycling is another feasible alternative. Despite unmanageable financial problems and laughable prices, the municipality of Moscow maintains enormous treatment plants and re-uses most of its water.

Wars are the outcomes of cultures and mores. Not every casus belli leads to belligerence. Not every conflict, however severe, ends in battle. Mankind has invented numerous other conflict-resolution mechanisms. There is no reason to assume that water would cause more warfare than oil or national pride. But water scarcity sure causes dislocation, ethnic tension, impoverishment, social anomy, and a host of other ills. It is in fending off these pernicious, all-pervasive, and slow-acting social processes that we should concentrate our efforts.

"[In]... the brothels off Wenceslas Square, in central Prague, [where] sexual intercourse can be bought for USD 25 - about half the price charged at a German brothel... Slav women have supplanted Filipinos and Thais as the most common foreign offering in [Europe]."

"I'm also wary of the revolutionary ambition of some feminist texts, with their ideas about changing present conditions, having seen enough attempted utopia's for one lifetime."

"As probably every country has its Amazons, if we go far back in Czech mythology, to a collection of Old Czech Legends, we come across a very interesting legend about the Dévín castle (which literally means 'The Girls' Castle'). It describes a bloody story about a rebellion of women, who started a vengeful war against men. As the story goes, they were not only capable warriors, they had no mercy and would not hesitate to kill their fathers and brothers. Under the leadership of mighty Vlasta, the 'girls' lived in their castle, 'Dévín', where they underwent a severe military training. They led the war very successfully, and one day Vlasta came up with an shrewd plan, how to take hostage a famous nobleman, Ctirad. She chose the lovely Sárka from the body (sic!) of her troops and had her tied up to a tree by a road with a horn and a jar of a mead out of her reach, but in her sight. In this state, Sárka was waiting for Ctirad to find her. When he actually really appeared and saw her, she told him a sad story of how the women from Dévín punished her for not following their ideology by tying her to the tree, mockingly putting a jar and a horn (so that she would be always reminded that she is thirsty and helpless) near by. Ctirad, enchanted by the beautiful woman, believed the lure and untied her, and when she handed him the mead, he willingly drunk it. When he was drunk already, she let him blow the horn, which was a signal for the Dévín warriors to capture him. He was then tortured in many horrible ways, at the end of which, his body was woven into a wooden wheel and displayed. This event mobilized the army, which soon afterwards destroyed Dévín. (Very significantly, this legend is the only account of radical feminism in Czech Lands.)"

"We myself... and many others are not in search of global sisterhood at all, and it is only when we give up expecting it that we can get anywhere. It is each other's very 'otherness' that motivates us, and the things we find in common take on greater meaning within the context of otherness. There is so much to learn by comparing the ways in which we are different, and which the same elements of women's experience are global, and which aren't, and wondering why, and what it means."

"It is difficult to carry three watermelons under one arm."

"The high level of unemployment among women, segregation in the labour market, the increasing salary gap between women and men, the lack of women present at the decision making level, increasing violence against women, the high levels of maternal and infant mortality, the total absence of a contraceptive industry in Russia, the insufficiency of child welfare benefits, the lack of adequate resources to fund current state programs - this is only part of the long list of women's rights violations."

The European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) warned yesterday against a rising tide of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim views in the European Union in the wake of the September 11 atrocities in the United States. The report states that the main victims of this resurgent racial prejudice are women wearing traditional headscarves.

This is merely the latest in an uninterrupted tradition of victimization.

Last month, Donna Hughes from the University of Long Island, published a damning overview of Russian prostitution. She described the work of the Angel Coalition of non-governmental organizations trying to save women and girls in Russia and other former Soviet republics from human trafficking and subsequent sexual slavery.

Tens of thousands of young females from Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria and a host of other erstwhile communist countries, suffer this fate every year. Lured by promises of work or marriage, they are smuggled to the Persian Gulf, to Russia and to western Europe by organized crime gangs in cahoots with local politicians. Tellingly, many former communist countries, Russia foremost, have no laws against these practices.

AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases among women sex workers are rampant. They are the main conduit of infection of heterosexuals and neonates in these societies. A policy forum hosted by the State Department in August 2000 recommended to "decriminalize prostitution and redefine it as 'sex work' — i.e., a form of labor ... Since 'migrating sex workers are simply responding to a demand for their labor', migration laws should be reformed to accommodate their transnational travel. Prostitution in foreign countries was described as potentially 'empowering' for women because it would enable them to migrate to other countries and to achieve 'greater economic independency and autonomy from men."

The Angel Coalition rejects this counsel: "Legalization of prostitution would ruin this country. Russian women have suffered enough exploitation. They do not deserve to become the (prostitutes) of the world." According to the Vienna-based International Organization for Migration, more than half a million women from east Europe serve as sex workers in the West.

The Economist remarked wryly in August 2000: "(In)... the brothels off Wenceslas Square, in central Prague, (where) sexual intercourse can be bought for USD 25 - about half the price charged at a German brothel... Slav women have supplanted Filipinos and Thais as the most common foreign offering in (Europe)."

Yet, grave as they are, these transgressions against the 200 million women and girls in the 27 countries in transition are the least of their concerns. Elena Kotchkina from the Moscow Centre for Gender Studies, wrote this in the "Report on the Legal Status of Women in Russia":

"The high level of unemployment among women, segregation in the labour market, the increasing salary gap between women and men, the lack of women present at the decision making level, increasing violence against women, the high levels of maternal and infant mortality, the total absence of a contraceptive industry in Russia, the insufficiency of child welfare benefits, the lack of adequate resources to fund current state programs - this is only part of the long list of women's rights violations."

The mythology of the left in Europe, well into the 1980s, postulated that communism may have been tough on men but a Shangri-la for women. Actually it was a gender-neutral hell. Feminine participation in the labor force was, indeed, encouraged. Amenities such as day care centers, kindergarten, daylong schools and abortion clinics were common, except in Poland.

Women were allotted quotas in all governance levels, from parliament down, though the upper echelons remained unwaveringly and invariably male-dominated. March 8 - a cross between Valentine's Day and a matriarchal May 1 - is still celebrated throughout the region with great official fanfare.

But this magnanimous gender equality was a mere simulacrum. Women were not allowed to work night time or shifts or in certain jobs, nor were they paid as much as men in equal functions. By the demise of communism in 1989, more than 90 professions in Poland were found to be women-free, probably by design.

Women were quashed by the "triple burden" of obligatory employment, marital and childrearing chores and inescapable party activism. According to surveys quoted by UNESCO, women worked, on average, 15 weekly hours more than their male counterparts. Communism had use only for "super-women", Ninotchka-like, communist bluestockings. Yet, "it is difficult to carry three watermelons under one arm" - goes a Bulgarian proverb.

Thus, the Marxist revolution did not extend to "kitchen, children, church". The woman's traditional domestic roles within a largely patriarchal family remained intact. "Scientific Marxism" made limited headway only in urban centers like Moscow. Folk wisdom reflected these tensions between dogma and reality. "The woman is the neck that moves the head, her husband", went the old adage. Czech men often referred to themselves self-deprecatingly as "underslippers". But male prominence and statal patriarchy prevailed.

Unemployment - officially non-existent in the communist utopia - was ignored. So were drugs, AIDS and battered women. The legal infrastructure left by communism was incompatible with a modern market economy. While maternal leave was an impossibly generous 18 to 36 months - there were no laws against domestic or spousal violence, women trafficking, organized crime prostitution rings, discrimination, inequality, marital rape, date rape and a host of other issues.

No medium (print or electronic) catered to the idiosyncratic needs of women. Academic gender studies programs, or women's studies departments were unheard of. According to Slavenka Drakulic, author of "Cafe Europa" and "How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed", no factories in the region manufactured tampons or sanitary bandages.

Women, who formed an integral and important part of national and social movements throughout the region, were later shunned and marginalized. They felt betrayed and exploited. Disenchanted and disillusioned, they voted overwhelmingly for right wing parties ever since. They conservatively reverted to the safe values, mores and petite bourgeois aspirations of the 19th century.

Writing in the July 2001 World & I, Christine Weiss described the situation in Slovakia:

"Slovakia is similar to many other countries in central and eastern Europe in its attitudes toward women and their role in society. Officially equal to men under communism and given equal government representation by law, women nevertheless carried the greater burden of domestic duties and were not given decision-making positions. Women's involvement in politics and political parties has decreased drastically in the last decade. Most Slovak women agree with the official myth that they are 'equal' to men, making it difficult for them to seek help with issues such as protection against domestic violence, employment discrimination, and inadequate health care.

The worsening economic situation has placed a greater burden on women since 1990. Increasingly, there is an out-migration of men to larger towns, more prosperous regions, or other countries for work. This heightens the domestic burden on women; the help they got from husbands, sons, or other relatives is now largely removed. The economic slump has also forced women to increase food production from the family plots."

Feminism failed to take root in pragmatic central and east Europe. It was too ideological, often Marxist, too extreme, family-disparaging and man-hating. Petr Prihoda offered the male point of view in the Czech-English monthly New Presence: "I'm also wary of the revolutionary ambition of some feminist texts, with their ideas about changing present conditions, having seen enough attempted utopias for one lifetime."

Czech women tend to agree. "We myself...and many others are not in search of global sisterhood at all, and it is only when we give up expecting it that we can get anywhere." - says Jirina Siklova from the Gender Studies Center in Prague - "It is each other's very 'otherness' that motivates us, and the things we find in common take on greater meaning within the context of otherness. There is so much to learn by comparing the ways in which we are different, and which the same elements of women's experience are global, and which aren't, and wondering why, and what it means."

Capitalism has improved the lot of women in some countries - and considerably worsened it in others. According to Elizabeth Brainerd of Harvard University, writing in the October 2000 issue of the Industrial & Labor Relations Review:

"Under state socialism, women fared relatively well in the labor market: female-male wage differentials were similar to those in the West, and female labor force participation rates were among the highest in the world. Since the introduction of market reforms (there is) a consistent increase in female relative wages across Eastern Europe, and a substantial decline in female relative wages in Russia and Ukraine. Women in the latter countries have been penalized by the tremendous widening of the wage distribution in those countries. Increased wage inequality in Eastern Europe has also depressed female relative wages, but these losses have been more than offset by gains in rewards to observed skills and by an apparent decline in discrimination against women."

All in all, transition was not good to women. The privatization of state-owned enterprises was dominated by a male nomenclature of managers and insiders. Technological modernization was both male-driven and male-biased. Men in central and eastern Europe are still three times as likely as women to find a job. Between three and four fifths of all women's - mostly menial - jobs were lost, notably in the industrial sectors, especially in textile and clothing.

According to the February 2000 issue of the UNESCO Courier, 14 million of the 26 million jobs that vanished in eastern Europe since 1989 were women's. Unemployment among women is 5 percentage points higher than among men. Two years ago, the inter-gender gap in pay in Russia was 24 percent. It was over 15 percent in both Poland and Hungary.

In all the countries in transition, the highest rates of unemployment are among middle aged and older women. Three quarters of the unemployed are women. The Ukrainians call it "unemployment with a female face". Women go unrecorded both when employed and when unemployed - thus deprived of social benefits, health and unemployment insurance and labor-related legal rights.

When trained, women are relegated to clerical, low-skilled and low-paying jobs. Men are assigned to assimilate new and lucrative technologies. In some countries, women are asked by prospective employers to waive their rights, to produce a medical certificate confirming non-pregnancy, or, more rarely, to provide proof of sterilization prior to gaining employment.

Even in higher education, where women's participation has gradually increased - they are confined to "feminine" - i.e., low pay and low status - occupations. Vocational and technical schools are either defunct or do not welcome women. The rising cost of tertiary schooling threatens to dampen women's educational opportunities. Even in feminized professions (such as university teaching), women make less than 20% of the upper rungs (e.g., full professorships).

The very ethos of society has adversely changed. Resurgent nostalgic nationalism, neo traditionalism and religious revival seek to confine them to home and hearth. Negative demographic trends - declining life expectancy and birth rate, numerous abortions, late marriage, a high divorce rate and an increasing suicide rate - provoke a nagging sensation of "we are a dying nation" and the inevitable re-emphasis of the woman's reproductive functions. Hence the fierce debates about the morality of abortion in Catholic Poland, in Lithuania, Slovenia and even in the agnostic Czech Republic.

Many women believe that capitalism is for men, emphasizing, as it does, masculine traits, such as aggressiveness, assertiveness, and competition. Women political representation shriveled since 1989 when rubber stamp parliaments were transformed into loci of real power.

The few women that did make it are typically relegated to "soft" committees which deal with budget-poor social issues. There is a dearth of women among business executives of medium and large enterprises, or the owners of privatized enterprises. Job advertising is sex-specific and sexist to this very day.

Pay regulations and tax system are skewed in favor of male employees. Child benefits were all but eliminated, maternal leave shortened, affordable day care facilities rendered extinct by massive cuts in social outlays. The quality of social benefits not yet axed has deteriorated, access to them has been restricted and supplies are often short.

The costs of public goods, mainly health and education, have been transferred from state to households either officially, once services have been commercialized, or surreptitiously and insidiously (e.g., patients required to purchase their own food, bed sheets and medication when hospitalized).

The swift deterioration in the quality of the region's health systems and the proscription, in certain countries, of the only effective form of contraception - abortions - led to an upsurge in maternal mortality and teenage pregnancy. The curtailing or absence of sex education yielded an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases. Rape, spousal abuse, date rape, street prostitution, begging, especially by destitute widows - are common phenomena. Divorce maintenance payments are often both pitiful and delinquent.

A generational abyss opened between young women and their older sisters. The post-communist generations are conspicuous consumers, car owners, and career opportunists. They aspire to be managers, shareholders, politicians and professionals. The older ones, exhausted by decades of social turmoil and futile activism, prefer to stay at home, in relative tranquility, tinged with benign dependence.

Yet, neither fare well. East European pseudo-yuppies lack business skills, knowledge, contacts, supportive infrastructure, or access to credit. Older women cannot work long hours, lack skills and, when officially employed, are expensive, due to the burden of their social benefits. Consequently, women mostly migrate to services, light industry and agriculture - the less lucrative sectors of the dilapidated economies of their homelands.

As far as women as concerned, the brave, new world of liberal democracy is old, patriarchal, discriminatory and iniquitous. This may yet prove to be transition's worst failure.

Work Ethic

"When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery."
Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), Russian novelist, author, and playright

Airplanes, missiles, and space shuttles crash due to lack of maintenance, absent-mindedness, and pure ignorance. Software support personnel, aided and abetted by Customer Relationship Management application suites, are curt (when reachable) and unhelpful. Despite expensive, state of the art supply chain management systems, retailers, suppliers, and manufacturers habitually run out of stocks of finished and semi-finished products and raw materials. People from all walks of life and at all levels of the corporate ladder skirt their responsibilities and neglect their duties.

Whatever happened to the work ethic? Where is the pride in the immaculate quality of one's labor and produce?

Both dead in the water. A series of earth-shattering social, economic, and technological trends converged to render their jobs loathsome to many - a tedious nuisance best avoided.

1. Job security is a thing of the past. Itinerancy in various McJobs reduces the incentive to invest time, effort, and resources into a position that may not be yours next week. Brutal layoffs and downsizing traumatized the workforce and produced in the typical workplace a culture of obsequiousness, blind obeisance, the suppression of independent thought and speech, and avoidance of initiative and innovation. Many offices and shop floors now resemble prisons.

2. Outsourcing and offshoring of back office (and, more recently, customer relations and research and development) functions sharply and adversely effected the quality of services from helpdesks to airline ticketing and from insurance claims processing to remote maintenance. Cultural mismatches between the (typically Western) client base and the offshore service department (usually in a developing country where labor is cheap and plenty) only exacerbated the breakdown of trust between customer and provider or supplier.

3. The populace in developed countries are addicted to leisure time. Most people regard their jobs as a necessary evil, best avoided whenever possible. Hence phenomena like the permanent temp - employees who prefer a succession of temporary assignments to holding a proper job. The media and the arts contribute to this perception of work as a drag - or a potentially dangerous addiction (when they portray raging and abusive workaholics).

4. The other side of this dismal coin is workaholism - the addiction to work. Far from valuing it, these addicts resent their dependence. The job performance of the typical workaholic leaves a lot to be desired. Workaholics are fatigued, suffer from ancillary addictions, and short attention spans. They frequently abuse substances, are narcissistic and destructively competitive (being driven, they are incapable of team work).

5. The depersonalization of manufacturing - the intermediated divorce between the artisan/worker and his client - contributed a lot to the indifference and alienation of the common industrial worker, the veritable "anonymous cog in the machine".

Not only was the link between worker and product broken - but the bond between artisan and client was severed as well. Few employees know their customers or patrons first hand. It is hard to empathize with and care about a statistic, a buyer whom you have never met and never likely to encounter. It is easy in such circumstances to feel immune to the consequences of one's negligence and apathy at work. It is impossible to be proud of what you do and to be committed to your work - if you never set eyes on either the final product or the customer! Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece, "Modern Times" captured this estrangement brilliantly.

6. Many former employees of mega-corporations abandon the rat race and establish their own businesses - small and home enterprises. Undercapitalized, understaffed, and outperformed by the competition, these fledging and amateurish outfits usually spew out shoddy products and lamentable services - only to expire within the first year of business.

7. Despite decades of advanced notice, globalization caught most firms the world over by utter surprise. Ill-prepared and fearful of the onslaught of foreign competition, companies big and small grapple with logistical nightmares, supply chain calamities, culture shocks and conflicts, and rapacious competitors. Mere survival (and opportunistic managerial plunder) replaced client satisfaction as the prime value.

8. The decline of the professional guilds on the one hand and the trade unions on the other hand greatly reduced worker self-discipline, pride, and peer-regulated quality control. Quality is monitored by third parties or compromised by being subjected to Procrustean financial constraints and concerns.

The investigation of malpractice and its punishment are now at the hand of vast and ill-informed bureaucracies, either corporate or governmental. Once malpractice is exposed and admitted to, the availability of malpractice insurance renders most sanctions unnecessary or toothless. Corporations prefer to bury mishaps and malfeasance rather than cope with and rectify them.

9. The quality of one's work, and of services and products one consumed, used to be guaranteed. One's personal idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, and problems were left at home. Work was sacred and one's sense of self-worth depended on the satisfaction of one's clients. You simply didn't let your personal life affect the standards of your output.

This strict and useful separation vanished with the rise of the malignant-narcissistic variant of individualism. It led to the emergence of idiosyncratic and fragmented standards of quality. No one knows what to expect, when, and from whom. Transacting business has become a form of psychological warfare. The customer has to rely on the goodwill of suppliers, manufacturers, and service providers - and often finds himself at their whim and mercy. "The client is always right" has gone the way of the dodo. "It's my (the supplier's or provider's) way or the highway" rules supreme.

This uncertainty is further exacerbated by the pandemic eruption of mental health disorders - 15% of the population are severely pathologized according to the latest studies. Antisocial behaviors - from outright crime to pernicious passive-aggressive sabotage - once rare in the workplace, are now abundant.

The ethos of teamwork, tempered collectivism, and collaboration for the greater good is now derided or decried. Conflict on all levels has replaced negotiated compromise and has become the prevailing narrative. Litigiousness, vigilante justice, use of force, and "getting away with it" are now extolled. Yet, conflicts lead to the misallocation of economic resources. They are non-productive and not conducive to sustaining good relations between producer or provider and consumer.

10. Moral relativism is the mirror image of rampant individualism. Social cohesion and discipline diminished, ideologies and religions crumbled, and anomic states substituted for societal order. The implicit contracts between manufacturer or service provider and customer and between employee and employer were shredded and replaced with ad-hoc negotiated operational checklists. Social decoherence is further enhanced by the anonymization and depersonalization of the modern chain of production (see point 5 above).

Nowadays, people facilely and callously abrogate their responsibilities towards their families, communities, and nations. The mushrooming rate of divorce, the decline in personal thrift, the skyrocketing number of personal bankruptcies, and the ubiquity of venality and corruption both corporate and political are examples of such dissipation. No one seems to care about anything. Why should the client or employer expect a different treatment?

11. The disintegration of the educational systems of the West made it difficult for employers to find qualified and motivated personnel. Courtesy, competence, ambition, personal responsibility, the ability to see the bigger picture (synoptic view), interpersonal aptitude, analytic and synthetic skills, not to mention numeracy, literacy, access to technology, and the sense of belonging which they foster - are all products of proper schooling.

12. Irrational beliefs, pseudo-sciences, and the occult rushed in to profitably fill the vacuum left by the crumbling education systems. These wasteful preoccupations encourage in their followers an overpowering sense of fatalistic determinism and hinder their ability to exercise judgment and initiative. The discourse of commerce and finance relies on unmitigated rationality and is, in essence, contractual. Irrationality is detrimental to the successful and happy exchange of goods and services.

13. Employers place no premium on work ethic. Workers don't get paid more or differently if they are more conscientious, or more efficient, or more friendly. In an interlinked, globalized world, customers are fungible. There are so many billions of potential clients that customer loyalty has been rendered irrelevant. Marketing, showmanship, and narcissistic bluster are far better appreciated by workplaces because they serve to attract clientele to be bilked and then discarded or ignored.

Work, Future of

A US Department of Labor report published, aptly, on Labor Day 1999, summed up the conventional wisdom regarding the future of this all-pervasive pastime we call "work". Agriculture will stabilize, service sector jobs will mushroom, employment in the manufacturing sector will be squeezed by "just in time" inventory and production systems and by labor-intensive imports. An ageing population and life-prolonging medicines will prop up the healthcare sector.

Yet, the much touted growth in services may partly be a statistical illusion. As manufacturing firms and households contracted out - or outsourced - hitherto internal functions, their employment shrank while boosting the job figures of their suppliers. From claims and wage processing to take-away restaurants and daycare centers, this shift from self-reliance to core competencies spawned off a thriving service sector. This trend was further enhanced by the integration of women in the workforce.

The landscape of future work will be shaped by technological change and globalization. The latter is erroneously considered to be the outcome of the former. But as "The Economist" has pointed out in a series of "School Briefs", the world has been much more globalized one hundred years ago, long before the Internet.

These two independent trends reinforce each other in a virtuous cycle which will profoundly impact the future of work. Enhanced flows of information increase market efficiency, partly through global competition and price transparency and partly through shorter product life cycles.

But innovation by itself would not have had such an impact on work patterns. Manufacturing techniques - chiefly miniaturization - had a profound effect on the relocation of work from factory and office to home and car. Machine tools and office equipment well into the 1980's were too cumbersome to install at home.

Today everyone has a telephone and many have a fax, a mobile phone, an Internet connection, and a PC. As a result, work-from-home and flextime are burgeoning. Increasingly - with the advent of Internet-enabled PDA's, laptops, beepers, and wireless access to e-mail and the Web - so does work-on-the-move: in cars, in trains, everywhere. Work has become ubiquitous.

This harks back to the past. Even at the end of the 19th century - at the height of the Industrial Revolution - more than half the population still worked from home. Farmers, medical doctors, blacksmiths, small time retailers - lived and slogged in combined business and domestic units. A steady career in an organisation is a recent invention, as William Bridges pointed out in his book "Job Shift".

Harlan Cleveland and Garry Jacobs explained the emergence of Organisation Man in the newsletter of the World Academy of Art and Science:

"The job - the kind that you had, or hoped to get - became a central fixture of life in industrial countries. Its importance was great because it served many needs. For managers and efficiency experts, job assignments were the key to assembly-line manufacturing. For union organizers, jobs protected the rights of workers. For political reformers, standardized civil service positions were the essence of good government. Jobs provided an identity to immigrants and recently urbanized farm workers. They provided a sense of security for individuals and an organizing principle for society."

Currently, three types of work are surfacing. Old, industrial-age, permanent, and workplace-bound jobs are increasingly the preserve of low and medium skilled workers - about 80 percent of the workforce in Britain. New, itinerant, ad-hoc, home-based, technology-intensive, brand-orientated, assignment-centered careers characterize another tenth of the workforce. Temporary and contract work work - mainly in services - account for the rest. It is a trichotomous landscape which supplanted the homogeneous labor universe of only two decades ago.

Nowadays, technologically-literate workers - highly skilled, adaptable, well-educated, and amenable to nontraditional work environments - are sought by employers and rewarded. The low skilled, computer-illiterate, uneducated, and conservative - lag behind.

In 1999, more than 13 million people in the USA alone held multiple jobs, or part time, or contract jobs (i.e., freelancing). Work from home and flextime accounted for one fifth of all other employees. Contrary to their image as rigid labor marketplaces, self-employment and temporary work were more prevalent in the European Union (except Britain) than in the USA.

The Bureau of Labor statistics in the US Department of Labor noted these demographic changes to the workforce. Though pertaining to the USA, they are applicable, in varying degrees, to the rest of the world, with the exception of certain parts of Africa. America is a harbinger of trends in employment and of changes in the nature of work.

(1) Labor force growth will slow down to an annual 0.2 percent after 2015 - compared to 2.6 percent between 1970-1980 and 1 percent during the last decade. This is when Baby Boomers start retiring and women's participation will level off. Women already make almost half the labor force. More than three quarters of all mothers are working. The propensity to hold a job is strongest among single mothers.

(2) The median age of the labor force will reach a historically unprecedented 41 years in 2008 - compared to 35 in 1978. As middle management layers are made redundant by technology and as start-ups mature - experienced executives will be in great demand and short supply. Even retirees are being recalled as advisors, or managers of special projects. This - coupled with a dramatic increase in functional life expectancy - may well erode the very concept of retirement.

The Urban Institute predicted, for ABCNews, that, as Generation X, Generation Y, and young immigrants enter the workforce, it will be polarized between the under-25's and the over-45's.

(3) Labor force growth is strongest among immigrants and minorities. In the USA, they will make up more than a quarter of the total workforce in 2008. Those with higher education and those devoid even of a high school diploma are over-represented among recent immigrants.

(4) College graduates already earn twice as much - and their earnings are still growing in real terms - as people with a high school diploma whose inflation-adjusted earnings are dwindling. High school dropouts are four times as likely to be unemployed as college graduates. These disparities are going to be further exacerbated. On the job training allows people to catch up.

(5) Five of the ten fastest growing occupations are computer-related and three are connected to healthcare. Yet, contrary to hype, half of the new jobs created by 2008 will still be in traditional, labor-intensive, sectors such as retail or trucking. One in two jobs - and two in three new ones - are in small companies, with less than 100 workers. Even behemoths, like General Motors, now resemble networks of small, autonomous, businesses and profit and loss centers.

(6) Much hectoring and preaching notwithstanding, the burden of wage-related taxes and benefits in the USA is heavy, at one half the base salary - though it has held stable at this level since 1970.

(7) The shift from defined benefit to defined contribution retirement plans continues apace. This enhances labor mobility as workers are able o "carry" their personal plans with them to new employers. Still, the looming social security crisis is far from resolved. In 1960, there were 5 workers per every beneficiary.

By 2060, there will be less than two. Moreover, close to a third of all beneficiaries will be the relatives of retired or deceased workers - rather than the pensioners themselves. This is likely to create severe social tensions between workers and beneficiaries.

(8) Job tenure has decreased markedly in all age groups over the last two decades - but only among men. Both boom and bust contributed. Economic growth encourages job-hunting, job hopping, and job-shopping. Recessions foster downsizing and bankruptcies. Jobs are mainly obtained through nimble networking. This is especially true at the higher rungs of the income ladder.

Still, the median figure for job stability hasn't changed much since 1983 in both the USA and the UK. Moreover, some jobs - and employment in some states - are far more stable than others. Transformation across all professions took place among workers younger than 32 and workers with long tenure.

The job stability of the former decreased markedly. By the age of 32 they had already worked for 9 different firms, according to figures published by "The Economist". The job security of the latter has vanished as firms, until less than 2 years ago, succumbed to a "youth cult" and inanely rid themselves of precious social and professional capital.

Another phenomenon is the emergence of a Hollywood-like star system among ultra-skilled workers - both technical and executive. Many of them act as freelancers and get paid with a mixture of cash and equity. They regard themselves as a brand and engage in brand marketing on a global scale.

The more capable they are of managing organisational change, leading teams, and identifying business opportunities - the more rewarded they are, according to a study by Timothy Bresnahan, published in the June 1999 issue of the "Economic Journal".

(9) About 3 percent of the workforce are employed through temporary help agencies. This is 6 times the figure in 1983. Public prejudices aside, even engineers and system analysts work as "temps". Many people prefer Mac-jobs, freelancing, or temporary assignments. It allows them to preserve their independence and free lifestyle. More than 90 percent of all Americans are happily ensconced in their jobs.

(10) Work gradually encroaches on family life and leisure time. In 1969, couples aged 25-54 toiled a combined 56 hours a week. By 2000, they were spending 67 hours at work - or 70 hours if they were childless. This increasing absence has probably contributed to the disintegration of the nuclear family, the emergence of alternative family systems, and the loosening of community ties.

Workplaces and employers - and employment laws - have as much adapting to do as do employees.

The UK's Economic and Social research Council runs a Future of Work Programme, launched in 1998, to investigate "changing organisational forms and the reshaping of work". The program studies novel work-organisation structures - temporary work, franchise, multi-employer sites, partnerships, supply-chain collaboration, and variants of outsourcing, including outsourcing to the company's own employees.

In Working Paper no. 14 published November 2000, the authors say:

"The development of more complex organisational forms involving cross-organisation networking, partnerships, alliances, use of external agencies for core as well as peripheral activities, the growth of multi-employer sites and the blurring of public/private sector divide have implications for both the legal and the socially constituted nature of the employment relationship.

The notion of a clearly-defined employer-employee relationship becomes difficult to uphold under conditions where the employee is working in project teams or on site beside employees from other organisations, where responsibilities for performance or for health and safety are not clearly defined, or involve organisations other than the employer.

This blurring of the relationship affects not only legal responsibilities, grievance and disciplinary issues and the extent of transparency and equity in employment conditions, but also the definition, constitution, and implementation of the employment contract."

In a futuristic piece published in the last day of the millennium, ABCNews described "corporate hotels" where one would work with other employees from the vicinity. Up to one third of all employees will work from home, according to David Pearce Snyder of "The Futurist". Companies will share "hot desks" and start-up incubators will proliferate.

But the phenomenon of self-employment in conjunction with entrepreneurship, mostly in the framework of startups and mainly in the services and technology sectors - is still marginal. Contrary to contemporary myths, entrepreneurship and innovation are largely in-house corporate phenomena - known as "intrapreneurship".

Yet, workers did not benefit from the wealth created by both the technology-engendered productivity rise and the ensuing capital markets bubble. Analysts, such as Alan Harcrow of "Workforce" magazine have long been sounding the alarm: "The thing is, the average employee hasn't been able to enjoy the benefits of increased productivity. There's no reward."

A recent tome by Kevin Phillips - "Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich" - claims:

"The top 1 percent pocketed 42 percent of the stock market gains between 1989 and 1997, while the top 10 percent of the population took 86 percent." Most American had more invested in their car than in their stock exchange portfolio. To Phillips, America is an old-fashioned, though no less pernicious for that, plutocracy.

No wonder that 40 percent of all employees hate the notion of working - though they may like the specific jobs they are in. Work is perceived by them as an evil necessary to finance their vacations, hobbies, and socializing - and, by many, as a form of exploitation. Insecure, bored, and disgruntled workers make bad entrepreneurs. Forced self-employment does not amount to entrepreneurship and, even in America, the former far outweighs the latter.

There are other ominous signs. The worker of the future will interface mainly with machines or with others through machines - often from home. The merging of home and work, the seamless fusion of leisure time and time on the job - are already creating a privacy backlash and "out of the rat race" social movements.

Admittedly, future workers are likely to be much more autonomous than their predecessors - either by working from home or by participating is "self-governing teams" and "stakeholder councils". Yet, the aforementioned blurring of boundaries between private life and working time will exact a heavy psychological and social toll. It will impact family life adversely and irreversibly. Job insecurity coupled with job hopping and personal branding will transform most elite workers into free - but anxious - agents trapped in a process of perpetual re-education.

As globalization and technological ubiquity proceed apace, competition will grow relentless and constant. Immigration and remote work will render it also global. Insurance claims processing, airline bookings, customer care, and many other business-support services are farmed out to India. Software development takes place in Israel and Ireland.

Society and community will unravel in the face of these sea changes. Social safety nets and social contracts - already stretched beyond their foreseen limits - will crumble. Job protection, tenure privileges, generous unemployment, retirement, and healthcare benefits - will all vanish from the law books and become a nostalgic memory. The dispossessed will grow in number and in restlessness. Wealth will further concentrate in the hands of the few - the educated, the skilled, the adaptable - with nary a trickle down effect.

Some scholars envision a plutocracy superimposed on a post-industrial proletariat . Dysfunctional families and disintegrating communities will prove inadequate in the face of growing racial tensions and crime. Ironically, this dystopian future may well be the inevitable outcome of this most utopian period - the present.

WTO (World Trade Organization)

On April 8, 2003, in a testimony before the Senate Steel Caucus, industry executives urged legislators to ignore the future decision of a World Trade Organization appeals panel, widely expected to uphold an earlier preliminary ruling that U.S.-imposed steel tariffs flouted international trade law.

Several senators called on the United States to withdraw from the multilateral body. Wilbur Ross, chairman of International Steel Group, blamed the burgeoning balance of payments deficit on the rulings and regulations of the WTO.

According to Steve Seidenberg in the National Law Journal, defiance of the WTO is a growing trend. Gary Horlick of the Washington DC law firm, Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, reckons that one in seven judgments rendered by the WTO's dispute mechanisms have been hitherto ignored.

Nor is the USA alone in its transgressions.

Ten polities - including the European Union and Canada - are serial violators. The WTO cannot enforce its decrees. It can only grant complainants permission to retaliate by imposing their own tariffs on products imported from the unrepentant country. This is a blunt and ineffective instrument. Experts warn of a return to unilateralism with the entire edifice of multilateral trade law discredited.

Revamping the dispute settlement rules is one item on the agenda of the current phase of trade negotiations, dubbed, in a November 2001 WTO Ministerial Conference, the Doha "Development" Round. Like the rest of the itinerary, it is going nowhere fast.

Alarmed by a looming and unrealistic deadline on May 31, 2003 the Chairman of the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), Peter Balas, proposed to first concentrate on a framework document, followed by a draft text. But, as James Wolfensohn, the former President of the World Bank, observed, with everyone preoccupied with Baghdad, Doha - arguably far more crucial to the global economy - is sidelined.

This is unfortunate - and ominous. The 146 members of the WTO - the newest one being Macedonia - failed to agree on the future shape of farm trade by the stipulated deadline of March 31, 2003. The goalposts were then moved again and again with a deadline conference in December 2005. The September 2003 Ministerial Conference convenes in Cancun, Mexico was an abysmal failure.

In the meantime, the multilateral regime which bolstered international trade in the past 10 years, is being supplanted by a patchwork of bilateral and regional treaties, albeit subject to WTO rules. Scholars disagree whether, in the absence of a global compact, these are preferable to the status quo. But everyone accepts that international rules are the best option.

But divisions run deep.

India - an important player and the unofficial spokesperson for the "less privileged" club - joined Cuba, Egypt, Malaysia, Dominican Republic, Honduras and Jamaica in demanding "special and differential developing country provisions". With Indonesia, Malaysia, Mauritius, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe, it insists on preferential market access for the group's non-agricultural goods.

The developing countries regard the previous Uruguay Round as a rip-off perpetrated by the club of developed and industrialized countries at the expense of the indigent. They have sworn not be led down the garden path again. Hence their furious resistance to demands to expand the negotiations to include such issues as animal welfare, food safety and labeling and the protection of geographical trade names. They see these as thinly veiled attempts to introduce trade restraints through the backdoor.

Instead, they want to concentrate on their main exports - agricultural produce and textiles - on tariff reductions and preferences, special treatment for certain products and safeguard provisions. Some of them want rich-world farm and export subsidies - totaling more than $300 billion a year - dramatically reduced, or even eliminated altogether. Export credits and state-owned trading enterprises are also contentious topics. The atmosphere is so dour that no one even broaches industrial tariffs and anti-dumping.

Poor countries are especially incensed at the United States for having torpedoed an agreement to grant poor countries access to generic drugs to fight AIDS and other diseases - and at the European Union for postponing any serious tweaking of its egregious Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to 2013.

The United States - faced with inane European subventions - raised its own farm support by a whopping four fifths in May 2003. Yet, it is still far below EU largesse. America is also the prime driver - together with the Cairns group of agricultural exporters (including Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Brazil) - of a bold initiative to cut subsidies down to 5 percent of production, to slash tariffs to 25 percent and to abolish all export-related aid.

Japan, insensitively, is trying to reduce its rice import quota. Together with Norway, India, the EU and South Korea - known as the "friends of multifunctionality" - it is championing an unworkable "linear" formula by which countries should cut subsidies and tariffs equally, irrespective of prevailing levels of farm aid. Even so, the EU would like to slash subsidies by no more than 45 to 55 percent and tariffs by less than 36 percent, as per the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture.

Nor is the camp of developing countries either homogeneous or cohesive. African and Caribbean nations enjoy preferential access to markets in the EU and the United States. Others - notably India - are terrified of the inevitable onslaught of efficient competition following farm liberalization. But no country, rich or poor, seems to be preparing its agricultural sector to cope with the impact of a successful Doha round.

Time is running out. The term of Pascal Lamy, the EU's capable trade commissioner, ended in 2004 and he was replaced by Peter Mandelson. President George Bush's fast track negotiating authority expires in 2007, if he makes it that far. As The Economist warns, the "peace clause", yielded by the Uruguay Round, elapsed on December 31, 2003. While in force, it prevented a deluge of farm-related litigation from erupting on the scene. A trickle is already evident: Brazil has sued both the USA and the EU over cotton and sugar subsidies, respectively. Textile wars erupted between China and both the EU and the USA and were settled by inconclusive short-term agreements.

The crisis at the WTO is part of a global transition from the multilateralism that characterized the Cold War - to unilateralism or, rather, bilateralism. The breakdown of consensus-based alliances strains international institutions and laws. National - or supranational - interests emerge as renewed sources of legitimacy. While the United States may be blamed for the demise of political multilateralism - it is the EU that is largely responsible for the collapse of the international economic order.

The Doha Development Agenda falls prey to these geopolitical upheavals as it tries to tackle the most prickly issues. In a presentation in March 2003 to the 3rd International Temperate Rice Conference in Punte del Este, Uruguay, Dan Horovitz, of the Theodore Goddard law firm in Brussels, reminded the participants how uncertain the outcomes are:

"Whereas the average non-agricultural worldwide tariff is 4 percent, the average tariff imposed by developed countries on agricultural products is 40 percent, with peaks as high as 500 percent ... The new Round's negotiations are of paramount importance for the very viability and credibility of the WTO system. A failure to provide for proper solutions to the problems of the global agricultural trade would have particularly devastating results not only for trade in agriculture, but for the current trading system as a whole."

XYZ

Precisely two years ago, in March 2003, the West killed Serbia's Prime Minister since January 2001, Zoran Djindjic. By forcing him, at times against his better judgment, to surrender one more war criminal, to pursue yet another mobster, to eliminate the remaining subsidies that rendered tolerable the drab and destitute lives of Serbs - the West cast Djindjic as its lackey.

His compatriots often accused him of being a supine American stooge. According to recent opinion polls, Djindjic trailed 10 other politicians in popularity. In truth, people also resented his vainglorious athleticism, conspicuous consumption, incisive intellect, his good looks, youth, energy, inexplicable wealth and meteoric rise to power.

He was a difficult man: haughty, stubborn, outspoken, abrasive and impatient. Aleksandar Tijanic, a Serb polemicist and columnist, called him "Little Slobo(dan Milosevic)" in an article in the daily Danas. His supporters dubbed him "The Manager" in recognition of his organizational skills.

Nor the did the West sweeten the bitter nostrums it so liberally administered. Money promised never arrived, sanctions were repeatedly threatened, ten years worth of onerous - and much disputed - economic reforms were unwisely compressed into the past 26 months. Foreign investors - with the exception of a few multinationals - abstained.

In a belated attempt to emulate his erstwhile ally and current archival, the ubiquitously popular Milosevic-lite Vojislav Kostunica, Djindjic demanded a final settlement of the Kosovo gaping wound and courted the hitherto hostile Orthodox Church. But this turnaround was deemed by his countrymen to be merely his latest cynical ploy to revive his sagging political fortunes.

As leader of the Democratic Party in the 1990s, Djindjic cultivated a relationship with Yugoslavia's president, Slobodan Milosevic and his reviled regime. He fraternized with the likes of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader and war criminal and Zeljko Raznatovic ("Arkan") the bloodstained militia chieftain and mafia capo.

During the Kosovo war in 1999, he infamously fled from bombed Serbia to tranquil Montenegro, claiming implausibly that, being branded by Milosevic "NATO's mercenary", his life was in the balance. An opportunistic dealmaker, he was dogged to his dying day by persistent rumors about his alleged contacts with the mob.

The head of the Zemun gang, based in a suburb of Belgrade, is Milorad Lukovic a.k.a. Legija. The municipality was formerly run by Vojislav Seselj, an indicted war criminal, now incarcerated at the Hague. When Lukovic commanded an elite police unit, the "Red Berets", he helped Djindjic attain power by refusing Milosevic's orders to suppress dissent. His lot now stand accused of the assassination.

Paradoxically, the death of Djindjic restored stability to Serbia. A state of emergency was declared, tantamount in some ways to a military putsch. But the army, police and security organs did not leverage this fortuity into full control of the tormented country and Kostunica re-emerged in due time to capture the Serb presidency and then appoint a reformer to the premiership.

Shocked by the atrocity, the umbrella grouping of 18 political parties, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, now in power, re-coalesced around a single leader. Radicals of all stripes were flogged by a disgusted electorate. The relationship between the two uneasy constituents of "Serbia and Montenegro" weakened further, as the latter drifted away.

But in one respect Djindjic may be irreplaceable. He was a true economic reformer with the will to proffer painful solutions to apparently intractable problems.

The Djindjic-prodded government liberalized prices, restructured state finances, rescheduled Serbia's international debts, cleaned up the banking sector by closing down otherwise dysfunctional money laundering outfits, freed the labor market, widened the tax base by eliminating loopholes and exemptions and privatized aggressively.

The much-lauded governor of the central bank, Mladjan Dinkic, stabilized the Yugoslav (now Serbian) dinar, cut hyperinflation to low double digits and succeeded to have some Milosevic-era debts written off.

This earned them a three year standby agreement with the International Monetary Fund, World Bank soft loans and close to $300 million to overhaul the crumbling energy infrastructure.

But the economy, despite growing at an annual rate of more than 3 percent since 1999, is still less than half its already depressed 1989 level of about $2700 in gross domestic product per capita. Serbia endured a decade of war, sanctions, civil wars, international pariah status, bombing, and refugees.

Its infrastructure is decrepit, its industry obsolete, its agriculture shattered to inefficient smithereens, its international trade criminalized. The foreign exchange reserves are depleted by years of customs evasion and theft. Serbia's exports may have climbed by one tenth on Djindjic's watch- but imports surged by one third. The country's yawning trade deficit is menacing as is the stagnation in its dilapidated industrial output.

Serbia is destitute. The average monthly salary is $100 (or c. $140 in Belgrade). In 2000, more than one third of the population subsisted under the official poverty line. Things got worse since then. One fifth of the populace survives on $1 or less a day.

Privatization resulted in mass layoffs - 15,000 were made redundant when the Zastava factory in Kragujevac was sold. Another 10,000 lost their jobs when the licenses of four banks were withdrawn due to illicit activities. In a workforce of about 1.5 million people - such numbers hurt.

No wonder that the government took a breather, relegating to the sidelines legislation pertaining to mortgages, bankruptcy, denationalization and the financing of political parties. A White Book published in February 2003 by the Foreign Investors Council in Belgrade recounted the unfinished agenda of languishing reforms:

"The civil, in particular commercial, procedure should be strengthened to facilitate the speedy conduct of the trials; Judgments of superior courts should be made binding on inferior courts; A larger number of judges need to be trained and the current case-load per judge should be reduced; Banking legislation should be enhanced with respect to loan loss provisioning and establishment of the legal lending limit; Repayment history (should be used) for the purpose of the calculation of loan loss provisions; Increase the legal lending limit, where transactions are backed up by quality collateral; Allow investors the right to re-sell the right to use of land; (Provide) option for subdivision of the land use obtained; Allow buyer to collateralize the 'irrevocable right of use' after transfer."

The document also calls for objective criteria in the granting of tax holidays, the speedy introduction of the value added tax, a reform of the antiquated payment system, the formation of a special unit to handle the tax affairs of expat confidentially. A new law on concessions should streamline the application procedure by unambiguously identifying the authorities in charge and by rendering the process transparent. The requirements for work and residence permits should be simplified and made less exacting.

Next Djindjic moved to tackle the murky underbelly of Serbia's thoroughly criminalized economy.

Albeit reluctantly, he clamped down on arms sales to the likes of Iraq - an important source of foreign exchange and employment. The decision to hand Milosevic and a few other henchmen to the war crimes tribunal in the Hague was largely economic, too, in that it released $1.2 billion in international aid.

Djindjic curbed petrol smuggling by permitting only the importation of crude oil and by obliging importers to refine locally. Illegal construction was demolished in accordance with stricter new statutes, incurring the wrath of many penumbral figures, collectively decried as "the construction mafia".

The next target was the mob's extensive and all-pervasive pecuniary and commercial reach in cahoots with the ministry of interior, the secret services and the military. This particular ambition may have cost him his life.

In a public debate with Dusan Djordjevic on the Web pages of Central Europe Review, I wrote in October 2000:

"There are undercurrents and overriding themes in Serb history that perseverate and appear immutable. There is no reason to believe that the election of the hitherto non-corrupt and fiercely nationalistic law professor, Vojislav Kostunica, will miraculously transform the apparently ineluctable essence of Serb history and its salient proclivities ... Balkan societies are organized in (often regional) networks of political patronage, business and crime in equal measures. Politicians, criminals and businessmen are indistinguishable and interchangeable.

Perhaps as an inescapable consequence of all the above, the Balkans (and Serbia) lack institutions (though it fanatically maintains the verisimilitude of having ones). The ultimate arbiters have always been raw force or the threat of using it. The disempowered are passive-aggressive. Recondite sabotage and pertinacious stonewalling are their modes of self-defense and self-expression. The unregenerate power elites react with contemptuous suppression and raging punishment. It is a war from within to mirror the war from without. The result is a moral quagmire of depravity and perfidy."

Djindjic was a consummate philosopher. He studied under Jurgen Habermas in Germany. The titles of his four books are his most precise and comprehensive obituary: "Serbia - neither East nor West," "Subjectivity and Violence," "Yugoslavia - the Partially Formed State" and "The Fall of the Dialectics".