Novus Ordo Seclorum 3.0
As Americans, there is a collective need — for our continued existence — to acknowledge and accept some inconvenient truths: Despite what any politician or union leader might tell you, jobs in the finite fossil fuel industry will only decline from this point; they are not coming back. Manufacturing jobs, as we currently know them, are not coming back. Jobs in agriculture, as we currently know them, are not coming back. Retail, administrative, fast food, and livery jobs, as we currently know them, are not coming back and will forever be changed in the coming years.
Now that we’ve gotten the negatives out of the way, allow me to paint a more positive picture of what this means for the present and future.
Novus ordo seclorum, the Latin phrase that appears on the back of every one-dollar bill, underneath the thirteen-step unfinished pyramid (representing the original 13 colonies as the literal building blocks of a new nation) embossed with ‘1776’ in Roman numerals and an all-seeing Eye of Providence within an isosceles capstone (evoking the Pythagorean Theorem), roughly translates to “a new order of the ages.” The blatant Masonic imagery — symbols of an industrious, ambiguously-theistic society of prolific builders — was perhaps the most apt metaphor for the intentions of our this country’s founding; A budding young country with hopes of shedding the mistakes of exponentially-older nations, erecting a fresh landscape of possibilities in a rapidly-evolving world that was on the precipice of the Industrial Revolution.
So why the brief, seemingly unnecessary history lesson? What relevance might it have today? I think it is safe to say that we are in the midst of the latest ‘reordering of the ages,’ and perhaps the most major socioeconomic shift since the institution of the five-day work week and the advent of the magneto assembly line.
Speaking of, a little more history:
There is an excellent TruTV series called “Adam Ruins Everything,” and in an episode from the first season, host Adam Conover demystifies the origins of the five-day, forty-hour work week. A century ago, workers put in an average of ten-hours per day, six days per week [source]; and that was without a guaranteed bathroom or lunch break. Back then, when an overwhelming majority of the country attended church on Sundays, workers rarely ever had a full day to themselves. Enter labor unions and a large influx of Jewish immigrants (including my great-grandfather in 1906), who successfully petitioned business owners and the federal government to mandate a forty-hour, five-day work week. Factory owners, like Henry Ford, extended that ‘luxury’ well before it became the standard, despite his deep-seated hatred for labor unions and…well, never mind — we won’t go there.
In 1956, less than twenty years after the five-day work week was established, then Vice President Nixon foresaw an eventual move to a four-day work week. But just twelve years later, two-income households were working an average of fifty-three hours per week, and by the year 2000, they were working sixty-four [source]. We now work four more weeks per year than we did in 1979. In a time of automation, how is it that we have so much more work to complete than we did forty years ago? The short answer is: we don’t.
A recent study found that employees spend — on average — just 44% of their work day performing their primary job duties. Of the remaining 56%, respondents said, 15% was spent on emails, 11% on administrative tasks, 10% on useful and productive meetings, 8% on meetings that could have been emails, 8% on interruptions for non-essential tasks, and 4% on everything else. Additionally, a 2013 study found that workers spend between 1.5 and 3 hours per day on personal activities. But, according to the U.S.Bureau of Labor Statistics, full time employees are (er, were, before the pandemic) still at the office an average of nine hours per day, as opposed to closer to eight when Sesame Street was my primary source of news and entertainment.
For the sake of argument, and being very generous, let’s say that six hours of every nine-hour day is spent performing essential work functions, regardless of whether or not they are considered part of our official duties. Assuming most of us were traveling to the office five days per week, pre-Covid, we were spending fifteen additional hours per week there than was really necessary. Add to that, the national average commute time of roughly 4.35 hours per week, which alone accounts for nine days per year. So, in one week, the full time American worker wastes about 19.5 hours getting to their office and engaging in inane activities for a sizable portion of each day. Imagine how much more productive we would all be with an extra 19.5 hours of breathing room each week.
The last time I saw my Manhattan office, my daughter was fourteen months old and not yet talking, walking, or feeding herself. Over the last six-and-a-half months, I have had the once-in-a-kid’s-lifetime opportunity to watch her take her first steps, independently spoon her breakfast (mostly) into her mouth while I leisurely eat mine, add more and more— some outright hilarious — words to her vocabulary, and develop a strong, loving hug. My wife and I are incredibly fortunate to have our parents living very close by, so they had been nobly handling our daughter’s daycare until she returned to ‘school’ a couple of weeks ago. Still, every morning I get the pleasure of greeting my smiley little one as she’s rubbing the sleep from her eyes and giving her breakfast until the time comes for the hand-off. Over the last 29 weeks, had I been commuting my usual five hours round trip per day, two or three days per week, I would have missed 12–18 days of my daughter’s life; just getting to and from my office.
When I was commuting to Manhattan, I was generally dashing out of the office at 5pm on the dot so that I could make a reasonably-timed train in order to maybe get home in time to give my kid a kiss goodnight before scrounging through the fridge for something to heat up for dinner. Since I fled the city on March 9th, I am typically at my home-based desk until at least 6pm and I am many times answering emails until I go to sleep. Staying on the reserved side, let’s say I work an extra 45 minutes per day. By that math, accounting for firm holidays and PTO, I have given my company an extra 11 days of my time. Don’t get me wrong: I love my job, and have grown to love it even more since I’ve been working remotely full time. But, by working remotely, I have given my company a lot more of my time than if I had been commuting to the office. As an unintended benefit, I have become more efficient and even more thankful to be working (not just because of the current job economy).
With the ability to spread my day out and share the responsibilities of taking care of our daughter and homestead with my wife, I have found new freedom in which to inject a healthy dose of professional development into my schedule.
Almost immediately after I began working remotely full time, I began receiving targeted advertisements from the online learning platform Udemy (good job, marketing team!). I had thought about purchasing web development and other programming courses in the past, but always rationalized that I would never have the time to devote to them. I had gone fairly far with freeCodeCamp, but found that with my limited expendable hours, it was difficult to allot the focus required to excel. Seeing as how I thought (at the time) that this pandemic would probably last at least a week or two — maybe a month — I figured I would put to good use my newfound five hours per day and sign up for a full-stack web development boot camp series. I took advantage of a flash sale and, for just $20, I have been honing my HTML and CSS skills, developing a more strategic design process, and have even started to dip my toes into Javascript for the last six months. I have since redesigned all of the standard user interfaces I build for my customers, tweaking the code more and more with each tailored delivery. Co-workers now seek my advice for improving their designs and debugging their code. While not one of my primary job duties, it has become one that keeps me thoroughly engaged and hungry for more projects.
As I have seen several friends, family members, and family and friends of my friends and family fall victim to the furloughs and layoffs of late, my go-to advice each and every time is for them to learn how to code. Coding is a profession that was created around the idea of being able to work from anywhere with an internet connection, and all signs are pointing to a much more liberated and mobile workforce, generally, in the future post-Covid world for many industries. Coding is a profession that is the present and future of our increasingly automated world. It is a profession that is not going anywhere for awhile…at least until they teach machines how to code their own functions and build and code their replacements…then we’re all in trouble.
While being prepared for the future requires a 21st century mindset, our leadership, ways of working, and education system seem to be stuck in the 20th. Worldwide, there has been an average decline in math literacy and only a slight uptick in science aptitude among American high school students in the last two decades. In a world that is ever-reliant on that knowledge, there is an alarming need to reevaluate our curricula. While interest in STEM education among American high school students has remained relatively unchanged for the last decade at just under 50%, only 20% of graduates are actually meeting the ACT STEM benchmark. Of course, we still need to keep a focus on reading, writing, geography, and world affairs, but the sooner we move to curricula rich in real world knowledge and skills building, the sooner we can prepare the next generation for the workplace of the future.
While we are waiting for our leadership to get up to speed, the working (and laid-off/furloughed) adults of the country can lead by example for the next generation. Instead of fretting over which jobs of yesterday will be gone tomorrow, we should prepare ourselves for the jobs of tomorrow, today. In the 20th century, digital marketing experts, SEO specialists, chief listening officers, social media managers, app developers, podcasters, cybersecurity analysts, user experience designers, customer success managers, and online influencers did not exist. On the flip side, how many VCR repair people, video rental clerks, switchboard operators, ice cutters, lamplighters, milkmen, Dictaphone operators, radio actors, typesetters, elevator operators, film projectionists, soda jerks, book peddlers, telegraphists, and factory lectors do you know today?
Of course there will probably always been a need for some professions that can only be done manually, but most of our jobs will be affected in some way by automation in the near future, if they have not already been. It is imperative that we develop a greater sense of adaptability, in addition to being able to let go of the past while retaining lessons learned.
As our world evolves, the workforce generally moves along with it. Even the brand new jobs of right now might be altered or even eliminated in the next couple of decades. But until Anya Major shows up to smash her sledgehammer into our insatiable thirst for technological advancement, the country — and the world — will need the personnel to see future innovations to fruition and maintain them…until the next big thing comes along.
