Who will provide in the nations of the world for the individual's needs for income, affiliation, and retirement security? To achieve the goal of sustaining employment in a society facing the end of work, Jeremy Rifkin (The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era, New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1995: 256-267) has proposed that the role of the third sector as a locus of valued work become more fully developed. Specifically, he suggests that third sector organizations augment their employment roles, supported by public and philanthropic policies providing 1) "a social wage for community service" and 2) "shadow wages for voluntary work".

These questions require the most serious and searching consideration. This discussion paper is directed toward the examination of these issues, and draws attention to the development of resolutions appropriately fitted to the particular situations of a number of different countries of the world.

That these issues already weigh heavily on the minds of the citizens of the modern state is readily apparent, as was dramatically brought to the fore by the New Hampshire (U.S.) primary campaign of Republican presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan in 1996. The degree of interest may also be indicated by the standing of Jeremy Rifkin's recent book, The End of Work, on the best-seller lists of such countries as Italy, France, and Canada.

Earlier work has suggested that society provides four potential ways of meeting these needs, as represented by the four major institutions identified by Van Til in his Mapping the Third Sector (New York: Foundation Center, 1988): 1) the polity, 2) the economy, 3) the "third sector" (voluntary and nonprofit organizations), and 4) the informal sector (family, kin and neighborhood). Of these four sectors of the modern society, the first three possess the ability to provide for significant paid employment. Building on this work, Rifkin has described the coming of the third industrial revolution, in which the microchip threatens a very end to work itself, while also offering the potential for a future of vast leisure and social progress.

It is evident from this work that the business corporations that form the mainstay of the modern economy are beating a hasty retreat from their traditional role of providing for mass employment. The increasing use of part-time positions, contract hires, temporaries, and outsourced work make this apparent. Rifkin argues that only the most adept 20% in society can expect anything resembling full employment in the years ahead.

While the corporation withdraws from its previous commitment to employ, so does its first-sector counterpart, government. The de facto freeze on taxation at every level of the federal system assures the steady reduction of governmental payrolls, both for employees and beneficiaries of welfare, healthcare, and retirement programs.

The third and fourth sectors, themselves hardly independent of business and governmental support, are also dealt reeling blows. Family disorganization rises with underemployment, and charitable donations of time and money are threatened while the needs claimed by clients of social agencies rise.

Meanwhile the chorus of society's leadership voices continues to sing the same increasingly discordant tune: Education is the answer--Just become computer literate and prepare yourself for many job changes! As the rate of college graduation in the United States approaches the 40% rate, however, the number of good jobs provided by all employers, public and private, decreases. Employment increasingly comes to resemble a game of musical chairs, albeit with fewer seats placed into play with every passing year.

This neo-Darwinist perspective, however attractive it may sound to society's rich and powerful, ignores the fundamental law of American capitalism most prominently discovered by Henry Ford: Consumers are as important as providers in a mass economy. Ford sustained employment at his factories in part to assure that his workers could also be purchasers of the vehicles they made. Likewise, Aetna Insurance Executive John Filer never ceased to remind his listeners that a society in chaos could not sustain a viable insurance industry.

Survival of the fittest multi-jobbing part-time workers will not support the needs of all, or even most, families in society in the challenging years ahead. In a society like that of the United States, with its high "civil war potential" (as political scientist Austin Ranney once put it), social distress waits if only the few have wealth, only a minority have adequately compensated work, and the majority competes for survival at or about the minimum wage. Yet, as Zellig Harris notes, it is a characteristic of advanced capitalist economies to give rise to "a large unemployed and impoverished segment of the population excluded from the benefits of capitalist production and society" (The Transformation of Capitalist Society, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997, p. 2).

To achieve the goal of sustaining employment in a society facing the end of work, Rifkin (1995: 256-267) has proposed that the role of the third sector as a locus of valued work become more fully developed. Harris notes that "Opportunities for non-profit starts are more available when the low-profit areas passed up by much of big business are too important for the population, or for particular sectors of it, to be readily eliminated" (op. Cit, p. 147).

Rifkin suggests that third sector organizations augment their employment roles, supported by public and philanthropic policies providing 1) "a social wage for community service" and 2) "shadow wages for voluntary work". A similar note has been sounded by sociologist Herbert Gans, and echoed in statements by both U.S. Presidential candidates, Clinton and Dole, in the 1996 campaign.

Among the potential policy interventions third sector organizations might develop and support are those listed in Table 1, which have been identified by a preliminary exploration and literature review. ISTR colleagues are invited to reflect on the productivity of such initiatives as policy responses to the crisis of work in their own nations. Responses are invited on the form attached as page 5 of the current paper.

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To conclude: An emerging crisis in the nature and distribution of work confronts advanced capitalist economies, even those in which expansions in low-wage employment have served, if only temporarily, to depress rates of unemployment. Third sector organizations, facing this societal challenge, may choose to explore and develop program strategies aimed at extending and distributing productive work in the varying societies which they serve. As Zellig Harris (op. Cit., p. 113) has observed, "When in difficulties the transactors of business can cede various domains of decision-making to government, and possibly in some cases to the participants in the work of production." And, if such explorations are to be essayed, might not specialists in third sector research and practice play important roles in these vital processes of social and economic development and change?

Jon Van Til is Professor of Urban Studies at Rutgers University, Camden New Jersey 08102 USA. Phone: 1-609-225-6223. E-mail: vantil@crab.rutgers.edu

Arthur P. Williamson directs the Centre for Voluntary Action Studies at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, Northern Ireland. Phone: 44-1-265-326-4618. E-mail: ap.williamson@ulst.ac.uk

To return to Jon Van Til's home page: http://www.crab.rutgers.edu/~vantil