Am I here a human being? Am I allowed to be one here? Modern worlds of work - by Bernhard Scholz (translation by Ferdinand Graziotto)

I just finished the translation of a presentation held by Bernhard Scholz (president of the Compagnia delle Opere) at the Rhein Meeting in 2017. I translated it for a friend that wants to read it. I think it is a very interesting presentation. Therefore I want to share it with you guys as well. Here is the link to the original version, for those of you, that speak German: https://www.rhein-meeting.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Rhein-Meeting_2017_Scholz.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3sB5k4zwtztxN_0w1aanyVYbSRSzgbs3WHiL8KgvXDUoEL9476i8KgZEU

That is the translation, Ferdinand Graziotto 

Am I here a human being? Am I allowed to be one here?
Modern worlds of work

Good morning, thank you for the invitation. What we are performing this morning is already practice for modern worlds of work: achieving a lot in a very short period of time. Let me start with some preliminary notes. I am going to let you participate in questions, that are on my mind. To which there are not as many done answers as one would wish. And I am going to narrow it down to European and North American worlds of work, otherwise it would get out of hand. And last: worlds of work are so diverse. Think of someone working in the automobile industry. Think of a teacher or think of a housewife. For that reason I am just going to make some important points. I will offer a general understanding of the issue. Therefore it is very important to me to focus on the questions that are on your mind in dialog after the presentation. 

First question: What happens when I work? When I work, I am pursuing a certain purpose, my personality comes into play, and I interlink with reality, i.e., reality comes into play. So work is always an interdependency between a subjective dimension and an objective dimension. The subjective dimension, that is me, and the objective dimension is what we call "working conditions", "lifeworlds". These are closely intertwined, but for reasons of clarity, simplicity and reflection, I want to distinguish them. Starting with the subjective dimension in order to then engage with the question of the working conditions, in that we are these days.

When pursuing a purpose, the question of meaning is inevitable to me: I am doing the dishes, why? So that we can eat. Why do we eat? So that we can live. What do we live for? You can ask this question for all steps in all work processes. We can ignore this question of meaning, but we cannot turn it off.
It often gets ignored, but it remains. Which answers are there to this question? The simplest: I have to work in order to earn my living, in order to provide my family. That can then expand further. I want to raise my children as best as possible. I want good relationships with my colleagues. I want good relationships with my customers. I want my company to run well so that it provides jobs, so that others can benefit from it and can start families on there own. I can extend that and realise that the contribution I make to my company is ultimately a contribution to the common good. But I can also see that work makes me more mature. I acquire a certain self-awareness. I get to know myself: my talents, my abilities, my limits. Furthermore I can develop my relationship skills. I can also develop what has been called virtues: moderation, justice, bravery. I can also do my work at the service of the one who gave me myself, but this always means that I also do it at the service of the people I am entrusted with.

Most of these considerations, which we continue to make, also apply to unpaid work. We must also bear in mind that there is unpaid work. Work is work, whether it is paid or not. There are a lot of volunteers, a lot of mothers, a lot of housewives: they do a great service and are not paid for it.

Of course I can also live work as a drug. In other words, I no longer ask myself what for, but it becomes a substitute for this question to me - and that happens very quickly in modern working worlds. I immerse myself in work, I get intoxicated by work, and as long as it goes well, everything is fine, but when it does not go well anymore, it ends very badly. The other big danger is that I identify myself with the work. I identify myself with what I achieve. I then also identify myself with failure, which leads to these oscillations between intoxication and depression, which we experience very frequently.

Let us turn to the working conditions, because everything I have said so far happens in certain conditions. And these conditions can promote all this or can also endanger it. I would like to just briefly recall how working conditions arise. Since there have been people, they have tried to improve their living conditions. In other words, the desire for a better, more pleasant, less arduous life has always been the driving force behind a change in lifeworlds and thus also in working conditions. All of that already started when people settled down. When the times of hunters and gatherers came to an end, the era of working conditions as something naturally given per se ended as well. Mankind, by starting to breed animals, has created new working conditions for himself through this breeding, through agriculture. Philosophers refer to it as a second constitution of reality, i.e., the reality created by man. And now we get to the point that particularly concerns us today, that these days we are living in a world, in which we are facing almost only this second constitution of reality, so to speak. We have children growing up in cities, that do not even know anymore what a stable is, what a meadow is, what a tree is, they only see it in pictures, or on television. Therefore, the direct reference to reality, is for many people often only water, one’s own body and water. Everything else is already somehow produced or reproduced. And of course that creates a certain culture. A certain work culture, a life culture, in which this - let's call it nostalgic - direct reference to reality diminishes.

And I would like to briefly emphasise some of the situations, that we are facing these days. You all know that we are talking about industry 4.0. I want to go through this very briefly, to realise, that there was an incredibly rapid development after the Middle Ages. Until the end of the Middle Ages work, the development of worlds of work was linear. Medicine had progressed, but relatively linear. Textiles, the whole agricultural economy, everything developed, including the construction industry and the water industry, relatively linear. And then suddenly an incredible acceleration began, when the first weaving machine was invented in 1784. By the way: this immediately led to the famous Weaver Uprising in Silesia, because it took away jobs. The second phase of the industrial revolution then followed in 1870 with the establishment of chemistry and electricity, hence mass production. Electricity, not just coal, but electricity. The next big step was the first commercial robot in 1970. That is a robot that performs work relatively independently with a certain storage capacity. This was the third industrial revolution, largely made possible by electronics. We are now talking about the fourth. It is very controversial, though. Some also talk about the second digital revolution. But these are problems that I leave to others. What is sure is that we are moving towards a digitalisation like there has never been before, with cyber-controlled companies. I am going to give you two very short examples. If you order a car today, it works like this: you go online, you put it together, you order it, you will soon be able to follow all the payment mechanisms online, right up to the bank, which will send you the credit online. You order the car, the computer sends it to a central computer, which calculates which components have to be delivered by which suppliers at what time and where. The whole thing gets planned, programmed. Then at a certain point the model comes on a rail, is assembled and delivered. If it was not for the handing over of the keys at the end, you could also get the car home purely computer-controlled. Without ever having met anyone. 

A second example: Two weeks ago I visited a company, that manufactures Formula Three racing cars, near Parma. They had a simulator, but not one of those we know, a real simulator: It stands on three legs and simulates the whole driving experience. There is a professional racing-car driver inside: Even Hamilton trains with machines like these. The whole braking process, the acceleration process, the movements, the curves, everything is perfectly simulated. It is like actually sitting in the car driving on a real speedway. Made possible by the big screens in front of them the simulation lets them drive in Bahrain, in Indianapolis, in Monza, on the Nürburgring et cetera. It is simply entered electronically: Nürburgring, and they start driving on the Nürburgring. Two days before I came, a company had been there that had eighty tires on chips. They were put in to be tested by a professional racing-car driver. There were no tires, there was no car, there was no racetrack. He drove in the rain in Indianapolis, on sand tracks with desert wind in Bahrain, everything simulated. After two days, the manufacturer knew which of these eighty tires
he has to produce. Racing cars are no longer produced as prototypes. They are completely tested beforehand and are built two months before the race - to give a little insight into what is going on. It is always difficult to explain developments that come along with Big Data- but I am going to give you an example: IBM is currently producing a computer for emergency rooms in hospitals. It works like this: you arrive, the computer asks you questions, or your relatives, if you feel very bad. Your finger is placed on a sensor that then analyses your blood. Blood pressure, blood analysis, etc. do not get tested the common way. They are analysed directly through the skin. The computer makes a comparison with millions and millions of patient data - these are the famous
Big Data. The computer analyses the entire state of health with all its information. The computer analyses the entire state of health with all the information. If an information is missing, it asks you questions. You enter the answer. The doctor gets an ejection with a 99% probable analysis after about two minutes. Simply because the computer compares millions of patient data with yours. But he also learns from you by saving your information - these are the intelligent systems. He learns from this case, which you now present as a patient, to continue to improve. So now the second constitution of reality is very obvious, very, very perceptible to everyone.

What does that mean? We like to talk about the risks of this world, but I would like to make a preliminary remark: We are doing very, very well in Europe. In other words, when we complain, we complain at a very high level. We have a health system that works. We have a training system that works. As a rule, we have jobs that work. We have a pension system that works. That is to say, when we look critically at these issues, we need to know from what point of view we are doing this. We are doing this from a very good position. That does not mean that we do not have to confront this problem. But I made that preliminary remark, so that what I am saying remains in the right dimension. I would like to exclude the whole problem of environmental issues. It is one of the main problems, but it is now so well known, that I do not want to analyse it in detail here.

We have a first problem, which is the general dependence on economic issues. Everything that happens is immediately an economic issue - benefit-costs -, because prosperity is produced economically. An economisation of the world. That is the foundation of finance. Since it was the reason for the economy becoming more financial, mainly due to digitalisation. To a large extent, actually only explainable by digitalisation. If you know how investment processes work. There are always computers analysing the world markets, telling you what trends there are. Sometimes the computers even have the decision-making power. In a few seconds, entire processes are transacted. Millions of dollars are getting rebooked, either to one side or the other. Hence we are dealing with a type of financial exploitation of the economy. That, of course, also affects companies. Which are less and less able to plan for the long term. Since they have to generate ever shorter-term returns. So that investors are satisfied with their returns. We are a working society that is running out of work because more and more processes are being controlled. There is a Harvard analysis that Obama has commissioned: 49% of today's jobs will disappear in the next five to ten years. We will no longer have cashiers in many stores as well as many salespeople will no longer be necessary. The banking industry will have much less direct customer contact, online banking will substitute most of it. There will also be far more computer-controlled systems in the areas of engineering and architecture that will handle our processes independently, et cetera. And we will have a very rapid change in the world of work: 65 % of the children born today will work in professions that do not exist today. On the other hand, this also means that all of us who have a profession must constantly learn something new. I assume that everyone here has changed something since they started working, but that will accelerate. Hence, the actual learning process now is to be able to learn as quickly as possible, to be able to relearn, to rethink. 

And then there is a problem, which we also see in politics: the increasing complexity, because everything is cross-linked with each other. If I decide something somewhere, it has unbelievable consequences on the other side. As a result, even in a simple company, many people no longer understand why certain things work, how they work. And that leads to uncertainty. And insecurities lead to fear. That is why complexity is a very problematic factor - I will suggest later what is to be done. 

Furthermore we face an ever-increasing demand for efficiency and quality: in other words, things must always be de facto perfect. And that also has to do with a loss of time,
that we achieve by gaining time, i.e. the more time we can gain, the more we lose. Due to the fact that in the moment I gain time, I enter into a process of losing more and more time. Meaning that we always have the feeling that we have less and less time, because we want to gain more and more time. That is one of those paradox situations we have to live with. While others thereby have more and more time and do not even know what to do with it. This means that those who work will have less and less time. Whereas those who fall out of this system will have more and more time. Time they do not know how to use. That can be compensated by the different Smartworks, thus I do not have to go to work anymore. I work from home, from the computer, I am connected. The people who do that usually burnout, because they work twenty-four hours a day. There are few people who can really deal with it. It is not as easy as it sounds to organise one's own working hours.

All of this, I have said so far is often perceived as alienation. That leads to the anti globalisation movement. That leads to the new nationalisms. They often have their causes in this, not so much in the political problem, but in economic insecurities: "I no longer have a job, I no longer have a future". Withdrawal into the private sphere, nostalgic attempts to return… Just think about it: in agricultural economics, time was predefined, nowadays time needs to be arranged. In agriculture it rained, it snowed, there were seasons, it worked, it did not work. The time could not be arranged at all, it was predetermined, I had to follow the time. Today we are trying to adjust reality to our schedules. Therefore what I said earlier happens. We have less and less time, because we want to gain more and more time.

So can I be a human being here? That was the question. Let me make two preliminary observations: 1. We cannot stop technological progress. I think that is an illusion. But we can guide and shape it. 2. There is no perfect organisation of work. That is another illusion. There are bad-, there are inhumane-, there are worse- and there are better ways.
But there is always room for improvement in the way work is organised.

Now I come to the point, we want to talk about here: Work follows what we expect from life. We expected so much from the living and working conditions. Thus we concentrated so much on improving them. But in the process we forgot the question of what we actually live for, what kind of live we want to lead under these improved conditions. That sounds very abstract. But think about it. We have developed communication techniques, but do we actually communicate? There has never been so much communication and information technology as there is today. Do we have more knowledge? Do we have more wisdom? Do we have better relationships? But we continue to develop technological processes, although we do not even know whether this really benefits us. Money: Money has changed from a means to an end. We work for money: What do we need the money for? All the banking systems are trying to make more and more money, more and more profit: for what purpose? This means that we have a loss of reality through coping with reality. That is to say, this second constitution of reality, or perhaps already the third one,
is not the problem. The problem is that we have made this an end, instead of using it as a means, to lead a better and good life. That is the real risk. That is a very subtle shift. I do not want to engross this thought. But please consider: today, politicians, doctors and technicians have been asked questions that used to be asked only of God. This means that we expect that through our own working technique, working power, certain problems will be solved. Problems, where in former times no one would have came up with the idea that people could solve them.

Two questions, and then you ask the questions. The first question is: Is my humanity determined by the conditions I live in? Or is my humanity constituted in such a way, that I can freely face these conditions? I believe that the question of freedom, not whereof, but wherefore, has never been more urgent as it is today. Wherefore am I actually free in these living conditions that I am faced with? We have forgotten that work is service. What purpose does it serve what I am doing? What meaning does it have? For work has no meaning in itself, it never had, and it never will. It has its meaning only in what I do it for. 

The second question, that inevitably arises from this, is: Do I work for something worth living for? And if this is the case, that it is worth living for, then - I must be very brief now - I would like to give some hints how this is possible.

The first and most important thing from my point of view is: we have to build, live and foster relationships at work. Relationships are the best means to become myself, to stay myself, to become myself and to prevent loss of reality. Let me remind you of yesterday, that was very interesting when Markus Schlemmer (chief physician for palliative care in Munich) said: Ask a doctor if he would do this operation with his mother. But to ask such a question, I have to have a relationship, and that brings this doctor back to reality. Ask yourself, if you would make this suggestion to a customer or to an employee, if you would require that from him, if it were your son or your daughter. Since we leave behind the reality of life, divorce ourselves from it and enter into a self-constructed reality. And relationships are the only truly human way to bring us back to the reality of life.

The second hint is: We have to try to understand these complex interrelationships as far as possible. If we do not, we will not find the right solutions either. This is not easy, but we have to try it together. We must learn to listen, we must learn to understand why certain developments proceed as they do.

Thirdly: Let us try to focus on the ends. I cannot discuss it: I do not like it, it does not suit me, it is not possible, but: Wherefore are we doing what we are doing?
Fourth: Let us not try to build up a position against each other, but let us try to find solutions together, to develop them and to develop suggestions.

Fifthly, a wrong decision is better than no decision. Since I can change a wrong decision, but no decision at all leads to a disaster. I am saying this because many decisions today are fraught with risk. Especially, because the final decision-makers in a complex world all tend to be overwhelmed. Maybe Big Data can help a little, but I do not know.

And the last thing: If we cannot change something, let us try not to harbour a grudge. It just does not work then. I cannot spend my life angry that certain things cannot be changed the way I want them to be at the moment. There are certain things that we have to accept. If we let ourselves be determined by them, we will never be able to change them.