The 1800’s changed education and the workplace on a colossal scale. Mandatory education meant more children required to be taught. There was no obvious way to rapidly boost teaching staff, so children were assembled into classes and classes were located in schools. I like to think that compulsory education was entirely an altruistic transformation in society, but conceivably it also conditioned our children to large buildings with many people in them. About the same time the Industrial revolution kicked off, and the schools supplied a pool of knowledgeable young adults for the factories and the heavy industries. So the factories now employed people who used to Work From Home, and so it has been in Western Europe and North America until the late 1970’s.

Over a period of time, western wages have grown to the extent that even unsophisticated factory workers have had a lifestyle far above the rest of the world. It couldn’t keep on this way, and throughout the last 40 years the western world has divested heavy industries like coal and steel, textiles and electronics to more economical locations. The UK has almost no large manufacturing industries left.

So when you think it over, the “Work From Home“ resurgence has coincided with a sizeable amount of large industrial companies moving their activities to low cost countries. Countries like the USA, the UK etc have less need for personnel to be co-located in a factory to sustain a manufacturing process. Complementing this is the increase in knowledge based service industries, and the explosive increase in Internet Business. In many ways we are reverting back to smaller businesses, lots of which are one man operations, suitable for people who want to Work From Home.

But rather than small potters or bakers vending to the local population, many of these new endeavours utilize the World Wide Web. They also use people ejected from Online Jobs previously located in factories or offices. It is as if we have come full cycle in the West and thrown away the industrial machine. In truth the biggest employers are now Central and Local Government and the Health Service. But even the public services have come around to the possibility of reducing expenses by pushing many of their Online Jobs out of the office and into the home.

Still if a new Internet Business is for example simply acting as a low cost distributor, then the value add may be adequate to feed a family, but it is not going to be a major participant in the world of commerce. Similarly offloading Online Jobs to employees who can Work From Homeseems a bit forlorn and is this really just symptom of what is happening in the West. Yes, consumer goods produced in China do cost less, but back at home wages are decreasing. Perhaps we have parity on our standard of living just now, but it is hard to see how a knowledge-based Internet Business or an online consultancy can equal the wealth creation of a car industry or a foremost consumer goods company.

The vision of us going back to a world before the industrial revolution is fairly thought provoking. What I do know is, that that after the skills have gone from an industry, it takes generations to get back to where we used to be. So we might be dependent on our knowledge based industries for years to come!

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Share This  |  Email It  |  |  Subscribe to It!
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 24th, 2010 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Business and Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.