Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

But perhaps the most dramatic change has overtaken the ranks of management, once well insulated from the jolts of fate that afflicted the less fortunate. "For the first time in our history," says Dr. Harold Leavitt, professor of industrial administration and psychology, "obsolescence seems to be an imminent problem for management because for the first time, the relative advantage of experience over knowledge seems to be rapidly decreasing." Because it takes longer to train for modern management and the training itself becomes obsolete in a decade or so, as it does with engineers, Leavitt suggests that in the future "we may have to start planning careers that move downward instead of upward through time ... Perhaps a man should reach his peak of responsibility very early in his career and then expect to be moved downward or outward into simpler, more relaxing, kinds of jobs."

Whether upward, downward or sideways, the future holds more, not less, turnover in jobs. This realization is already reflected in the altered attitudes of those doing the hiring. "I used to be concerned whenever I saw a résumé with several jobs in it," admits an official of the Celanese Corporation. "I would be afraid that the guy was a job-hopper or an opportunist. But I'm not concerned anymore. What I want to know is why he made each move. Even five or six jobs over twenty years could be a plus ... In fact, if I had two equally qualified men, I'd take the man who moved a couple of times for valid reasons over the man who stayed in the same place. Why? I'd know he's adaptable." The director of executive personnel for International Telephone and Telegraph, Dr. Frank McCabe, says: "The more successful you are in attracting the comers, the higher your potential turnover rate is. The comers are movers."

The rising rate of turnover in the executive job market follows peculiar patterns of its own. Thus Fortune magazine reports: "The defection of a key executive starts not only a sequence of job changes in its own right but usually a series of collateral movements. When the boss moves, he is often flooded by requests from his immediate subordinates who want to go along; if he doesn't take them, they immediately begin to put out other feelers." No wonder a Stanford Research Institute report on the work environment of the year 1975 predicts that: "At upper white-collar levels, a great amount of turbulence and churning about is foreseen ... the managerial work environment will be both unsettled and unsettling."

Behind all this job jockeying lies not merely the engine of technological innovation, but also the new affluence, which opens new opportunities and at the same time raises expectations for psychological self-fulfillment. "The man who came up thirty years ago," says the vice president of industrial relations for Philco, a subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company, "believed in hanging on to any job until he knew where he was going. But men today seem to feel there's another job right down the pike." And, for most, there is.

Not infrequently the new job involves not merely a new employer, a new location, and a new set of work associates, but a whole new way of life. Thus the "serial career" pattern is evidenced by the growing number of people who, once assured of reasonable comfort by the affluent economy, decide to make a full 180-degree turn in their career line at a time of life when others merely look forward to retirement. We learn of a real estate lawyer who leaves his firm to study social science. An advertising agency copy supervisor, after twenty-five years on Madison Avenue, concludes that "The phony glamour became stale and boring. I simply had to get away from it." She becomes a librarian. A sales executive in Long Island and an engineer in Illinois leave their jobs to become manual-training teachers. A top interior decorator goes back to school and takes a job with the poverty program.

Each job change implies a step-up of the rate at which people pass through our lives, and as the rate of turnover increases, the duration of relationships declines. This is strikingly manifest in the rise to prominence of temporary help services – the human equivalent of the rental revolution. In the United States today nearly one out of every 100 workers is at some time during the year employed by a so-called "temporary help service" which, in turn, rents him or her out to industry to fill temporary needs.

Today some 500 temporary help agencies provide industry with an estimated 750,000 short-term workers ranging from secretaries and receptionists, to defense engineers. When the Lycoming Division of Avco Corporation needed 150 design engineers for hurry-up government contracts, it obtained them from a number of rental services. Instead of taking months to recruit them, it was able to assemble a complete staff in short order. Temporary employees have been used in political campaigns to man telephones and mimeograph machines. They have been called in for emergency duty in printing plants, hospitals and factories. They have been used in public relations activities. (In Orlando, Florida, temporaries were hired to give away dollar bills at a shopping center in an attempt to win publicity for the center.) More prosaically, tens of thousands of them fill routine office-work assignments to help the regular staff of large companies through peak-load periods. And one rental company, the Arthur Treacher Service System, advertises that it will rent maids, chauffeurs, butlers, cooks, handymen, babysitters, practical nurses, plumbers, electricians and other home service people. "Like Hertz and Avis rent cars" it adds.

The rental of temporary employees for temporary needs is, like the rental of physical objects, spreading all over the industrialized world. Manpower, Incorporated, the largest of the temporary help services, opened its operation in France in 1956. Since then it has doubled in size each year, and there are now some 250 such agencies in France.

Those employed by temporary help services express a variety of reasons for preferring this type of work. Says Hoke Hargett, an electromechanical engineer, "Every job I'm on is a crash job, and when the pressure is immense, I work better." In eight years, he has served in eleven different companies, meeting and then leaving behind hundreds of coworkers. For some skilled personnel organized jobhopping actually provides more job security than is available to supposedly permanent employees in highly volatile industries. In the defense industries sudden cut-backs and layoffs are so common, that the "permanent" employee is likely to find himself thrown on the street without much warning. The temporary help engineer simply moves off to another assignment when his project is completed.

More important for most temporary help workers is the fact that they can call their own turns. They can work very much when and where they wish. And for some it is a conscious way to broaden their circle of social contacts. One young mother, forced to move to a new city when her husband was transferred, found herself lonely during the long hours when her two children were away at school. Signing up with a temporary help service, she has worked eight or nine months a year since then and, by shifting from one company to another, has made contact with a large number of people from among whom she could select a few as friends.

Rising rates of occupational turnover and the spread of rentalism into employment relationships will further increase the tempo at which human relationships are formed and forgotten. This speedup, however, affects different groups in society in different ways. Thus, in general, working-class individuals tend to live closer to, and depend more on their relatives than do middle– and upper-class groups. In the words of psychiatrist Leonard Duhl, "Their ties of kinship mean more to them, and with less money available distance is more of a handicap." Working-class people are generally less adept at the business of coping with temporary relationships. They take longer to establish ties and are more reluctant to let them go. Not surprisingly, this is reflected in a greater reluctance to move or change jobs. They go when they have to, but seldom from choice.