The notions of leisure and leisure time are thought to have emerged in
Victorian Britain in the late nineteenth century, late in the
Industrial Revolution. Early factories required workers to perform
long shifts, often up to eighteen hours per day, with only Sundays off
work. By the 1870s though, more efficient machinery and the emergence
of trade unions resulted in decreases in working hours per day, and
allowed industrialists to give their workers Saturdays as well as
Sundays off work.
Affordable and reliable transport in the form of railways allowed
urban workers to travel on their days off, with the first package
holidays to seaside resorts appearing in the 1870s, a trend which
spread to industrial nations in Europe and North America. As workers
channelled their wages into leisure activities, the modern
entertainment industry emerged in industrialised nations, catering to
entertain workers on their days off. This Victorian concept - the
weekend - heralded the beginning of leisure time as it is known today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure
Quotes From: The End of Work
by Jeremy Rifkin
http://www.amazon.com/End-Work-Jeremy-Rifkin/dp/0874778247
A survey of recent technological developments and trends in the
agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors suggests that a near-
workerless world is fast approaching and may arrive well before
society has sufficient time to either debate its broad implications or
prepare for its full impact. page 106
A new generation of sophisticated computer-driven robots may soon
replace many of the remaining manual tasks on the land, potentially
transforming the modern farm into an automated outdoor factory. page
115
The new gene-splicing and cell-fusion techniques allow scientists to
cross virtually all biological boundries, recombining genes from
totally unrelated species. Species are no longer veiwed in organismic
terms as indivisible entities, but more as mainframes containing
programmed genetic cassettes that can be reedited, resequenced and
recombined by proper manipulation in the laboratory. page 119
The ability to manipulate living entities, to treat life as an
assemblage of individual genetic traits. By eliminating the
constraints imposed by biological boundries, and by reducing
microorganisms, plants, and animals to their constituent building
blocks, scientists can begin to organize life as a manufactured
process. page 119
The tremendous economic potential of biotechnology has drawn chemical,
pharmacuetical, agribusiness, and medical companies together into a
new life-science complex whose commercial clout is likely to equal or
surpass that of the petrochemical complex of the past century. page
119
By granting broad patent protection over genetically engineered life
forms, the government is giving its imprimatur to the idea that living
creatures are reducible to the status of manufactured inventions,
subject to the same engineering standards and commercial exploitation
as inanimate objects. page 119
While the first technological revolution in agriculture replaced
animal power and human labor with machinery and chemicals, an emerging
biotechnology revolution is soon going to replace land cultivation
with laboratory cultures, changing forever the way the world veiws the
production of food. page 13
Now, chemical and pharacuetical companies hope to use genetic-
engineering technologies to eliminate the farmer altogether. The goal
is to convert food production into a wholly industrial process by
bypassing both the organism and the outdoors, and "farming" at the
molecular level in the factory. / Silicon Collar Workers and
"pharming." page 16
The payment of higher wages to workers who cannot be described by any
standards as anything more elevated than machine minders is rapidly
becoming unattractive, and where a man is employed solely for
unloading one machine and loading another . . . the substitution of a
robot is not only a glaringly obvious course course but also
increasingly easy to justify financially.
Moreover a robot is not subject to the random variations in
performance . . . and for all intents and purposes working as hard,
as conscientiously, and as consistently at the end of the shift as it
is at the beginning. page 131
In virtually every major manufacturing activity, human labor is being
steadily replaced by machines. Today, millions of working people
around the world find themselves trapped between economic eras and
increasingly marginalized by the introduction of new laborsaving
technology. By the mid-decades of the coming century, the blue collar
worker will have passed from history, a casualty of the Third
Industrial Revolution and the relentless march toward ever grrater
technological efficiency.
Computers that can understand speech, read script, and perform tasks
previously carried out by human beings foreshadow a new era in which
service industries come increasingly under the domain of automation.
The computerization and automation ofthe service sector has barely
begun, but it is already having a deep effect on the state of the
economy, impacting both productivity and employment. page 143
The dazzling array of high-tech electronic office equipment is
bringing the fully electronic office closer to reality. "In the long
run," says Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future, we
are going to become paperless in the same way we became
horesless . . . horses are still around, but they're just ridden by
little girls and hobbyists." page 148
Corporate management expects to save untold billions of dollars in
productivity gains and labor savings with the new silicon-collar
office workforce. For millions of clerical workers, the electronic
office spells the end of the career line. page 148
The intelligent machine is steadily moving up the office hierarchy,
"subsuming" not only routine clerical tasks but even work
traditionally performed by management. page 149
The new information technologies and telecommunications technologies
are also making offices less relevant as centers of operations.
Portable fax machines, modems, and wireless laptop computers allow
business to be conducted either on location or from home. AT&T's
virtual office; Employees are provided with a mobile office, complete
with laptop, fax, and cellular phone, and literally sent home.
Companies, anxious to increase the productivity of their workers, see
telecommunications as the wave of future.
Some retailers are eliminating the cashier altogether. More
sophisticated robots equiped with speech recognition and
conversational abilities will likely be commonplace in depatement
stores, convenience stores, fast-food resturaunts, and other retail
and service businesses by the early part of the next century. page 153
Jack Mcdonald forsees a nationwide network of digital servers on which
movies, software games, music, and virtually any other kind of
entertainment you can think of, will be stored digitally, and
transmitted over telecommunication links to retail stores and
eventually right into your living room. Electronic transmission of
products will likely mean the loss of tens of thousands of jobs in the
warehousing and transportation industries in the coming years. page
156 .
Electronic shopping is also quickly penetrating the retail market,
threatening the jobs of tens of thousands of sales clerks, managers,
stock personnel, maintenance crews, security gaurds, and others who
make up the retail employment complex. page 156
Electronic shopping: The laying down of a nationwide information
superhighway and the opening up of hundreds of new cable channels with
interactive capabilities promises a flood of home-shopping services. /
Electronic home shopping will take over more and more of the nation's
one-trillion-dollar-a-year retail market and the convenience it offers
of not having to travel to the mall. / Its a low cost distribution
system, you don't need thousands of stores or inventory at each
location. / EOW page 156
Home TV shopping, with its just in time retailing, is going to pose a
signifigant challenge to the nation's highway oriented retail
culture. . . a serious threat to the country's traditional retail
industry and to the 19 million people it employs. . . as the TV tube
becomes the salesperson. page 157
During the heyday of highway culture, retailers and real-estate
developers built more than 39,000 shopping centers across the united
states. When shopping at home really takes off many of these malls
will be obsolete. Their steady decline will mean a significant drop in
employment in the retail sector. page 157
The End of Work
by Jeremy Rifkin
http://www.amazon.com/End-Work-Jeremy-Rifkin/dp/0874778247
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