What Will We Do For Work

I believe that 90% of white-collar jobs in the U.S. will be either destroyed or altered beyond recognition in the next 10 to 15 years. That's a catastrophic prediction, given that 90% of us are engaged in white-collar work of one sort or another. Even most manufacturing jobs these days are connected to such white-collar services as finance, human resources and engineering.

I talked to an old London dockhand some time back. He allowed as how in 1970 it took 108 guys about five days to unload a timber ship. Then came containerization. The comparable task today takes eight folks one day. That is, a 98.5% reduction in man-days, from 540 total to just eight.

This time the productivity tool kit aims, belatedly, to reconstruct--make that deconstruct--the white-collar world. In fact, I see a five-sided pincer movement that will bring to fruition my apparently bizarre "90% in 10 years" prognostication.

FIRST The destructive nature of the current flavor of competition, dotcoms. Sure, most will fail. But the survivors will exert enormous pressure--fast!--on the Big Guys. When an Amazon or a Charles Schwab moves into your neighborhood, you've got moments to react. Or take king entrepreneur Jim Clark of Netscape fame. His latest venture, Healtheon/WebMD, intends to squeeze hundreds of billions of dollars of waste out of the health-care system. These new firms aim to create nothing less than havoc in the theaters in which they operate.

SECOND Enterprise software. It's a jargony name for the tools that will hook up every aspect of a business's innards--personnel, production, sales, accounting--and then hook up all that hooked-up stuff to the rest of the "family" of suppliers and the suppliers' suppliers and wholesalers and retailers and end users.

They are your nightmare, these "white-collar robots." The complex products from German software giant SAP will do to your company's innards exactly what forklifts and robots and containerization did to the blue-collar world circa 1960. Installing these tools is not easy. The technical part is harrowing; the politics are horrendous. When the blue-collar robots arrived, the unions raised hell. This time it's management bureaucrats who are turning Luddite. Why? These tools threaten their cozy baronies, carefully crafted over several generations.

But the robots did come. And they triumphed.

THIRD Outsourcing. M.I.T.'s No. 1 computer guru, Michael Dertouzos, said India could easily boost its GDP by a trillion dollars in the next few years performing backroom white-collar tasks for Western companies. He guessed that 50 million jobs from the white-collar West could go south to India, whose population hit 1 billion last week. The average annual salary for each of those 50 million new Indian workers: $20,000.