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FuturTele5-RMR.doc-Aug2000
The Transition from an Industrial to an
Information Society.
The
Author, Noel Hodson, has 30 years accountancy experience, was an employer and
entrepreneur, specialising in long term tax-planning. He has advised more than
5,000 SME's and has been a telework consultant to British Telecom and the
European Commission for ten years. He wrote the Economics of Teleworking (BT
Labs 1992) and Teleworking Explained (Wiley & Sons 1993) and is known for
his seminal work on the Costs & Benefits & Ecological Impact of
telework. His WEB Site is Http://www.NoelHodson.com
. He is a director of ITAC the International Telework Association and Council
in
Future Forecasts - 1
- Telework will force radical economic and political changes. The boss-employee
relationship will be replaced by a collegiate culture. Computer telephony
global compatibility will be achieved. - 2 -
End.
Forecasts for the Information
Society up to 2021.
NB : To avoid qualifying each and every forecast, they are here cited as if the changes and the years are certainties. However, the dates when changes may occur, particularly the major changes, could be many years adrift.
Rapid Growth in
Telework....................................................................... 2
The Resurrection of Russia...................................................................... 3
The Birth of Telework 1980-1992............................................................. 4
Hearth & Home & Work may not
mix........................................................ 6
Your Information Technology Status
at Cyberspace Headquarters................ 8
Most Jobs will be Teleworked by 2015...................................................... 9
1999 Map of Statistics........................................................................... 10
Banking on Automation......................................................................... 12
Tax Havens, Money laundering and
Off-Planet Companies......................... 14
Live Where You Play – Not Where You
Work........................................... 15
Remote Computer Controlled Factories................................................... 16
Psychological and Fiscal Barriers............................................................. 16
Rapid Growth in Telework
From 2000 to 2021
the rapid growth of telework in
for the commercial
and tax implications of trans-border transactions; for local, regional and
international financial systems; for employment, unemployment and pay-rates
around the world; for national taxes, tax havens and money laundering; and, not
least, for the compatibility and interoperability of computer and telephony
systems.
The Resurrection of Russia
Through the two
decades from 1988-2008,
Hampered by an
inefficient and perhaps dishonest banking system, electronic transactions
remain very difficult to complete in
But once a modern
computer-telephony system is created, reliable and inexpensive electronic banks
will be able to handle the ordinary citizens' transactions securely and, with
the advantage of the latest technologies,
The Birth of Telework 1980-1992
Telework, or
telecommuting, started some 40 years ago in about 1980 when Jack Nilles at the
state traffic authority in
My own early work, The Economics of
Teleworking 1992, identified the most powerful economic rationale, namely that
every hour per work day saved from non-productive activities, such as
commuting, was equivalent to 30, eight-hour work days a year[4].
Typically a teleworker converting from full time commuting to full time at home
gives an extra 30 work-days to their employer and gains 40 work-days extra
leisure and family time. This is the logic for the "effortless increase in
productivity" experienced by most teleworkers. By reducing their
work-related-costs, for example commuting, child minding, formal clothing etc,
a teleworker could save up to one-sixth of their gross annual pay. The economic
equation for employers and employers was very positive. But the costs of
organisational change and the habits of long term commuters put a strong brake
on any headlong rush into telework.
In 1990, both in the
EU and the
Berlin
The
The Mayor of Berlin
welcomed the technology enabled trend towards flexible and tele-working but she
expressed concern for the impact on home and family life if people stopped
going out to work. The UK’s Baroness
Seaar summing up the conference, echoed
the Mayor's concerns saying that in her youth, when men went out to work and
women stayed at home, ladies were very clear about family and work boundaries,
vowing that "we may marry them for Better or for Worse ------ but not for Lunch".
Hearth & Home & Work may not mix
Marital
psychotherapist Pauline Hodson published and delivered her paper "Bringing
Home the Electronic Baby" [7]in 1996,
citing the cases and difficulties of husbands and wives who as telework
pioneers, switched from daily commuting to working at home. In the future it is
likely that alongside New-Man and his spouse new societal protocols will evolve
and emerge to resolve the difficult
emotional, spatial and territorial issues that arise when the home
doubles as a micro–office. The new protocols will bring a new, enlightened
understanding on working at home to employers, employees and to families.
Numbers of sociological studies are being undertaken on this subject,
accompanied by analyses and forecasts on travel patterns.
Gridlock
Many traditional
employers continue to resist any changes to the status quo. Particularly if the
proposed changes threaten their use of the motor car. In 1993, the Chief
Executive Officer of a traditional two-hundred man UK consultant engineering
firm, when asked to reconsider the role of the company car as part of the
salary package, instinctively and unconsciously grabbed the startled telework
adviser by his tie and tried to throttle him.
But the engineer’s
resistance was swept aside, as he had fully recognised would and must happen,
by young, computer literate engineers, organised on telework principles,
working mostly at home, without office overheads, company cars and other fixed
costs who undercut the market prices by up to 50%. Change will be either
voluntary or forced upon companies by competition, but changes in work
practices will increase exponentially as the power and reliability of mass
communications improves. The “Work will be taken to the People” and the daily
commute will rapidly become obsolete. This implies significant value and price
changes for travel related activities and for commercial and domestic
buildings.
The company car
remains as the prime status symbol of workplace hierarchy. In
It may take one or
more severe gridlocks and great improvements in virtual presence, video
conferencing and the user friendliness of PC’s to finally topple the company
car; but all of these are forecast and seem to be inevitable. Just when the
log-jamb will break is an open question that revolves around the growing
inconvenience of maintaining and parking a car balanced against the convenience
and self-expression inherent in owning one.
The growth in traffic
is so ubiquitous that no statistics need to be published here to convince any
road user that gridlock is around the next corner. Out of eight
The most likely
dates for
Your Information Technology Status at Cyberspace Headquarters
Workplace Status
will by 2015 be indicated by the personal and home-office equipment provided by
the company, and by the virtual presence access levels permitted at the
Cyberspace-Office-Head-Quarters.
The technologies for
these virtual electronic headquarters are being created today. Requiring no
startling breakthrough in techniques or products, but with far faster and
broader band widths, Cyberspace Headquarters will be established for all the
top multi-national companies. They will be “open” 24 of 7, as Americans put it
– 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Employees will be able to attend via
sophisticated teleconferencing and be able to reproduce most of the encounters
and transactions that take place in a large central office. The technology will
enable people to see their colleagues and enable themselves to “be seen” to be
at work. It takes little imagination and no startling technology breakthroughs
to envisage being able to knock on a virtual office door in a virtual corridor and hear your colleague
call “come in” before you “enter” their space for a conversation. The core of a
Cyberspace-HQ will be the permanent secretaries who will best know how the
systems work and can guide less adept colleagues through the electronic
environment.
Such virtual
presence offices will become possible by 2015 and fully operative by 2021. The
current vogue for the most senior people to delegate their technology
understanding and tools will evaporate as the user-friendliness increases to
the same level as using a button-free circular dial 1980’s telephone.
Most Jobs will be Teleworked by 2015
The family problems
and resistance from traditional managers will be eventually overcome and the
telework population will grow rapidly as computer-telephony continues to halve
in price and double in power every two years.
By December 1999, at
the turn of the Millennium, there were over 15 million
These numbers were
tangentially confirmed in a 1999 survey by NOKIA,[12] the
largest mobile phone maker, that showed: - on
Mobile Phone
Subscriptions - Finland 62%; Norway 52% - Sweden 49% - Iceland 42% - Denmark
41% - Italy 39% - Portugal 36% - Luxembourg 35% - Austria 31% - Switzerland 27%
- Ireland 26% - Netherlands 26% - Greece 24% - France 21% - Spain 21% - Belgium
21% - Germany 19%. Numbers of mobile
phone subscribers have been growing at 70% per annum. Here may lie the seeds
for the modernisation, skipping the wired stage, of
The most reliable
telework statistics for 1998 were gathered by the European Commission project
DIPLOMAT, the European Charter for Telework. The picture was as below:-
1999 Map of Statistics
Note - These numbers show the home-telework offices
equipped. The more important statistic – how many are being used on
any-one-work-day remains difficult to estimate. Most surveys indicate that
around 25% are in use on any-one-work-day.
Straw polls in traditional offices generally find that about 10% of the
(office) workforce is working at home or remotely in a hotel for example, via
computers, on any-one-work-day.
What the 1999
figures reveal is a large difference between the national statistics for
teleworkers and the industry statistics for mobile phones. Given that the majority of mobile phones were
in 1999 then owned by people who had jobs, even allowing for the fashion for
children and vulnerable older people to be given a mobile phone, it would seem
that the extraordinary increase in workplace communications mobility compared
to the 1970’s and 80’s was not and is not being regarded by statisticians as
"location free, advanced communications enabled working" - one of the
definitions of teleworking in current use. This difference is not surprising as
the rate of change is so fast that no institutions and very few individual
observers are able to keep pace with it.
As German
teleworkers were recorded at only 200,000 people - just 2.1% of the workforce -
and as having 19% of subscribers (homes) owning a mobile phone, Deutsche
Telecom led Europe by publishing, in January 1999, a telework agreement for
their 210,000 employees, endorsed by the employers, employees and trade unions[13], and paving
the way for a large surge in numbers of teleworkers.
As "working
where you live - and living where you work" becomes possible and
fashionable, all jobs that can be made location free will be freed from fixed,
central offices. The economics demand this
change and, as has been said earlier, the change will either be voluntary or
forced – by the competition – but change it must.
The accompanying
shift in travel will see more vehicles used for leisure rather than for
commuting to work. But as commuting is reduced and as business travel becomes
less glamorous and therefore also reduced, cars will be kept for longer,
changed less often and become less of a
status symbol. A
By 2015 most jobs
that can be teleworked will be converted, and the daily commute will be a
distant memory. About 60% of the 165 million EU workforce will work via
computer-telephony in 2015. As traditional heavy industry, agriculture and
manual work becomes increasingly automated, the number of jobs in those sectors
will further decline[14]. The
other 40% of the workforce will work in the service-sector; for example dealing
face to face with customers, such as in Hotels, Cafes, Theatres, Sports, Health
Care, the few remaining Retail Shops, Face-to-Face Training and in Laboratory
Teams. Politicians may still physically gather in parliaments in 2015, but
communications technology will become so user friendly and secure that even the
most Machiavellian politicians will use it in preference to actual physical
secret meetings in the corridors of power.
Banking on Automation
The transformation
we are experiencing is not and will not be without pain and crises. The signals
were very clear in all OECD countries as long ago as 1990 that computers and
automation would decimate jobs in banking, financial services and in heavy
manufacturing – even in agriculture. The
As soon as powerful
personal computers enable every citizen, 90% of whom are innumerate, to count
and to follow economic models, global transactions and added-value chains, the
mysteries that surround profit and money will evaporate.
With 21st
Century technology at everyone's fingertips, the general population will demand
accurate 21st Century information about the economic systems that
govern their lives. As President George Bush told
Just as tourism has
brought prices in most developed countries in line and you can no longer live
like a King on $20 a month in some hidden away Shangri-La, as you might have
done in the 1950’s, so the transformation of the global economy made possible
by advanced communications systems is and will continue to create wealth in all
communities, wherever they are located. There is no hiding place from the
Information Society. Deliberately
created and preserved Communication Free Zones or CFZ’s, where mobile phones,
laptops, Email, radios, TV’s and all other electronic devices are banned, will
proliferate and increase in value as people seek havens of peace away from the
ceaseless, restless traffic of mass communications. Who wants to trek two hundred miles through
the trackless wilderness, to round a corner and overhear a mobile phone
conversation reminding you that you haven’t paid your fuel bill and that you
are expected back at work in three days – Stop the World! I Want to Get Off CFZ
theme parks will be successful.
What has recently
become a global cartel, the financial services industry, employing over two
million people in the
Two million
financial services
Employed
teleworkers, already freed from fixed offices, will be able to obtain mortgages
from their own region to buy a home and insure it, almost anywhere on the
planet.
Tax Havens, Money laundering and Off-Planet Companies
As heavy
manufacturing is being fully automated alongside financial services, the
resulting unemployed are being and will continue to be encouraged into
self-employed teleworking and into marketing their skills across the world.
Millions of previously employed tax-payers are being thrown into the maelstrom
of self-employment and being furnished with advanced communications technology.
Those who earn good money rapidly discover that a solo-teleworker in, say,
French employers are jumping on the band-wagon
to avoid the highest pay-roll taxes in the world. They route their job offers,
through cyberspace, to for example Channel Isle companies, formed by solo
French teleworkers. Fewer European registered companies make any taxable
profits as invoices in foreign languages, in strange currencies, drop out of
cyberspace the day before the company year-end, and strip the profits out to
some exotic location. Within the next five years an Off-Planet company will be
registered on an accommodating orbiting satellites, leaving the tax authorities
puzzling over the legal jurisdiction of the transactions that flash at the
speed of light through the satellites' broadband channels.
National treasuries
will however retaliate. The OECD in
If a tax collections
crisis occurs in all OECD countries one powerful solutions could be the sudden
launch of a new global currency, say, the EuroDollarYen (EDY) requiring all
citizens to convert their cash and investment balances and at the same time
explain their source and tax status. The
massive tax collections and money confiscation that would follow would more
than compensate for years of poor treasury income. A Global-Fiscal-Responsibilities-Convention can
be forecast by 2017 that will finally end cyberspace tax avoidance and money
laundering. It will create the fiscal and financial stability for teleworkers
to live in any place they would like to live while retaining jobs perhaps
hundreds or thousands of miles away. A world currency is inevitable and
convergence of the main tax rates will occur. Local variances will proliferate
as local authorities compete to attract high earning teleworkers to live, and
to pay taxes, in their regions.
Live Where You Play – Not Where You Work
Teleworkers need to
physically attend central offices less and less often, particularly with the
growth of Cyberspace-Head-Quarters, open 24 hours a day and accessible as a virtual
person from anywhere. Teleworkers are
likely to choose to live in communities of special-interest-groups, based on
hobbies, such as mountaineering, or gardening, or ski-ing, or skin-diving, etc.
and will buy houses in areas suitable for these hobbies.
Remote Computer Controlled Factories
Teleworking, as it
has from its earliest days, along with computerisation, will help to free
mankind from the tyranny of the commute and from the manacles of the production
line in factories and offices.
By 2021, most
factories will be computer controlled automated facilities, many underground
near to raw materials, that are switched on and off in response to
just-in-time-stock control instructions, by managers perhaps living hundreds of
kilometres from the factories. Citizens
could be free to live wherever they like - enjoying the same financial,
taxation and social security systems as they would in their countries of
origin. Bureaucracy and government,
computer assisted, can become infinitely subtle and complex, managing hundreds
of devolved European regions, catering for a multitude of local community
preferences under the umbrella of necessary global agencies.
Psychological and Fiscal Barriers
The hurdles and
barriers to these forecasts are not technological nor are they commercial, the
barriers are psychological and fiscal/political. The fiscal system is the last
of the societal mechanisms to come in line with the rapid pace of change. The
major challenges lie in the fiscal and political changes required to
accommodate the irrepressible Information Society revolution.
End
© Noel Hodson,
Contact – Noel
Hodson, 14
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