FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

FAMILIES OF THE FUTURE

 

In the out-of-the-home economy, employment practices in many places still are based on the obsolete assumption that (he man is the primary breadwinner and the wife a supplemental, expendable earner, instead of a fully independent participant in the labor market.By easing seniority requirements, by spreading flextime, by opening part-time opportunities, we not only humanize production, we adapt it to the needs of a multistyle family system. Today there are many indications that the work system is beginning to accommodate itself to the new diversity of family arrangements. Shortly after Citibank, one of the largest banks in the United States, began to promote women to managerial jobs, it found that its male executives were marrying their new colleagues. The bank had a long-standing rule barring the employment of couples. It had to change that rule. According to Business Week, the “company couple” is now flourishing with benefits both for company and for family life.

It is likely that before long we will go far beyond such minor adaptations. We may see demands not merely for the hiring of “company couples” but of whole families to work together as a production team. Because this was inefficient hi the Second Wave factory doesn’t mean it is necessarily inappropriate today. No one knows how such policies would work out but, as in other family matters, we ought to encourage, perhaps even publicly fund, small-scale experiments.

Such measures could help us ease our way into tomorrow, minimizing for millions the pain of transition. But whether painful or not, a new family system is emergying to supplant the one that characterized the Second Wave past. This new family system will be a core institution in the novel socio-sphere taking shape alongside the new techno-sphere and info-sphere. It is part of the act of social creation by which our generation is adapting to and constructing a new civilization.

 

 

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