CODA: THE GREAT CONFLUENCE
Those who do work in Third Wave factories will perform far less brutalizing or repetitive work than those still trapped in Second Wave jobs. They will not be paced by mechanical conveyor belts. Noise levels will be low. Workers will come and go at hours convenient for them. The actual workplace will be far more humane and individualized, often with flowers and greenery sharing the space with machines. Within fixed limits, payment and fringe benefit packages will be increasingly tailored to individual preference.
Third Wave factories will increasingly be found outside the giant urban metropolises. They are also likely to be much smaller than those of the past, with smaller organizational units as well, each enjoying a greater degree of self-management.
Similarly, the Third Wave office will no longer resemble the office of today. A key ingredient of office work—paper— will be substantially (though not wholly) replaced. The chattering banks of typewriters will fall silent. The file cabinets will shrink away. The role of the secretary will be transfigured as electronics eliminates many old tasks and opens new opportunities. The sequential movement of papers back and forth across many desks, the endlessly repetitious typing of columns of numbers—all this will become less important and the making of discretionary decisions more important, and more widely shared.
To operate these factories and offices of the future, Third Wave companies will need workers capable of discretion and resourcefulness rather than rote responses. To prepare such employees, schools will increasingly shift away from present methods still largely geared to producing Second Wave workers for highly repetitive work.
The most striking change in Third Wave civilization, however, will probably be the shift of work from both office and factory back into the home.
Not all jobs can, will, or should be carried out in people’s homes. But as low-cost communications are substituted for high-cost transportation, as we increase the role of intelligence and imagination in production, further reducing the role of brute force or routine mental labor, a significant slice of the work force in Third Wave societies will perform at least part of its work at home, factories remaining only for those who must actually handle physical materials.
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