Labor as a Commodity - III

The type of work that you want to extract from a commodity does not matter. It does not matter if oil is used to power a car or an airplane. If labor is to be treated as a commodity, then the type of work that it is to be asked to do should also not matter. It should not matter what industry someone is working in. At any stage, that person should be willing to undergo any type of retraining necessary for the demands of the economy.

The problem with this reasoning is that commodities do not have an independent existence outside what they are asked to do whereas people do. The type of supreme flexibility that this particular assumption implies is simply not present in the case of labor. People develop relationships based on where they live and work. These relationships are not always easy to discard. Retraining is an integral part of the new thinking about labor. Now training has always been a part of work. New technologies demand new ways of working and people have had to adjust to the new reality thus created. What is different now is that people are expected to retrain in completely different areas not once or twice but three to five times in their working careers. It is also assumed that the learning capacity of people does not change over time and that a person of say 50 are able to learn at the same capacity and the same rate as somebody 30 years younger.

Incidentally, the idea of a working career has also changed. Whereas previously people were expected to work for a time and then retire, now they are expected to keep working for as long as they are fit. This is also in alignment with the concept of treating labor as a commodity.