Rifkin, Jeremy, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era

Rifkin, Jeremy. The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: Putnam, 1995.

In spite of statistics showing more Americans employed than ever, and the possibility that we are working as hard as ever, JR argues that "Intelligent machines are replacing human beings in countless tasks, forcing millions of blue and white collar workers into unemployment lines, or worse still, breadlines" (qtd. Mattera 463). On the basis of secondary sources, surveys effects of automation and newly introduced "digital technologies," including "an account of how technological change—first mechanization of cotton picking in the South, and later, automation of factories in the North—has shaped the destiny of African—Americans" (Mattera 463). JR estimates that in the USA in the 1990s, "more than 90 million jobs in a labor force of 124 million are potentially vulnerable to replacement by machines" (qtd. Mattera 463). Rev. Philip Mattera, The Nation 2 April 1995: 463-65, whom we quote. See in this Category, S. Aronowitz and W. DiFazio, The Jobless Future; see under Fiction F. Pohl's "The Midas Plague" and K. Vonnegut's 'Player Piano.