Work in the ^21st century : Law, techniques, ecumene

Part one: the community of problems

This section looks at the three major challenges facing the organization of work around the world today.

The first is technological. With the computer revolution, the assimilation of the worker to the machine has taken on a new face. The worker is no longer conceived as a machine that mechanically obeys the commands it receives, but as a computer, an "intelligent machine" capable of achieving the objectives assigned to it, by reacting in real time to the signals it receives. To the paradigm of subordination, contemporary management adds that of worker programming. Yet this new programming paradigm takes no account of the singular, subjective experience of work, nor of the most recent technical advances linked to "artificial intelligence". This technological revolution poses new risks, while at the same time creating new opportunities for the establishment of a "truly human regime of work".

The second challenge is ecological. The industrial revolution was incapable of perceiving the limits of natural resources, and instead encouraged their over-exploitation, tipping our planet into what some today call the "anthropocene" age, i.e. a period marked by the determining impact of human activity on the earth's ecosystem. Yet it is through our work that the human species inscribes itself in its ecumene and transforms it, so that the question of the organization of work and that of the ecological footprint are two sides of the same coin.

Finally, the third problem facing the International Labour Organization is an institutional one. Over the past forty years, a conflict of legal logics has emerged between, on the one hand, the principles and rules of international trade and finance, which treat labor, medicines, crops and natural resources as pure economic goods competing in a borderless market, and, on the other, the principles and rules of social justice and ecological fairness. The result is a schizophrenic international legal order, in which the financial and commercial hemisphere encourages the non-ratification or non-application of standards whose social and environmental hemisphere proclaims their necessity and universality. This normative schizophrenia affects not only States, but also multinational companies, insofar as they escape their tutelage.

Part two: the diversity of experience

For the past two centuries, the idea of economic and social progress has generally been accompanied by the idea of extending to every country in the world the modes of work organization established in the old industrial countries. Since the Second World War, this philosophy of history has guided development policies, with the "most advanced" countries, whether capitalist or communist, showing the way to progress for the "least advanced". It has led to the universalization of normative categories derived from the experience of the old industrial countries, and to their extension to the entire planet. This continues to be the approach of globalization, conceived as an inescapable process of standardization fuelled by competition between social systems. There are several signs that this repression of the diversity of work histories and cultures is untenable, if only ecologically, and that if this diversity is not thought about and respected, it will reappear in pathological forms. A perspective of globalization, on the other hand, implies taking into account both the objective interdependence created by the community of ecological, technical and institutional challenges of the present day, and the diversity of national and regional cultures , which is not an obstacle but, on the contrary, a fundamental resource for humanity in meeting these challenges, and thus a constituent part of a "truly human regime of work".

It is from this perspective that this diversity will be addressed in the second part of the symposium. The aim is not to make an exhaustive comparison of the evolution of work regimes in every country in the world, but to shine a spotlight on a few of them, from both old industrialized and emerging countries. This second part will conclude with an examination of three points of contact between these different cultures: migration, the anthropological function of work and the measurement of its efficiency.