Don't wait for Grandma, she's on a teleconference. The jobs of the future will be so good that nobody will want to retire and we will have to abolish pensions

I've always liked to provoke... ideas. One of the most disruptive ideas I can think of as society plunges into the super-longevity phase we are in is for work to be so much fun and so rewarding that no one will want to stop working as long as they can. However, one need only review the modern history of work to realise that it is not precisely these qualities that adorn many of the jobs that have emerged from the modernisation of the economy in recent years. 

The industrial revolution greatly multiplied the range and number of jobs that existed in the society of the ancien régime at the end of the 18th century. For almost a century, the advanced countries witnessed a dramatic increase in productivity, as well as rapid social, political and geostrategic change. Conditions for workers, whose services were then in almost permanent oversupply (reserve army), however, became extremely harsh until they developed a remarkable capacity for self-organisation through the creation of trade unions capable of defending their rights and demands. 

Dialogue between workers and employers was never easy, reaching high levels of aggressiveness and violence. And in order to avoid revolutionary tensions among the proletariat, state intervention began to consist more and more in the establishment of laws to protect and guarantee workers' rights than in matters of public order. 

The workers thus won hard-won rights which, in the first half of the 20th century, ended up materialising in impressive social gains and, years later, in a decisive participation of the working classes, together with employers and social democratic and Christian democratic parties in the post-war consensus which made possible the "golden age" of social and economic progress which characterised the advanced societies of the Western world in the first two decades of the second half of the 20th century.

The very brief historical synthesis of the three preceding paragraphs suffices to eloquently visualise something that we often forget, if we ever knew it. The times when workers' rights have been well defined and, at the same time, well served across the board have been very rare. The jobs of the 1950s to 1970s in the Western world, certainly with less nominal protection than today, allowed millions of workers access to home ownership and savings, paid holidays, the advancement of their children in quality education systems, quality health care, the accumulation of pension rights for retirement, disability and widowhood for spouses. 

The "Atlantic Consensus" that brought together Western political leaders, and workers and employers on both sides of the ocean, to achieve social peace through a decent primary distribution of income, with decent wages and rights, and redistribution of income through progressive taxation schemes, is missing today. 

In 1960, life expectancy at birth in countries such as the UK, France, Germany and the US was around 70 years. After the age of 65, which, however, was reached by about 70% of the population, and which also coincided with the most common retirement age, the remaining life expectancy was just over 14 years. Today, life expectancy at birth exceeds 80 years in advanced countries. More than 90% of the population of cohorts born 65 years ago reach this age, the remaining life at 65 is more than 20 years, half of these completely free of disability or disease, and the average effective retirement age is well below 65.

Workers who are retiring today in an advanced country, when they began their working careers in the early 1980s, have already witnessed the employment advances enjoyed by their parents, who were well into the second half of their working lives, and will live six or seven years longer in retirement than their parents. But they will have experienced a series of profoundly transformative employment and economic upheavals. They are also witnessing how younger workers are living through these transformations.

The working careers of those entering retirement today have already been affected by the virtual disappearance of the "job for life".

A prospect that was already beginning to threaten workers in the wake of the somewhat traumatic structural change brought about by industrial relocations at the beginning of the wave of globalisation that began in the last decade of the last century. The recurrence of episodes of unemployment, particularly virulent in the more rigid continental and southern European economies. Or the relative lack of protection, never fully corrected, of millions of self-employed workers, who are very numerous in all economies.

The labour transformations of the last four decades have been traumatic, unwanted, and have caused a rupture in the labour uniformity that had advanced so far since the end of the Second World War, thanks to the Atlantic Consensus.

A transformation that was never fully completed, but which created a sense that workers were respected not only as citizens, but also in their functional status. A golden age, it should be insisted, which also coincided with a strong expansion of productivity and welfare.

The break in the trend towards labour uniformity referred to above, or any other break in any trend, need not be traumatic, but almost all of them are to one extent or another. In that case, duality of labour emerged as a response to the narrowing of margins that offshoring brought not only to industry but, in cascade, to the entire productive structure of Western economies. The long oil crisis of the second half of the 1970s should be mentioned here as a not innocuous antecedent to the disturbing loss of Western industrial hegemony.

Dual employment is an emergency response, to avoid company closures and mass redundancies, but it destroys the progress of the "social rights account" of the workers concerned. Reduced working hours or recurrent interruption of employment (much worse the latter than the former) is lethal for the achievement of a decent pension. And in some countries, such as Spain, duality has become entrenched. Moreover, the breakdown of the advances of the "golden era", for whatever reasons, put an end to the principle of decent treatment of workers. Since then, the West cannot be said to have lived in mass unemployment or permanent recession. It is true that there was a severe recession in the early 1990s, another recession in the early 2000s, the great recession in 2009... but in between there were periods of impressive gains in productivity and, almost exclusively, corporate profits. The racket of job quality did not go up. The Atlantic Consensus had faded, probably because, in the meantime, the world that brought it about had changed radically and those who forged it were no longer the living memory of society. 

It is inevitable to hold capital responsible for this development, many left-leaning analysts will think. But the truth is that the representatives of labour probably declined their role for who knows what reasons. What is certain is that today the vast majority of temporary workers do not want to be temporary workers, the majority of part-time workers do not want short-time work and a good half of the self-employed want to be salaried workers. 

Surely never in the last seven decades has there been as much job dissatisfaction as there is today. And the big question is why have we let this happen? Let us discard easy answers, such as the simplistic view of class struggle, the demise of communism or the voracity of unchecked capitalism.

Guy Standing, professor of development economics at the University of Bath, popularised the eloquent term "precariat" in 2011, when he published The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. With this expression, Standing bridged a century and a half long gap with the term coined by Karl Marx: Proletariat. And, as a device, it must be admitted that he was right. 

To all the developments alluded to above, since the end of the great industrial revolution, when Marx and Engels rightly diagnosed the situation of workers in the advanced countries of the time, the global event only comparable to that revolution which, in the opinion of their contemporaries, was only comparable to the neolithic revolution, is the digital revolution.

In reality, we have been living with robots (other than bread toasters, of course) for half a century and we are already beginning to know what can happen to work. In fact, the feeling is spreading among many ordinary people that there is going to be a hecatomb of human labour (the first time this expression has been used explicitly in this essay) at the hands of robots. The heralds of this hecatomb are the riders of home delivery platforms. 

Nothing could be more logical and, at the same time, more wrong. Not the advance of precariousness, of course, which is undeniable. Precariousness of wages, of accumulation of rights, of full-time or recurrent work, and so on. Who does not have a family member or friend who suffers from some kind of job insecurity? Is this what awaits us under the generic headline of "the future of work"?

The future of work is bad, the sooner we know that the better. But the work of the future doesn't have to be bad.

In fact, we can make the jobs of the future so much better than the jobs of today that they are so much fun and so rewarding that no one wants to retire and we need to abolish pension systems for lack of use.

I am not prone to utopianism, and what I have just said has all the hallmarks of utopia. But admitting that more and more conventional and repetitive jobs are being automated or simply disappearing, I hasten to recommend that we radically change our training system to adapt it to the jobs of the future. This is no simple matter, because many of these jobs have not yet been invented. The jobs we see emerging and believe to be the jobs of the future, such as the jobs associated with the ecommerce logistics chain, in its delivery link, are going to be automated, just as the jobs in many other links of the same chain were automated decades ago, starting with those in the design, manufacturing and wholesale distribution of products that today are still delivered manually.

Human beings deserve nobler jobs, for which they need to be prepared. These jobs are about people, knowledge and creation. It has to do with self-care and self-sufficiency, which is another form of self-care. They are about conquering as yet unexplored personal and social frontiers. They have to do with sustainability in the face of a climate collapse, who knows if it is irreversible in some of its most disruptive aspects. 

Supported by empowering technologies, distributed and accessible to all, human beings will be able to earn their livelihoods in a free, collaborative and remunerative way. The primary distribution of income must be based on legitimately acquired access to property, in an environment of competition and without privilege of any kind. So that redistribution (or secondary distribution) is not as necessary (and imperfect) as it is today. 

Those who work for the community, either voluntarily or because their services lack an organised market, should have recognised rights to remuneration and should be granted "shadow" social contributions, the counterpart of which would be deferred rights over time.

We are not used to experiencing spectacular productivity growth, but it does exist. But they do not occur at the same time in all productive sectors, nor in all companies in a given sector, however new it may be. Many sectors are in decline, many companies fail, especially in emerging sectors. The destruction of resources that these processes entail reduces average productivity and these continuing mishaps overshadow the productivity gains of the companies and sectors with which the future of the economy is being written.

Another big question arises here: are we measuring productivity well? For it is not intuitive that the technological progress we are witnessing is so poorly reflected in the statistics. This is a perverse question. It is not to question the refined measures of productivity, one of the more traditional endeavours of economists. It is to ask about productivity sinks, i.e. where are we burning resources so that productivity statistics perform so poorly?

In the advancement of productivity (in a sustainable way, of course) lies the welfare of society. But this well-being will not be complete if it is not adequately distributed among individuals who work for themselves and for the community, with solvent access to property and without privileges acquired through market power based on the distortion of free competition.

On this basis, is it possible to envisage the emergence of full, flexible, health-friendly, vocational, paid and enjoyable jobs for everyone? This is the big question. 

Half of the children born today will live to be over 100 years old. They are only two decades away from starting to think about their working lives in earnest, but someone has to be preparing for that future, and there is not much time left. In the meantime, the sprouts of that future, if the seeds have been planted in time and in the right soil, will be born by the time they take over the productive role in society. Their task, until then, will be to train themselves thoroughly, not without effort, as if they were students of the "industrial masters" of the 1960s, when the Spanish industrialisation that gave so many good jobs and salaries to so many workers took off. It will not be easy, but it is possible, it is a possible future.