Problems With Tomorrow’s Employment

In the adjoining room to a major factory, two men were both reflecting on the very different things in front of them. Suddenly one of them cried out.

"It's nonsense!" Ethan's boss Rob moaned grimly.

"What?" Ethan asked, typing away on his laptop as he spoke.

Rob held up a sheet of paper he had just slammed down on the table. "This law about the minimum number of humans we have to have here."

Ethan typed down a final sentence on his laptop and turned to face his boss. "Why, what does it say?"

“I says we need at least twenty humans, and we need to pay them... Oh, Christ sake... It is legally required we pay them at least ten pounds an hour. What a bloody waste.”

Ethan sighed, before turning back to his work. “Gasp, it’s almost as even they’re trying to make sure people can still be employed.”

“But people are bloody useless. What they do in minutes, machines do in seconds.” Rob stated, looking out the rooms window into the factory on the other side. “And they do a much better bloody job of it too, for a fraction of the price. The government is just taking the piss with these laws. Seems I was right. These days, they’re good for nothing.”

Ethan rolled his eyes, and sighed again. His fingers floated momentarily above the keyboard, as he prepared to type his next email. But his frustration with his self centred boss lead him to release a third heavy sigh, and he spun dramatically around to face Rob.

“Rob, permission to speak freely?” He asked with a cold sarcastic tone. He posed it as a question, but to anyone listening it was apparent he didn’t care what the answer was going to be and was intent on giving his opinion regardless.

“Okay.” Rob replied.

Ethan took a deep breath, laid his hands down on his lap, and began.

“Okay, well how about this: if it wasn’t for the previous law, I wouldn’t have been hired at all, and I’d be spending my days shifting through that huge tech garbage down South to find something which I’d sell for, I don’t know, a few quid. Which isn’t much, I know, but it’s better than nothing. But instead, thanks to that law, I have a well paid job. I go home every night, and enjoy a nice, if slightly bland, meal. Of course, you wouldn’t understand, seeing as you come from a privileged background, and don’t know what it was like when this first happened, because who didn’t have to work, so you never struggled to get a job.” Rob gave Ethan a muted stare, seemingly at a loss for words. “I’m sorry if I got a bit, you know, touchy, about that subject. It’s just that that kind of law is the reason I’m here in the first place.”

Rob looked stunned and mumbled an apology. “I’m sorry... I didn’t realise that... that you... you know.”

Ethan cocked his head as his boss continued to stutter in search of the correct words. “And it’s not even the fact that I myself am in this predicament that annoys me. It’s just common decency to try and consider other peoples points of view, to think about others more carefully, instead of being a self-centred arse. There’s more to life than profits, you known.”

Rob looked sheepishly down at his feet, as Ethan returned to his mail inbox.

“Plus,” Ethan said, in a final remark, “imagine if all we used were machines and suddenly every single machine either broke or malfunctioned. What then? If nothing else, that’s what we need people for.”