DWD20200328

David's Time With Peter F. Drucker 2020.3.28 Employment relations——traditionally among the most rigid and most uniform relationships——are likely to become increasingly heterogeneous and increasingly flexible, at least for older people (on this see also Chapters 1 and 6). This will increasingly be the case as the center of gravity in the older population shifts from manual workers to people who have never worked with their hands, and especially to knowledge workers——a shift that will begin in the United States around the year 2010 when the babies of the “baby boom” which began in 1948 reach traditional retirement age. For these babies were the first age cohort in human history, a majority of which did not go into manual work but increasingly into knowledge work. They are therefore also the first age cohort in human history who, after thirty or forty years of full-time work, are not physically worn out by hard manual labor but still, in the great majority, perfectly, capable to function and to work, both physicially and mentally. Major innovations in work and employment are therefore already needed in Europe and Japan. In the United States there may still be enough young people to postpone radical changes until around 2010. Yet in all likelihood the new employment relations are likely to be developed first in the United States, again because it has the most flexible and least restrictive labor markets and a tradition of experimentation by individual employers as well as by individual employees. ——《Management Challenges for the 21st Century · Chapter2》(Peter F.Drucker,1999)