Welcome to the Real World

This in The Guardian is a little odd:

These enterprises would have to compete for employees, who will become more footloose and less inclined to work for an organisation that does not allow individuals to tailor the working day to meet their personal requirements. "Organisations will have to address the growing power of the employee," the report said.

While they're talking there about changes in the work/life balance, the basic contention is so obvious that I'm amazed that people mention it.

All of the improvements in working life over the past few centuries have come from that growing power of the employee. The reverse idea, that there will be a progressive immiseration of the labouring classes, has always seemd to me to be one of the more absurd corollaries of Marxism.
For it assumes that "Capital" or capitalists are in fact a cartel, working together in their own interests. When, as is gobsmackingly obvious, capitalists are in fact competing with each other for access to the profits that can be made by employing labour. As productivity rises, so do the profits possible from any one amount of labour, and so competition for access to it raises the price willing to be paid for said labour.

This is what has brought rising wages in real terms, holidays, shorter working hours and all the rest over the centuries.

One data point: Chinese manufacturing wages have been rising 14% a year, year on year, for a decade. It's all those companies piling in to employ it that have caused this.

As there, so here. Organisations will compete for he labour they desire and as they do so they'll be offering said labour whatever it wants: might be flexi-time, might be higher wages, might be working from home, but that market will deliver what the people in it want.

Well, deliver, subject of course to the constraint of infinite desires and scarce resources. That £1 million an hour job for canoodling with the super-model of your choice might not be right around the corner just yet.