business to business blog

The 1800’s changed education and the workplace on a huge scale. State education meant more children needed to be taught. There was no palpable way to rapidly increase teaching staff, so children were assembled into classes and classes were situated in schools. I like to think that compulsory education was entirely an altruistic alteration in society, but perhaps it also acclimatized our children to large buildings with many people in them. About the same time the Industrial revolution started, and the schools supplied a pool of skilled young adults for the factories and the heavy industries. So the factories now took on people who used to Work From Home, and so it has been in Western Europe and North America until the late 1970’s.

Over the decades, western wages have risen to the extent that even unsophisticated factory workers have had a lifestyle far higher than the rest of the world. It couldn’t go on this way, and during the last 40 years the western world has sub contracted heavy industries like coal and steel, textiles and electronics to more economical locations. The UK has practically no large manufacturing industries left.

So when you think it over, the “Work From Home“ renaissance has coincided with many large industrial companies moving their operations to low cost countries. Countries like the USA, the UK etc have less need for employees to be co-located in a factory to take care of a manufacturing process. Complementing this is the increase in knowledge based service industries, and the massive increase in Internet Business. In many ways we are reverting back to smaller businesses, lots of which are one man ventures, suitable for people who want to Work From Home.

But rather than small potters or bakers trading to the local community, many of these new businesses utilize the World Wide Web. They also utilize people ejected from Online Jobs previously based in factories or offices. It is as if we have come full cycle in the West and got rid of the industrial machine. In effect the biggest concerns are now Central and Local Government and the Health Service. But even the public services have woken up to the possibility of reducing expenditure by pushing many of their Online Jobs out of the office and into the home.

However if a new Internet Business is for example simply acting as a low cost distributor, then the value add may be adequate to feed a family, but it is not going to be a major participant in the world of commerce. Likewise offloading Online Jobs to staff who can Work From Homeseems a bit forlorn and is this in truth just symptom of what is going on in the West. Yes, consumer goods produced in China do cost less, but back at home wages are decreasing. Possibly we have parity on our standard of living just now, but it is not easy to see how a knowledge-based Internet Business or an online consultancy can match the wealth creation of a car industry or a key consumer goods company.

The idea of us reverting back to a world before the industrial revolution is quite thought provoking. What I do know is, that that as soon as the skills have gone from an industry, it takes generations to get back to where we used to be. So we could be dependent on our knowledge based industries for years to come!