The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era.

• Author: Buell, John

Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam. 350 pages. $24.95.

In his powerful new book, Jeremy Rifkin paints a disturbing picture. He argues that chronic and persistent unemployment characterizes all industrial societies. A shrinking core of office and factory workers--often forced to work overtime--produces increasing amounts of what we need. The rest of the population is becoming simply surplus: unemployed or underemployed, impoverished, discarded.

The consequences are social as well as economic. "Technology displacement and the lack of job opportunities have affected the nation's youth most of all, helping spawn a violent new criminal subculture," he writes.

Automation is the major source of our current problems, Rifkin says, as wave after wave of technological innovation has made old patterns of employment obsolete. People often mistakenly believe that technology has primarily affected the manufacturing sector, but, as Rifkin points out, automated teller machines and voice-recognition technologies are rapidly eliminating millions of traditional service-sector jobs as well.

While Rifkin pinpoints much of what is wrong with our global economy, his emphasis is a bit one-sided. Everything is not technology's fault. It is not the sole cause of job loss and poverty.

Just as important as technology is the way in which our largely unregulated system of capitalism has concentrated the control over workplaces and work processes in the hands of a few. It's not just the technology, but who controls the technology that matters.

Ironically, the corporations themselves are being short-sighted. Their relentless drive to reduce labor costs and destroy unions may help their balance sheets in the near term, but they've been eroding the purchasing power of their own employees, thus reducing the demand for the goods they churn out.

Rifkin is well aware of this dynamic. He understands that this impoverishment John Buell, a journalist in Southwest Harbor Maine, is the author of "Democracy by Other Means: The Politics of Work, Leisure, and Environment, " which will be published by the University of Illinois Press in July. strategy will produce a crisis, and he recognizes that the system's ability to respond is much more limited now than it was in the past.

The response to previous capitalist crises was public-sector job growth: the government spends for highways and tanks--and allows moderate unionism to give workers in the larger firms a share of the gains new technology...