2024: Over-regulation and attempts to re-regulate the labour market

2024, the year of the Olympics (and attempts at labour market recovery)

Despite the fact that this year the entire employment scene, like almost all other socio-economic fields, was flooded with discourse on AI in an unprecedented and overwhelming way, 2024 was for me not the year of AI, but of the Olympics. Not because I am such a sports fanatic, or because the brilliant Hungarian achievements would have overshadowed those of any other nation (especially since the results - the number of Hungarian gold medals - were, in my own (performance) judgment, were well below the previously communicated expectations and the boldly exaggerated TERR targets), but because the Olympic event that probably generated the most press coverage overall, the gender scandal, provided a striking essence of our time (and especially of 2024!) and its ambivalent and paradoxical attitude to change - and to the labour market.

Obviously, I could not make this somewhat forced projection of this summer's games onto the world of work if, in Paris, Algerian Imane Khelif, in the women's 66kg Olympic quarter-finals, had not beaten a compatriot of ours - Luca Hamori, as it happens - by a unanimous score (as almost no one in this country paid any attention to Lin Yu Ting of Taiwan, who is embroiled in a chromosome scandal at the 2024 Olympics that is identical to Khelif's). Let's add that the domestic outcry following Luca's elimination, which was mainly triggered by the involvement (protests were lodged by the Hungarian Boxing Federation and the Hungarian Olympic Committee), was a minor action compared to the onslaught generated by the Italians, who had their competitor in the last eight, After 46 seconds - in self-certified self-defence - he gave up the fight against Imane, who has been accused, accused, vilified and vilified worldwide ever since for having a Y chromosome and too high testosterone levels, which biologically means that Imane is not Ms. Khelif, but Mr. Khelif, and this gives(s) her unequal physical superiority over the rest of the female field, including our Luca.

And there is something to this, I mean physical superiority, because Imane ended up winning her weight class, beating Jang Liu in the final, who was the winner of the World Boxing Championships in New Delhi a year earlier, where Imane Khelif - by the way - was the other, the above-mentioned contender, Lin Yu Ting, who also left Paris with a gold medal, was banned by the International Boxing Association (IBA) from competing in the women's World Boxing Championships last year, citing the results of a DNA test which showed that Imane is biologically male...

Well, for me, this is where the Olympics really started to get interesting, because the International Olympic Committee (IOC), completely ignoring the "brand new" gender position and regulations of the Boxing Federation, brought into being by the new challenges of our changing times, stood up for both intersex athletes, and of course, for their own "millennial" methods of regulation, nomination and gender testing, by declaring: "...they are listed as women on their passports and have competed in the women's field for many years. This is clearly the definition of being female". Hm, what for some reason was no longer enough for the Boxing Association in 2023 - namely, 'just' peeking up someone's skirt and/or looking at their passport to determine their gender - proved to be more than adequate for the IOC in 2024.

Inevitable changes?

Of course, the International Olympic Committee's outstanding idealism, its tireless sporting activism and, dare I say it, its sincere ideological naivety rather than its flexibility, proactivity and quick reactions, or regulatory resilience, but that this lack of depth should be a feature of capitalist employment as a whole, and should emerge spectacularly in the Hungarian and international employment arena in 2024, is somewhat surprising, even to me. Because in the competition on the labour market

- Defeated by the recoiling from the introduction of the four-day working week, Magyar Telekom;

- MÁV, which produced a similar lack of success and results by experimenting with the home office;

- Amazon's astonishing turnaround (Amazon owns or leases a significant portion of downtown Seattle, more than 50 office buildings - as well as many undeveloped parcels of land - and had $4.5-5 billion worth of underutilized office space on its balance sheet... So it would be a coincidence that Andy Jassy, Amazon's new CEO, is due to take over in 2024. five-day mandatory weekly walk-ins for the company's seventy-five thousand Seattle employees starting January 2024, citing the need to innovate, make faster decisions, collaborate, and strengthen the company culture?);

- the generational change of former top executives who "self-sacrificed" themselves in the spotlight, such as Robert 'Bob' Iger (Disney), or Howard Schultz (Starbucks), making a lavish comeback from retirement;

All of these are striking examples of sticking(ing) to old, tried and tested methods - and people.

As for the 2024 Olympics of the City of Light in elite sport - if the Tokyo Olympics four years earlier didn't make it, even though Imane Khelif and Lin Yu Ting had already boxed there, only both lost, and so hadn't yet stepped on anyone's medal-winning hen's eye... - In the world of work, the crown virus pointed the way, and the dominance of algorithmisation-digitalisation-artificial intelligence in 2024, among other things, reinforced the inevitability of atypical employment and work, or of changes in the labour market in general.

It is not enough to be enlightened

But enlightenment/enlightenment is not enough, nor even dominant (labour) market leadership! The main question is who dares to advocate, let alone lead, a social/employment change process on such a global scale - at least post-actively, if pro-actively has failed. In Hungary, Magyar Telekom, MÁV and the background regulating government did not dare to do so in 2024, nor did Amazon, Sturbucks or the International Olympic Committee at international level.

Of course, we know that "the first one over the wall bleeds from a thousand wounds", but I wonder if in 2025 anyone will have the guts to finally put on the gloves and face up to it

- According to centuries-old traditions, with the avidity of routine social-work processes and rule systems, 2024. in particular: time-based work, which has been in operation since the first industrial revolution; masculine-dominated employment; the systemic challenges of the gig economy; the rise of ESG expectations; the still "slipstream" employment of workers from the Far East in the home country; or the prioritisation of domestic low-value-added productivity);

- the inevitable difficulties of flexibilisation of a mentality defined by inflexible principles, ideologies, paradigms and dogmas;

- the collective risks of sensitisation processes in this direction;

- the almost incalculably high costs of widespread education;

- the lack of consensus and willingness to compromise necessary to reconcile warring political-economic adversaries;

- the vote-optimising tendencies of (employment) politics in all fields and areas;

- the exclusive financial return ambitions of growth-driven business decision-makers;

- the relentless brainwashing of (social) media, and its potential to destroy perceptions.

...or will we continue to wallow in our scandal-ridden yet comfortable unchanging "madness" in 2025? A phrase popularly attributed to Albert Einstein, although officially from Rita Mae Brown, who in fact also plagiarized it, because the original quote (allegedly...) first appeared in a 1981 publication of Narcotics Anonymous:

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results."Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the results to change