Welcome to our week six.
It's time to negotiate the next generation social contract.
So I'm looking forward to a really exciting and fruitful
week.
All the instructions are now on the platform on week six,
so all you need to do is to go to it.
You'll see instructions for how to find your team,
your role assignments.
Then you go through, and you'll complete the preparation
survey, you'll negotiate online with your counterparts,
hopefully in the same time zone where you are located.
And then as you complete the survey form at the end,
to record your settlements, those of you
who are taking the course for certification and for a grade
will get some extra credit as described on the platform.
So we're excited about it.
We're looking forward to hearing what you have in mind
for shaping the future of work.
As a bonus, we will provide a facilitator.
One of our MBA students, what we call our community TAs,
will be assigned to your group.
What is a facilitator?
A facilitator is just what that term sounds like.
It's a neutral person, it's a person
who helps move you through the process
without influencing your proposals
or the particular terms of the agreement that you reach.
So this individual will help you in scheduling times
or answering questions and be a liaison back
to the rest of us as needed.
So use the facilitator at your choice,
and we'll see how all of this works.
The deadline is Thursday at the end of the day UTC time 11:59
PM.
So it's important that you and your teammates
work on an agreement on when to negotiate,
engage in the course discussion as instructed.
And we'll see what we learn from this experience.
Next week is the grand finale of this course,
and we have a special event.
It's called a live video event or video chat,
whatever one wants to call it.
On Tuesday, May 10th at UTC time 8:00 PM,
we will have an hour and a half live interaction
with all of you, where we will summarize
what we have taken away as the key lessons from this course.
And we'll incorporate the materials
not only from the course but also
your materials from the polls that you completed,
the surveys, the assignments that you did, the discussions
that you've had on the forum, all of this will come together.
And with your engagement, directly
by passing on questions to us or comments
as we go along, for an hour and a half
we will see what did we learn from this, where are we going,
and how can we use all of this material
effectively, not only for yourselves,
but for external audiences who are also interested in shaping
the future of work.
So please put this on your calendar,
be ready with questions or comments.
We'll send you information next Monday,
the day before this event, on how
to tune in, where to link in for this interesting,
I hope interesting, and informative wrap-up
for the course.
Let me make a special request of you
to make sure that we bring your voices into this process,
one segment of the summary will ask the question
"What is our key message to the future leaders who
will shape the future of work?"
Business leaders and HR professionals,
labor leaders and their advocates,
government policymakers, and those of us
in the education field.
So make sure that, on the discussion board this week,
where we will post questions or a place
where you can add your thoughts to each of these stakeholders,
that you bring your voice into this process.
And we'll incorporate that into the discussion next week,
Tuesday.
So I look forward to seeing what you have on your mind
and what message you want to deliver
to these groups who will help to shape the future of work.
Last week we had a very, very rich, and engaging discussion,
and, in fact, throughout this course, many of you
commented on the subject for last week
and that is: "What's the future of Labor?"
Is there still a need for labor organizations,
for unions as we've called them over many years,
and in fact over several centuries?
Is there a new form of representation?
Are there new ways in which workers can get a voice at work
and assert their interests and work with their employers
to shape the future of work?
Most of you do see the need for some form
of labor representation, maybe not for everyone,
but for the people who really want
to have a collective voice at the workplace.
But you also see the need for change, and for innovation,
to build on the strengths of what
unions have done historically for so
many workers around the world.
You talked about the need to expand
more labor-management partnerships,
like the one out at Kaiser Permanente that we discussed.
Many of you focused, in a very rich dialogue,
over the need for what you call digital unions.
That is using information technology, social media,
and related mechanisms to convey your ideas
and to communicate with each other across the world.
And indeed you talked about the need for global unions,
because obviously today, where people work, how people
are affected by jobs that are created
by companies around the world, is not simply a national issue.
Some of you talked about the need
to return to these interesting organizations called guilds,
where workers came together cooperatively
to enhance their profession or their particular occupation
and to work to enhance their professionalism.
You talked about the need for apps
to share information on where good jobs are
and good employers are, along the lines
that we used in the good jobs survey that some of you
have done.
And then many of you talked about the need
for new forms of advocates for low-wage workers
in the United States, in Europe, in developing countries
all around the world, particularly
focusing on the role that NGOs are now playing.
So I think the bottom line of all of this:
don't just observe these trends.
Get involved, whether it's working
on the side of advocates for labor,
whether it's enriching and strengthening
the role that HR plays in our organizations,
whether it's thinking about the future of labor
policy in our countries, or whether you're
like me working in the education sphere,
either on the university level with the outside world,
all of you in this global-based online course,
or are school students in high schools and community colleges.
We all have a role to play.
We've emphasized that throughout this course, now
it's time for us to put our ideas to work.
So I look forward to a very invigorating week
of negotiations.
We'll summarize the settlements that
are achieved next week when we come together,
and we'll see if we can't really summarize and bring
together what did we learn, what are
the key takeaways from our efforts
to shape the future of work.