The leisure shock (1981)

In 1979 Clive Jenkins and Barrie Sherman wrote their famous and challenging book ‘The Collapse of Work’. It argued that the new microelectronic technology was developing so rapidly that a society with many millions of people permanently unemployed was not only inevitable but, in the perspective of such dramatic social changes, imminent. ‘The Leisure Shock’, an equally fundamental work of analysis and perception, takes the argument further. When it comes, the revolution will be borne out of technology, economic growth and affluence. That belongs as much to the unemployed as to those in work. What steps should be taken now to ensure that a better-educated non-work force will be equipped for the futute that faces us? The urgent prospect of a Britain confronted with five million unemployed (by about 1990), with no preparation for their new lifestyle – that is The Leisure Shock, which this book anticipates for the public before time runs out.