“Work-washing.”

You may be familiar with the term “woke-washing,” which is appropriating the language of social justice into marketing materials. (See also: “Chasing Insta impressions.”) Now there is a new term to consider: “work-washing,” which is where companies claim that the great promise of automation is not you potentially losing a job, but rather you being freed from humdrum, boring, task work.

In some organizations — the functional ones, usually — this is true. Automation is top of funnel stuff, and repeatable task work. It supplements humans. It does not replace them per se. Perhaps some of them, but the low end of the salary spectrum and the low end of the experience spectrum. This is bad in terms of career pathways, but probably won’t affect a lot of people who might read this. It may affect your children, but telling people “This might affect your children” usually gets you cancelled, slapped, and stabbed, so let’s not go there.

In a chunk of organizations — those run by cost-cutters — automation is absolutely coming for jobs, because the goal of most companies is to please stakeholders and contain costs. People? We don’t even refer to them as human beings. They’re human resources. In those companies, “work-washing” is very real, and consultant-driven. The marketing message is “You’ll never be bored again!” but the real message is “You might be bored, but it’s not gonna be our problem, because…