So a vanishing market for low-paying work is still going away... and this is news? Here's a tip: If your job requires repetitive physical activity, it's going to go away. Sooner rather than later. This is not something to be mourned, or to rend our clothes about. This has been the natural progression for at least 4 generations of humans. Who has not worked this out yet? In other news, a kid posted a cardboard sign on my street this week, advertising lawn mowing for $40. In other news, a good friend of mine in her 20's started a business as a dog-walker for "difficult" dogs, and she makes as much money as she wants, and turns down clients every single day. She has more business than she could possibly handle. In other news, my friend is a successful blacksmith. He makes ornate iron railings, doors, gates, and fabulous giant art installations for casinos in mainland China. He never graduated from high school. In other news, I'm gonna pay a guy $130 to come to my office next week and detail the outside of my car because I'm too damn lazy to get all the moss and mold and pine tree sap out of all the little nooks and crannies on my car, and it'll rust if I don't get this done regularly. The decreasing need for repetitive, low-paying work with no career path, is a good thing. For both the workers and the employers.
See if you can find where England closed the coal mines on this chart: Your first statement is correct: if your job can be automated, it will go away. Your second statement is incorrect: This is something to be mourned or rend our clothes about because it causes lasting sociological damage. Underemployment in the UK right now might be as high as 1 in 6 people, depending on how you count it; the fact that every trash television trend the US is subjected to comes in no small part from the fact that their welfare state is 30 years ahead of ours. People forget: the Luddites were right. The advent of large aristocratically-owned textile mills to replace individual artisan-class family businesses pretty much defined the grinding poverty and degradation of Victorian England. Watch the life expectancies go down: So on the one hand yes, progress is all about bad jobs going away to be replaced by better jobs (theoretically). But on the other hand, progress is also about hypercapitalists eliminating inefficiencies that generally provide a living for people. Let's say Alfredo has been averaging what? $25k a year? Over 21 years, he's a half million dollars worth of wages into retail. And yeah- give a tech firm a half million dollar incentive to replace Alfredo and he's fuckin' gone. Except he's not. He's still got an apartment, he's still got a family, he's still gotta eat and whereas he was a breadwinner and a member of society before, now he's a liability. Price of goods should go down as his salary no longer comes out of the overhead but the fact of the matter is, his boss is still employed (and is probably getting richer) but Alfredo is a shiftless bum now. I guess he can come pick the moss out of your grille for $130 except you've already got a guy that does that. So now maybe Alfredo is gonna do it for $100. So your moss guy suddenly finds his livelihood eroded. This is why every tile job in Southern California looks like hammered ass - the guys who knew how to do tile had to compete on price with the guys sitting under a tree outside Home Depot and pretty soon the artisans were gone. There are consequences. For laborers, for employers, for consumers, for governments. In the long run I'm glad that silicosis is uncommon now. In the short run I worry about 3.5 million cashiers (maybe a million of them Union) who suddenly can't feed their families.Here's a tip: If your job requires repetitive physical activity, it's going to go away. Sooner rather than later. This is not something to be mourned, or to rend our clothes about. This has been the natural progression for at least 4 generations of humans. Who has not worked this out yet?
Alfredo Duran, a 37-year-old New Yorker, has been staring down that threat. He began his retail career at the Gap, taking part in that quintessential American rite of passage: getting a summer job in high school. Twenty-one years later – after a career that took him from fast fashion chains to department stores to high-end boutiques and saw him climb the ladder from cashier to visual merchandiser to store manager – he’s looking for a way out.
There's a base premise here I do not agree with. When there is a surplus of anything, the market figures out how to make money from it. A surplus of low-skilled cheap labor is not going to be idle for long, I expect. Someone is going to find that the economics of doing X are now viable, because labor is cheap and available. This is not a zero sum game. Jobs disappear all the time, and new ones appear. If there is enough market pressure (aka, if enough people are unemployed), someone will find a way to capitalize on that surplus. What I DON'T want, is Walmart and their cynical corporate cronies to be allowed to pay less than a living minimum wage, because then the company pockets my money that should be going to the social safety net that supports my fellow Americans who genuinely need it to get through tough times.
You don't have to agree with me; economics hands you your ass. The Romans invented stamped metal coins but not movable type not because they were fucking idiots but because when you could use slaves as scribes it's cheaper to have someone write shit out by hand. Vestiges of the Ottoman Empire have a hand-crafted work ethic because theirs was a patronage-based society where Pashas had a responsibility to keep their underlings non-idle. The Ottomans didn't not invent Jaquard looms because they were fucking idiots but because if they idled all their weavers they'd have been destroyed in rebellion. Why did Gutenberg "invent" the movable type press? because the fucking Black Death and Hundred Years War. Scribes were in high demand so mechanization took over. So yeah - someone will capitalize on that surplus... but if it's cheaper to get robots to do it than to pay humans $4 an hour, that surplus labor starts replacing robots at $3 an hour. We've had industrial robots for 40 years now. They replaced steel workers that made middle class livings. We're just now starting to roll out fruit-picking robots. They're competing with $6/day labor. But then, it's a Japanese bot, where strawberries go for $5 a pint, rather than the $2 or less they get in the US. That robot's going to have to come down in order to compete in the US, but when it does, strawberry pickers will either (A) make less than $6 a day or (B) cease to work because let's be honest: there's not a lot of retraining available for strawberry pickers as they aren't exactly trained to begin with. They're not doing it for the love of the job. They're doing it because it's available. Real world example: I have a 2300 sqft birth center. Right now we have a lovely Russian couple that cleans the bathroom we share with the dentist once a week. I have a quote from them to hit the whole birth center and clean everything twice a week for, I believe, $140 a month. That's sixteen man hours for $140 which ain't minimum wage. Me? I'd like to have the place a little cleaner and I keep toying with buyin' a skookum Roomba. But the skookum Roomba for that size space is $900. I'm at six months to amortize that price and the thing ain't gonna scrub toilets, polish door handles or dust. But you know what? At $240 a month I'm buyin' the damn Roomba. And the Russians ain't workin'. Anything I do, they ain't workin'. Guaranteed - they're overqualified to be cleaning my toilets already. But what they are qualified to do? People are already doing that. Yeah. Jobs disappear and jobs appear. The fallacy is assuming that the new jobs are somehow open to the old jobholders 'cuz they fuckin' ain't, they never have been, and the premise that they are is one of the main excuses free market fuckers use to help themselves sleep at night.What I DON'T want, is Walmart and their cynical corporate cronies to be allowed to pay less than a living minimum wage, because then the company pockets my money that should be going to the social safety net that supports my fellow Americans who genuinely need it to get through tough times.
No. There will not be enough gig jobs to go around. Gig work is often inconsistent and unstable. There's no guaranteed paycheck. Gig workers often lack resources like affordable healthcare from employers, places to actually work, and collective bargaining power with their fellow peers. There will always be a pool of low skill, low knowledge workers, and/or low drive workers. There is very little room in gig work for people like them. The disappearance of low skill, low paying jobs will mean a huge chunk of purchasing power will disappear from the economy. With less money circulating throughout the economy, there will be even less jobs to go around, creating a negative feedback effect that will impact even gig workers negatively. I understand where you're coming from, but I think it's important to understand that not everyone is cut out to be major go getters like you. The people who will lose these jobs are often already in very precarious socio-economics positions as it is. They're staring disaster in the face here.
I don't agree with your (or KB's) logical leap, here. We have a current pool of low skill, low paying jobs. That pool is disappearing. That does not mean that there will not be other jobs of that type that will open up. Shit, any of those people could go pick the fruit that is rotting in farmer's fields across the US right now, because the migrant workers have been chased away. Now, that type of work isn't for everybody, but some people will do it. Let's just spin your idea around: We need to preserve shitty jobs, because there are some people who need something to do that doesn't take any skill or mental capacity. Great. Now are you going to champion legislation that prevents 7-11 from automating the cashier job? Or gas station attendants? Or grocery store clerks? Is your legislation going to penalize Amazon's new grocery store here in Seattle that has no employees? The penalties have to exceed the additional profits Amazon is making from not having to pay $15/hr plus bennies to cashiers. So your legislation worked! Now companies cannot automate their simplest business functions any more. Now the employees filling these jobs basically have tenure. They don't have to perform at even the most basic level, because their job is federally protected. Now the Amazon grocery store (and all others, as well) become the worst customer experience ever, full of employees who don't give a shit, and don't have to. Listen, I get it. I get your point. But this problem is not new. Look at coal miners. Or seamstresses. Or Full Service gas stations. This problem has existed, without a good solution, for generations. The reason why Walmart can pay $6.25/hour is because that employee is being supported by federal programs (welfare, food stamps, medicaid, etc) to the tune of $8.75/hr. If Walmart doesn't pay the living wage of (call it) $15/hour, someone else IS paying for it. And that "someone else" is me. Left Coast Democrat(ish) white upper middle class urbanite tech worker with a good-paying job. And I'm OK with supporting those who need help. I like the social safety net, and wish it was more comprehensive. (UBI) I am not OK with subsidizing Walmart because they have a cynical business model that abuses our social safety net for their corporate profits. That's just a pipe from my pocket to Bill Walton's bank account, with the Federal Government as the middleman. It sucks that low-wage jobs are going away. I agree. But that pressure on the market, and that availability of low-skilled labor will generate other market opportunities that we can't imagine right now. Any time there is a surplus of something, the system will find a way to make money from that surplus. It always happens. We need to let it happen, and we need to ensure these people have a working social safety net to protect them from the down times, that isn't just a corporate giveaway. (I think.) ... The disappearance of low skill, low paying jobs ...
I'd like to point out that you didn't actually refute any of my points that gig work, for low skilled workers, is actually a step down. I'm not saying that to be a dick, but I would like to say that as of right now, we're having a conversation about the future employment of people in my socio-economic class, so I'm a bit emotionally invested here. So, on to your new points. There is also no garuntee there will be new jobs opening up and since there are articles out there discussing how automation is going to erode jobs in white collar industries such as law, banking, health, and government (and that that's already happening, see internet banking and ATMS), there will still be even less jobs down the road. That's not even counting the fact that automation has already eroded the number of well paying, full time jobs in retail and warehouse work. Suffice to say, my confidence level in your theory couldn't be lower. Some people will do it. Those people are desperate, know the work is extremely temporary, is back breaking, and grueling. Let me ask you an honest question. Which would you rather have? A part time job, in an air conditioned building, where you're paid $9 an hour to work all year round scanning boxes and talking to customers feeling relatively secure in knowing that job is gonna be there one week after another with bosses and a company you're familiar with and can somewhat trust or a temporary two week, immediate hire job, in the grueling heat, with people you don't know or trust (that includes whether or not they'll pay you fairly or screw you) where after you're finished you're left where you started, jobless. There's a reason the second kind of jobs don't have a lot of takers, and it's not about work ethic or gumption. First of all. They're not shitty jobs. They're jobs that are viewed as shitty because people with college educations and six figure incomes feel better about looking down on as many people as they can. To a lot of people, they're just jobs, and while many hope for better and want more, many are quite content with what they got. Who said those people have to be tenured? Your theoretical legislation just says the jobs can't be automated. People can still get fired for being irresponsible and there will still be people lining up to take those spots. That said, some people argue any corporate fine is just a tax under a different name. Sometimes I think that statement is pretty compelling. Dude. Every day there's statements on the internet that say low wage employees don't give a shit. How much worse could it get? Right? Besides. You're wrong. Retail, food, and warehouse employment is like employment anywhere else and there's a teamwork dynamic involved and there's pressure from above to perform. There are numbers to hit from turn around times to sales goals to customer satisfaction metrics. Companies still have to compete with each other, so they're going to implement programs to keep employees compliant. If Walmart doesn't pay the living wage of (call it) $15/hour, someone else IS paying for it. Except A) just earlier this year Wal-Mart committed to increasing wages for all their employees, part time and full time alike, and B) companies are willing to pay what they're able to get away with. In regards to part B, don't you think a big culprit here is the erosion of the values of collective bargaining (and this is coming from a guy who's actually quite wary of unions) and the government itself not ensuring that the minimum wage is a livable wage? Then, and I know I've said this before, but can you believe the way that Obamacare is implemented that it actually creates an incentive for companies to have LESS full time employees? Chances are, there's tons of legislations and regulations out there that serve as a double edge sword and I'm willing to bet my left shoe that more often than not, it's people on the bottom rungs of society that get cut deepest because really, lets face it, they're not respected. Yeah. I mean, sure. I'd like Walmart to carry the whole ball, but if it's between them paying part of it or tax payers paying all of it . . . DUDE! People are fucking fighting hard against universal health care and you think something like UBI is realistic? Seriously. I know we both don't live in the same America, but come on. There is zero garuntee that there are magical new jobs around the corner. And if they're gig jobs like you're proposing, once again, it's a step down. Honestly? It's all about supply and demand. If there's a large supply of workers and a low supply of jobs, workers will be worth much less, jobs will be worth much more, society is gonna put the hurt on a lot of people. To put it another way, aluminum used to be more valuable than gold until someone found a way to quickly, easily, and cheaply process it. Now we use it to wrap our leftover hotdogs in.We have a current pool of low skill, low paying jobs. That pool is disappearing. That does not mean that there will not be other jobs of that type that will open up.
Shit, any of those people could go pick the fruit that is rotting in farmer's fields across the US right now, because the migrant workers have been chased away. Now, that type of work isn't for everybody, but some people will do it.
We need to preserve shitty jobs, because there are some people who need something to do that doesn't take any skill or mental capacity.
Now are you going to champion legislation that prevents 7-11 from automating the cashier job? Or gas station attendants? Or grocery store clerks? Is your legislation going to penalize Amazon's new grocery store here in Seattle that has no employees? The penalties have to exceed the additional profits Amazon is making from not having to pay $15/hr plus bennies to cashiers.
Now the employees filling these jobs basically have tenure. They don't have to perform at even the most basic level, because their job is federally protected. Now the Amazon grocery store (and all others, as well) become the worst customer experience ever, full of employees who don't give a shit, and don't have to.
The reason why Walmart can pay $6.25/hour is because that employee is being supported by federal programs (welfare, food stamps, medicaid, etc) to the tune of $8.75/hr.
If Walmart doesn't pay the living wage of (call it) $15/hour, someone else IS paying for it.
And I'm OK with supporting those who need help. I like the social safety net, and wish it was more comprehensive. (UBI)
It sucks that low-wage jobs are going away. I agree. But that pressure on the market, and that availability of low-skilled labor will generate other market opportunities that we can't imagine right now. Any time there is a surplus of something, the system will find a way to make money from that surplus. It always happens. We need to let it happen, and we need to ensure these people have a working social safety net to protect them from the down times, that isn't just a corporate giveaway.