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.