At least where I live, immigrants/refugees are put to work in the Tyson plant, until they learn enough English and American customs to start asking questions about things like worker’s compensation, and then they bring in a new crop.
In WWII Britain, they actually sent conscripted young men to be coal miners (the “Bevin Boys”) to increase coal production.
Seems like a pretty drastic measure to address a labor shortage to me.
Need more unionization to combat these exploitive measures.
In Japan during WWII, they started using high school and junior high school students in factories as well as importing Korean laborers for coal mines and such. The Koreans were not taken good care of.
All kinds of people extreme measures are implemented in war time to solve labour shortages including forced labour by prisoners.
The rules are very different during peacetime.
Governments have very different attitudes towards what they regard as skilled and unskilled Labour. Voters do not like the idea of what is regarded as unskilled low skilled labour, even if they are doing jobs that need to be done. Food processing and agriculture require lots of labour that often has to be imported because the locals just don’t want to do it.
The answer to that is often simply to turn a blind eye to illegal working. Many countries have huge workforces that do the poorly paid and work in poor conditions on precarious terms organised by recruitment agencies that specialise in such work placement. The worst examples seem to be in the oil rich Gulf states and the international fishing business where exploitative indentured labour schemes operate.
Skilled labour is a different matter, especially when it is needed for high profile work that is a government responsibility. In countries that have well financed health care, training doctors and nurses is expensive and takes many years. One solution is to simply poach trained medical staff from poorer countries. This goes on a lot. It can become institutionalised. Huge numbers of nursing staff trained in The Philippines support health services in countries such as the UK. The advantage to the country doing the training is the remittances that are sent back to support extended families. The alternative to this outsourcing approach would be to educate, plan and train locals for the careers that are needed. That is how it used to be, but the trend is towards globalised supply chains and that seems to apply as much to labour as it does to manufacturing.
Most governments don’t really have much idea about the labour requirements of the economy. They just play catchup when there is a crisis and change the immigration rules so companies can more easily get workers from other countries. The recent shortage of truck drivers during the Covid lock downs was an example. Long term planning seems to be to simply encourage more kids to get a university education and vaguely hope that will somehow match the skills requirements of a service based economy.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
No.
Self-serve attendant is one of the jobs I do at work. The ratio is 1 attendant to 6 stations, not “dozens”. Unless you want rampant theft through the self-serve (which, presumably, Wal-Mart tolerates given they are entirely self-serve right now, unlike my place of employment). And you’d be surprised how many people are NOT capable of checking themselves out. And people STILL try to use cash at the machines clearly labeled and set aside as “card only”.
In theory you’re correct but in practice it’s a mess.
There’s an issue with that approach to immigration when the labor shortage is at the bottom of the economy in relatively low skill labor but you’re only admitting PhD’s.
And what are the consequences to society when lower-skill labor displaces human workers entirely and they have no income?
I believe the clothes-sewing industry has been in Bangladesh and Vietnam for quite a few years now. It’s an industry that’s always chasing the cheapest labor as long as the country is politically stable. I fully expect it to move to Africa in the near future, if it isn’t already moving there.
There was much agonising back in the 1970’s about the end of work due to increasing automation on the back of developments in microprocessor technology. The robots would take everyone’s jobs.
It turned out that other parts of the economy expanded, particularly those providing services. Many jobs require interactive human communication. Not least the vast bureaucracies required by governments and enterprises. People helping to make widgets in factories has been replaced with people sitting at computers sending each other messages.
Organisations are pretty good at inventing new roles and jobs. As long as they are economically viable and the money rolls in, organisations have no problem creating important sounding job titles and having meetings and micro managing stuff. There will always be jobs unless the economy suffers from some crisis. They may not be well paid, but that is another issue.
Culture has not yet come to terms with the fact that many jobs are unnecessary and it would be better if people were paid to do something more productive with their time. But who knows, the recent lock down experience may lead to some changes.
In a word - automation.
Factories that used to employ thousand now employ hundreds. Even fast-food outlets are looking at becoming fully automated and self-driving trucks are only maybe a decade away. I can do my shopping online. It’s picked and packed by ‘robots’ and quite possibly the only human in the chain is the driver who delivers the order to my door.
As long as cheap immigrant labour is available, employers don’t invest in alternatives, but once there is no one available to pick the fruit or milk the cows, they learn to live without the workers. Not only that, but workers have rights - they need meal breaks and paid holidays. Machines just need regular maintenance.
Mention was made above about increasing retirement ages. The reason for this is not to increase the labour pool but because, as people live longer, their retirement benefits become unsustainable. My wife, for most of her working life expected to retire and draw her pensions (state and private) at 60. Now she has to wait an extra five years.
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have used forced labour and child labour in their cotton harvest (although it’s supposedly being stamped out).
In the ten yrs I’ve been here (in my city) this is the most I’ve seen for now hiring signs (and cut hours). It’s a shock(?) I recall my banker telling me that we may just simply see stores and restaurants simply close down. Like why is there both a CVS and Walgreens across street from each other? Why is there a Stein Mart and Marshalls in same strip mall?
A-men!
Self-checkout was never intended for people like, for instance, the woman I saw trying to do this a few weeks ago, trying to corral several small children while checking out a cartload of produce that needed to be weighed.
CVS and Walgreens are across the street from each other for the same reason Osco and Walgreens used to be across the street from each other: Both companies are trying to create a retail pharmacy monopoly.
So many people have left Walgreens, the company is trying to recruit my BFF, WHO WAS FIRED FROM THERE MANY YEARS AGO. And they know it! (BTW, the firing was for the best, in the long run.)
No, the legal position already was that people from elsewhere in the Empire/Commonwealth were “British subjects” and entitled to come. What changed was that the exigencies of war and then postwar labour shortages in some sectors led to proactive recruitment, particularly in the West Indies.
When the law changed, in relation first to immigration and later to citizenship, it was in the direction of greater restrictions on immigration and tighter definition of citizenship.
That’s more to do with sustaining the financial viability of the pension system as people live longer.
No more drastic than sending them into combat, which is what they were already conscripted for.
Also women without compelling domestic responsibilities were conscripted into non-combat occupations, whether in the forces, factories or public services. (As seen in contemporary movies such as The Gentle Sex and Millions Like Us)
I used to think cashiers were slow, until I saw regular people trying to check out groceries.
I was at my high school reunion a few years ago, and one of my former classmates was the manager of a large suburban Walmart. he excused himself early, saying “I have to be up by 7AM to open the store for the shoplifters.”
I’ve seen several stores where there are more than 6 scan stations, and the attendant covers those and often is wandering doing quick errands for the regular cashiers as well. My local Walmart has a pair of scanning aisles - go to be 30 or more , half for the “15 or less” line. I never noticed the number of attendants, I’ll have to look next time. Seems to me it was only 2. They’ve added automatic gates to slow the process of leaving, so people don’t just walk through. (I’m sure that doesn’t stop some.)
The point stands though - it’s a less mind-numbing job (I hope, I assume…) than swiping groceries over the scanner in a checkout. It’s a good example of how technology automates a job by altering the process. Same as how the fast food self-order screens and the “pick up your bag when your number is called” speeds the fast food counter process, makes the job simpler, and reduces manpower needs.
As for some of the other answers - I can’t see forced work as anything except a short stopgap solution. As I mentioned, the result is “we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.”
The question then is - what can change to reduce the number of employees. You can make a list where automation has eliminated a lot of drudge (and non-drudge) jobs. Bank tellers to ATM’s, order screens and apps for fast food service, self-scan checkouts, self-serve gas stations; online service is eliminating even more - bookstores are the prime example, but travel agents, the newspaper want-ads, and newspapers in general, many more retail outlets. The automated phone exchanges are annoying, but have eliminated a lot of phone service people. (“Press 1 for country & western hold music, press 2 for classic rock hold music…”) Robo-calls - even worse. Even human call centers use robo-dialers.
A main complaint with brick-and-mortar now is showrooming - people will come into the store to look at something, then buy it cheaper online (or because they have the size or colour the store doesn’t have in stock). Walgrens and CVS may be going the way of the dodo soon with far fewer outlets - I see a much-advertised service now is having your prescriptions sent to an online service that then packages all your different medications into single daily bubble packs to make it easier to track and dispense. Online glasses services are out-competing those highly lucrative optical stores.
It’s all part of the trend that started when mom and pop stores and the corner general store or farmers market were replaced by Sears catalog orders and big supermarkets and malls, which are now replaced by big box stores and slowly starting to succumb to online shopping.
We discussed in a much earlier thread about Amazon’s plan for drone delivery. It’s possible that people could place a target landing pad in a private area - especially the balconies on a high-rise - and a truck like an aircraft carrier would park in front of the building and a dozen drones would deliver packages to diverse nearby locations far faster than some guy carrying each package to the door one by one. Sign up for this service, get a big discount off your delivery charges (or prime membership).
Same for food deliveries. Join the fast delivery option and get really fast food; no human necessary.
the only gotcha is Uber - I still don’t believe computers will be that good at driving for a long time, unless we can get humans off the streets (coming!!) The software needs a large number of iterations. But if we can get private computer-only roads for most of the journey (like, perhaps, tunnels under the city?) that would certainly speed things up.
So just think about where you use the services of other humans and consider - how could this be automated, or what compromise in the level of service would eliminate a human? (Or at very least, the computer will guide you through the prep work so the human has only to review and/or sign off…)
What WalMart does and what the rest of the retail universe does are often two different things. The company I work for mandates 1 attendant for every 6 stations, to the point that if we don’t have sufficient attendants we shut the excess ones down. We still lose some stuff to shoplifting - that’s just reality, some of the pros are very, very good at what they do. (And then there was the couple a few months ago that set fires in the store to distract staff - which worked very well, by the way - while stealing stuff.)
As someone who spends half my week doing an 8 hour shift swiping other peoples’ groceries… probably not as “mind-numbing” as you think. Certainly less mind-numbing than data-entry jobs. Less toxic than working “customer service” phone lines. There is constant problem solving albeit on a low level - identifying produce (it’s amazing how many different fruits and vegetables exist, with multiple varieties of each), properly packing a bag is like a game of 3D Tetris, fixing pricing problems, dealing with coupon issues, and interacting with customers. Sure, it can get to be a grind but so can any job. Frankly, I find the physical impact of the job to be the biggest struggle: consider lifting 20 to 40 pound boxes/bags every few minutes for 8 hours. Also, standing more or less in place for 8 hours which by itself can be physically demanding.
I was surprised at both how good I was at the job, and how much I like it compared to other jobs I’ve had.
That’s also why completely automating the job has been difficult and why humans are still there on standby (at least at my store). Machines are great at routine things. Not so much at surprises. And there are a lot of surprises in retail.
Mind you, if one day the job really is completely automated I expect I could find something else to do, but then, I’ve spent a lifetime trying to be adaptable and doing a lot of different things. Not everyone is like that.
Heck, the other half of the week I’m in the cash office (another job people keep telling me is about to go away - um… most of the job these days is probably solving again, the sort of problems the automation doesn’t cope with, and 1/4 of our transactions still involve cash. We no longer have 6-8 people working there in a week, only 2 (because we have to cover 7 days a week) because yes, a lot of it is automated now, but that final bit seems very resistant to automation. So yes, I’m one of the “lucky” ones that went from doing double-entry bookkeeping with a pencil on paper many, many years ago to supervising the machines now doing the scutwork. Yay. And presumably the others who used to do that sort of thing are either doing something else now or retired. But at some point you’re going to wind up with more people than jobs, and then what are you going to do?