I was just watching an interview with Warren Buffet on CNN Money (and now I can’t find the link) where he made said that as our economy specializes, more and more people will be left behind. I think he is saying that thanks to automation and globalization, there is less of a place for low-skill labor. No great revelation there, but he notes that we will have to figure out what to do with these people. I assume no one here is in favor of turning them into soylent green and it is probably too expensive, too big of a moral hazard and completely politically untenable to just pay them a stipend. Demanding that we erect legal barriers to automation or globalization is, well, this isn’t the pit. You could demand higher wages for the same jobs, but whether or not you get them will depend on the size of the labor pool. Training or retraining would be one answer, but you can’t turn just any old fast food employee into a software developer or whatever.
Due to automation, I only see this problem getting worse. Anything that can be automated, will be and more and more people will find themselves without marketable skills. I have often thought that when robots start doing everything, most products and services will become so cheap that they can be given away, but that is a long way off. What do we do in the mean time?
Aren’t there always going to be jobs that are unskilled relative to other jobs? Either way, I’d say the answer is to give people real opportunities to get out of poverty and better access to education. I don’t think the problem is that the average McDonald’s worker is incapable of doing anything else.
Do what they used to do back when people were even stupider and less skilled than they are today: Train them.
Companies cut corners so bad on employees and then wonder why the perfect candidate for their position is nowhere to be found. If you paid a competitive wage and stopped expecting immediate productivity out of your workers (i.e., treat them like a long term investment and not a short term resource to be used and discarded at will), there wouldn’t be a “skills shortage” or whatever they’re calling their failures this week.
I think you will find that even highly skilled people spend a lot of the time in a 168 hour week doing activities which are low-skilled. Low-skilled people can be hired to do these–allowing the elite to pursue more leisure.
It is a mistake to assume that demand will always expand to require fourty hours of labour per week per adult, no matter how efficient your means of converting labour into goods and services. At some point you need to provide a stipend because there’s just not enough stuff that needs doing.
Probably some sort of basic income. The worship of jobs doesn’t really make sense. Some people should just stay home. Allow others to pursue jobs that make more sense, encourage better “fits.”
ETA: Yes, there will probably always be “unskilled” jobs, and one of the problems is too many of those that don’t pay anything. The left behind won’t only be the “unskilled” but other-skilled whose supply exceeds the demand in their fields. Many of the jobs that exist and grow are ones that can’t be made more productive and have no market demand for higher wages.
Hasn’t the same argument been made since the beginning of the industrial revolution? There will always be continuous productivity gains that wipe out certain categories of workers. We have no idea what future job markets or opportunities exist. It does sound rather dystopian, but the 40 hour work week and the leisurely family lifestyle are fairly recent expectations. Hell, think what it was like 200 years ago, which is a drop in the ocean time-wise.
Hell, into the 1980’s, some communities were so backward/foresighted that they simply acknowledged, in their school systems, that not all students were going to be college/professional material.
Instead of History, 10th grade males learned welding and lathe operation.
Females learned typing and Home Economics (how to feed the brood you are going to have because you are too stupid to use contraception, on the pathetic wages your hubby makes on the factory floor).
We can’t realistically train for factory jobs since we tore down ours and built the Chines shiny new ones, but we need to get back to the idea that not everybody is college material, and start training them realistically again.
Be a Lawyer! Sure, it’s expensive and takes forever, but think of all the money!
Well, that isn’t working out so well for whole bunch of people either.
There’s always room for another MD, but that room may not be any place you want to be, or doing what you dream of.
And I suspect, as the US spits and sputters its way into the 20th century, the money in medicine is going to drop.
Which presents better opportunities: clinical or research? (real Q, by the way).
Then there is cannon fodder - yeah, the military is going hi-tech and the days when there was room for anything with a pulse are gone. But as long as we go invade some hellhole on the other side of the world every 20 years, there will be room for a guy with a rifle and just enough training to operate it and understand orders.
All else fails, how about poorhouses? It is a wonderful irony when a Armory is opened as a homeless shelter. The need to have those huge structures for weapon storage and ? whatever else they did has passed with modern logistics.
The first thing to do is to sort people. There are some who can do it but for whatever reason chose not to get jobs. There are some who have psychological issues. There are some who can do it with the proper training. And, especially today, there are lots of people who don’t have the chance because of the bad job market. Over 20% of those in minimum wage jobs today have some college - don’t tell me that they don’t have some skills.
Anyone left who is truly unskilled still can do something. Look at the number of servants in Victorian England. Too much automation for that today, but we can find something.
As a last resort, I like Mack Reynolds inalienable basic. This treated each person as a stockholder, who got a bunch of shares which paid enough dividends for him or her to live on, and which he couldn’t sell.
WPA/CCC type programs. Back in the 1970s I knew a girl that worked for the CCC for a summer repairing hiking trails in a local park. They lived in some sort of barracks, and worked and ate onsite. She made minimum wage.
I really don’t see a problem with a combination of universal service and WPA/CCC projects. They can all be in a pool of people ranging from fresh out of high school to just about retirement age. The absolute conscientious objectors can do the CCC type stuff, others are sorted into the military where they are needed. People who can afford to send their kids to school can go ROTC and those who can make it into a service academy can go to the academy. There are lots of jobs done by contractors to the military that could be done by the WPA/CCC type people, ranging from flagman for road repair to standing security guard/desk jockey answering phones and making copies and filing paperwork. Painting walls that hideous pale green. Janitor services. Food slinging in a mess hall. Doing stuff just the same but out in the community. Hell set up a general labor pool that a company could call if they need a worker of some sort while the regular one is on vacation, just like a temp agency.
The thing is, people are already employed doing every single one of those jobs already - where do those people go?
It seems there might be more able-bodied, capable people than there are jobs to go around. What to do? Make busy work? Decrease the hours of those employed so we need more people do to the same amount of work? Provide living allowances to everyone who can’t find a job? Threaten to cut off food and shelter to those who can’t find work even if it’s not their fault because if we give them and incentive they’ll somehow find work anyway?
The problem with universal service is that it is a toned down version of slavery. It uses the threat of force as a substitute for offering an acceptable salary.
Due to the incredibly large size of the baby boomer generation we are going to have lots of jobs available in helping these people as they age. We will need more nurses, more nursing home assistants, more housekeepers, more lawn and garden care people, etc. The jobs won’t be especially nice or fun, but someone who could have been assembling widgets on a line 30 years ago will now need to serve meals in a nursing home or clean (or repair) houses for people who can’t do it on their own any longer. There will be entire companies and industries that are created to provide help and service to the elderly and that is where a large portion of these jobs are going to end up going.
I think to some extent there needs to be a cultural change. I think we’re always going to need engineers and scientists pushing the boundaries, but low-skill jobs will not always be around. We probably need retraining, but there is only so much work to be done. I think the place it needs to end up is the arts. We may not need another burger-flipper, but I wouldn’t have anything against having another artist or musician or writer. Right now, they’re only paid through the largesse of donor or through ticket sales, but on a “human stipend”, they could be free to create art as they pleased.
Well, the example is bullshit. Take a simple thought experiment: a rich man lives on an island and employs 20 people. One day he gets a robot that does all the work of all the people, and fires them. Now what?
Do the people simple starve?
Of course not. They go to work for each other, doing the work they had been doing for the rich man, but now for themselves. Given they no longer have to support the rich man, they can now divide all the value of their labor among themselves.
In other words, they’re better off without him.
The idea that their skills and their labor suddenly have no value just because the rich guy doesn’t need them anymore is false.
Your example makes no sense. If they’d all be better off without the rich guy, why are they working for him in the first place?
Not to mention you assume those 20 people’s skills are enough to support themselves. If the rich man gets his food by paying for it to be flown in every days and simply has 20 people around to unpack the box, all those box unpacking skills are going to be useless when they try coconut farming or crab fishing.
Even if the 20 people were performing agriculture for the rich man, after they get fired they no longer have a farm to work on, so they’ll still starve.
Well, aside from what yellowjacketcoder said above, I think you are missing the point. It’s not that their labor will have no value, it’s that the labor they were supplying before and that has now been automated is now worthless to the companies that automated. Sure, they could take their labor somewhere else…that’s always an option. Perhaps they can find another old school manufacturer or whatever that hasn’t automated yet. Perhaps they could use their low level skill set somewhere else (the idea that they would just work for each other and be better off is, of course, ridiculous). Or, perhaps they will improve their skill sets and do other work. All of those are always an option. But the point is that as companies automate more, unskilled labor is going to be worth less and less in the market because increasingly that automation and expert systems can do the jobs better and more efficiently, once the capital investment has been made to bring them in. You don’t need a worker to turn a bolt or even weld a seam on an assembly line when you have robots to do that. You WILL need repair and maintenance folks to keep the robots going, and IT people to manage the networks and systems, but you don’t need those large lines of workers anymore. Same goes for other jobs.
As someone mentioned above (have only skimmed the thread), there will always be a need for some unskilled or semi-skilled laborers in our society. The problem is the value of that labor continues to drop…it’s just not that valuable a commodity anymore and will increasingly become less and less so as the need further dwindles and you need less unskilled and/or semi-skilled workers to do fewer and fewer jobs while the pool of such people remains fairly large. The only way to change this equation is to make the pool of unskilled/semi-skilled laborers diminish so that the demand outstrips the supply, instead of the reverse.
But aside from a few of the shovel guys, or the guys waving traffic by (even here you need training), road maintenance and infrastructure improvement has become much more skilled and vertically focused (and automated) than in the old WPA days when you handed a bunch of folks some shovels and told them to start digging. A lot of the road building and even maintenance takes more vertically skilled laborers and operators, and a lot of things that were manual in the past are automated now. Plus there are a lot of safety aspects today that workers have to learn and know that they didn’t even conceive of in the past.