White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

The King File: Future of Work, Euro Trains, the Grammys

January 31, 2018 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Work Is Not What It Was and It May Not Be Again

It used to be that when you left school or college, you sought to hook up with an employer who would offer you a whole bunch of goodies: things that were taken for granted then, like job security, health insurance and a defined pension.

You could work for, say, General Electric, AT&T or Marshall Field. And you’d be on a kind of employment plateau.

Those were the days when even well-paid union employees, like truck drivers, would reasonably count themselves as middle-class. They’d expect their children to do even better than they had.

But stagnant wages and disappearing benefits are booting millions out of the middle class. They can’t afford the genteel life anymore.

In today’s workplace, keep your resume burnished and your home in good repair, in case you need to downsize quickly. Damocles’ sword hangs over the head of every employee: It could fall in a merger, if production is moved to another state or offshore, or if your company tried for a leveraged buyout and sank under massive debt.

With just 10.7 percent of U.S. workers belonging to unions in 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, things are not pretty for those who thought they would lead a life shielded from the buffets of the economy. Now no one is shielded — unless you are wealthy, in which case you’re likely to be one of those doing the buffeting. Or, you chose the security of government employment. That way you’re in a cocoon that private industry no longer offers.

At present, the enormity of this uncertainty in the workplace is concealed with the giddy stock market and full employment. But it’s there. When there’s a stock market correction or we have a recession (both of which history says are inevitable), the plight of working people will become more obvious. Also, the attendant plight of new retirees — more and more without pensions and relying, if they’re lucky, on 401(k) plans. They won’t have lifetime pensions, guaranteeing glitter in their golden years.

But worse may be to come. Meet the gig economy, where contract employment replaces formal employment: no employer medical plan, no paid vacation, no sick leave.

Hanging over all this gloom is the existential worry about artificial intelligence. One argument is that its predecessor, automation, always created more jobs than it cost. Mechanized woolen mills made cloth for the many. Production lines produced goods that more consumers could afford like cars and washing machines. Win-Win.

Artificial intelligence, though, threatens simply to replace workers not to make new products. Already, banks and some retailers are working to get people out of transactions, an indication of the workerless future.

 

Euro Trains Have Borrowed Pricing From Amtrak

While making a round-trip reservation from Brussels to London on the super-fast Eurostar, I find that it’s embraced one of the horrors of super-slow Amtrak: dynamic pricing. That’s the system where the cost of tickets is what the market will bear.

European trains, like Amtrak, have public subsidies. So the governments on both sides of the Atlantic are actually squeezing out people with limited budgets. Shame.

It seems to me if it’s the intent of government to subsidize transport, it should do so with an eye to the poor — with fixed pricing — not the rich.

 

This Was Not Your Grammy’s Grammys

Was I wrong in thinking the that the Grammys this year were strictly for the young? Bono and Sting looked decidedly uncomfortable.

There’s an age chasm between Bruno Mars listeners and, well, those of us who heretofore thought we were cool when we listened to Bono and Sting.

 

The Things They Say

“Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that who cares? He’s a mile away and you’ve got his shoes!” — Billy Connolly, Scottish comedian

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Bruno Mars, future of work, gig economy, music, technology, work

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
Police Beatings Deserve Outrage, but It Isn’t Easy Being Blue

Police Beatings Deserve Outrage, but It Isn’t Easy Being Blue

Llewellyn King

Police excess gained huge attention after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and again after the alleged beating death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis last month. But police excess isn’t new. A friend, who had been drinking and could be quite truculent when drunk, was severely beaten in the police cells in […]

IRENA Panel Urges Youth To Move from Anger to Action on Energy Transition

IRENA Panel Urges Youth To Move from Anger to Action on Energy Transition

Linda Gasparello

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate change canary, didn’t participate in the 13th assembly of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), held in Abu Dhabi on Jan. 14 to 15. Perhaps it was because she was otherwise engaged in protesting against the razing of the German village of Lützerath for […]

Big Tech First Cornered the Ad Market, Now Practices Censorship

Big Tech First Cornered the Ad Market, Now Practices Censorship

Llewellyn King

Big tech has siphoned off advertising and wants to be a global censor.  The Department of Justice has filed suit against Google for its predatory advertising practices. Bully! Not that I think Google is inherently evil, venal or greedier than any other corporation. Indeed, it is a source of much good through its awesome search […]

Going Green Is a Palpable Need but a Tough Transition

Going Green Is a Palpable Need but a Tough Transition

Llewellyn King

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — I first heard about global warming being attributable to human activity about 50 years ago. Back then, it was just a curiosity, a matter of academic discussion. It didn’t engage the environmental movement, which marshaled opposition to nuclear and firmly advocated coal as an alternative. Twenty years on, there […]

Copyright © 2023 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in