White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Cheerio, Your Job Has Been Computerized

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Some thoughts about work. It is under attack from a giant labor pool of maybe 200 million eager and qualified people in Asia and elsewhere, who will do it for less than it costs in the United States.
 
It also is under attack everywhere from computerization. Stated bluntly: if jobs are not going to Asia, they may be going to the cloud. The service sector, once the saving grace of the post-industrial world of work, is being computerized: no more people needed. 
 
The somber back story at the recent National Federation of Retailers annual convention and expo at the Javits Center in New York City, as recorded in The Washington Post, was not about new shopping centers, point-of-sale displays, the minimum wage or offshore call centers for warranties: it was about Amazon. Online retailing is eating up traditional retailing — and retailers have seen the future, and it is bleak.
 
Two University of Oxford researchers, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, recently calculated that 47 percent of American jobs are under threat from computerization. The only major publication that dwelt on this extraordinary study was The Economist.
 
Even those spoiled children of society, university professors, are feeling the cold winds from the computer vortex. Online learning is shaking up the quietude in the ivory towers. While they have to do something to improve the productivity of their academic staffs, this is not the way.
 
Against this threatening employment sky rages the debate over the minimum wage. But it is a debate that is too narrow; too much about the short-term interests of the employers of minimum-wage earners and too little, if at all, about the endangered workplace. The spurious argument is that any increase in the minimum wage will drive employers to install more computer substitution of workers. 
 
They are hell-bent on that anyway. Look around: checkout counters are being automated; book manufacture is threatened by e-readers; telephones are answered by other telephones, guided by the unseen hand of computers. Soon even those vilified call-center jobs in India, will be under threat. Here, your doctor will not want as many support staff, as records go the Web.
 
The minimum wage should be raised. It will not stop the rush to substitute humans with computer-driven gadgets. When a machine can be finely tuned to cook and serve hamburgers, a machine will be cooking and serving hamburgers. All those untruths about jobs in fast-food chains being only entry level will fade away. 
 
Meanwhile, go into any fast food outlet and count the people who are middle-aged: They are not there because it is a way in. It is a way of hanging on – especially for African Americans and Hispanics. The same is true for hotel room cleaning, chicken-plucking in processing plants, cleaning toilets in commercial buildings, warehouse working and those toiling in the night kitchens of bakeries. Entry into what? Hell?
 
I once earned the minimum wage in New York City. At the hiring hall, I can tell you, there were only those exiting the job world not entering it.
 
You will not get rich driving a non-union truck, either. Delivery people do it because they have no other skill and almost none of them are candidates for retraining, another shibboleth. Wherever there is menial work that is not unionized, there is economic misery.
 
Recently, I attended a conference in Europe — where the jobs problem is as bad as here, and possibly more intransigent — and speakers were talking openly about a decline in the standard of living. We, in the United States, are not immune. Those who have enjoyed middle-class comfort may have to face a devaluation in their quality of life: less and crowded housing, less travel, a smaller, older car or no car, more hourly work and less security, no medical procedures for ailments that some computer may deem elective. Grimmer daily lives that are more 19th century than 21st century.
 
The debate over the minimum wage ought to be a national discussion of the future of work. A rising tide does not lift all the boats anymore. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


Is There a Jobs Catastrophe in the Making?

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Disruption is in the air: disruption in Congress, disruption in the workplace, disruption in the well-being of the middle class. History may well term this the Age of Disruption.
 
This need not be all bad.
 
Disruption is only a problem if it is poorly managed, or if forces beyond control devastate existing order. Take the Russian Revolution or the recent tsunamis in Asia. Nowadays, we tend to think of disruption as being uniquely in the province of technology – and it is this disruption that harbors the most future shock.
 
The most serious disruption now getting underway is the disappearance of jobs; not the replacement of old jobs, but the utter disappearance of jobs. Jobs that once were are going into the ether or, call it what you will, to the cloud. Gone for good.
 
For the first time since the Industrial Revolution was ushered in by the substitution of human and animal labor by shaft horsepower derived from a waterwheel or a steam engine, technology is subtracting jobs rather than adding them. This is a disruption that hurts.
 
From Oxford University comes one of the most disquieting studies on the future yet to appear. Two researchers, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, predict that 47 percent of American jobs are at risk in the coming years from computerization.
 
Their conclusions are stupefying: nearly half the jobs in the United States could disappear in a few short years. Worse, according to the Oxford University researchers these jobs will affect the great middle reaches of employment, from the white-collar jobs down to unskilled workers.
 
Their study “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?” should have every parent and every policy wonk asking: What should be done? What can we do to save half of the population from not being able to find a job at any level, of being driven to compete for minimum-wage employment?
 
Until now, each leap forward in technology and its corresponding increase in productivity has had two effects:

1. The economic benefits have been shared with the workers. That has ended.

2. New prosperity from automation always led to new demand for more goods and services. This maybe ending. Depressed wages do not lead to new purchases.

In turn, this history has led to a pervasive economic myth that the relationship between automation – even automation using advanced computers – will always lead to more jobs and more prosperity.
 
Yet the market for labor is changing dramatically, and that lockstep has lasted pretty well since the first loom in England substituted shaft horsepower for human labor in the 18th century.
 
That happy union may be broken. The Oxford researchers, in a National Public Radio interview, suggested that the only safe jobs might be those that require a high degree of education and interpersonal skills like the law, teaching and management consulting.
 
My own daily reminder of the world of jobs that is changing is my Kindle. It reproves me. Its value is that I am never without a new book, and it is more portable than any but small pocket books.
 
But I used to publish books and every time I open the electronic book, I think of the long chain of people who were involved in making a book years ago: typesetters, printers, binders, warehouse staff, book wholesalers, and finally the clerks who took your money — all worthwhile jobs with dignity.
 
Books and book stores are not worse hit than many other things, but they are suffering. When did you last speak to a person at your bank, airline, insurance company or utility?
 
A nation that does all of its business online may be efficient in the short term until online leads to the breadline.
 
Disruption is the new normal and we need to understand it. New industries need to be sought. An example of a newish industry that has flourished in recent decades is tourism. A century ago, a few rich people traveled. Now tourism is the world's largest employer.
 
Old remedies for new problems won't do it. The jobs deficit won't be fixed by what we seem to have on the table: lower corporate taxes and less unionism. Less general wealth is the wrong kind of disruption and we are heading that way. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate