White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Skilled Jobs Go Begging Now, But Thinking Machines Are Coming

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Consider it as the work dichotomy.

There is a shortage in the millions for skilled labor jobs in the United States. The country is desperate for men and women who drive trucks, operate machines, weld, wield hammers — or can fill skilled jobs in dozens of categories from bulldozer operator to utility lineman.

Bill Hillman, chief executive officer of the National Utility Contractors Association, the organization that represents contractors (people who do everything, from replacing electricity poles to working down manholes to operating heavy equipment), says getting help is a major problem for his members. So they are setting up training programs and working with schools and community colleges.

But these also are some of the people who could be jobless due to artificial intelligence (AI) in the near future. Thomas Kochan, co-director of the MIT Sloan Institute for Work and Employment Research, told me this “middle of the labor market” is coming under attack by AI deployment.

John Savage, professor of computer science at Brown University, foresees a need for major retraining of workers with the spread of AI. But he told me he is “optimistic”: He sees major displacements but new opportunities.

Displacement is a worry for workers, but so is job quality deterioration in the so-named gig economy or freelance economy: a volatile labor pool where the employer holds most of the cards.

Gig workers are spread among diverse occupation groups: arts and design, computer and information technology, media and communication, transportation and material moving, construction and extraction. They are working here and there without permanence, medical insurance or pension provisions, like employer 401(k) contributions.

That is for starters and it is happening now. Then comes the apocalypse when millions of workers find themselves displaced by thinking machines. Think of what happened to elevator operators in cities when elevators were automated.

The first to go might be taxi drivers, some truck drivers, airline pilots and others in transportation. Already in Phoenix, you can ride in a robot taxi operated by Waymo, the Google self-driving car project. Truck makers, stirred on by potential competition from new entrants, like Tesla, are hard at perfecting autonomous intercity trucks.

To my mind, the issue is not whether but when. There are more than 3 million truck drivers on U.S. roads. Not all will be displaced by AI, but if 1 million go, there will be considerable downward pressure on wages.

Traditionally, and Savage points this out, automation has led to a surge in new, different jobs. Ned Ludd, who with his followers destroyed mechanical weaving machines in England in the early 1800s, was wrong. Mechanized weaving added far more related jobs than those lost.

But this time it could be different, warns John Raymont, chief strategy officer of Kurion, an advanced technology nuclear company. He says the difference is that automation heretofore has led to more products, and therefore more jobs. Artificial intelligence threatens to take away jobs without producing new products, which themselves produced new jobs.

Take the automobile production line: It led to more people being able to afford cars and more jobs maintaining and fueling those cars. It enhanced America’s growing prosperity.

So far, AI appears to be aimed directly at employment. In the way that cheap labor in Asia sucked manufacturing jobs out of the United States, so machines may take over skilled jobs from airline pilots to Uber drivers, Raymont says. Other jobs may still be safe, including plumbers, he says.

And it will not be just manual workers who will have their jobs taken over by wily computers. Accounting, tax preparing and auditing, money lending, loading and unloading ships and trucks will be done by machines guided by artificial intelligence. A ship, it is theorized, will be able to leave a U.S. port without the aid of seamen or dock workers and sail to Singapore, dock and unload autonomously.

Job displacement may have this opportunity: More leisure time in which people can play golf on greens maintained by thinking mowers, aerifiers and fertilizer spreaders. After they play, a machine may make them an extra dry martini at the club bar.

 

Photo: August 6, 2017 Mountain View/Ca/USA – Waymo self driving car cruising on a street, Silicon Valley. Editorial credit: Sundry Photography / Shutterstock.com

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

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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

Denigrating the Unemployed; at Christmas, Yet

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In order to execute an abomination, it helps to create myths about the victims: the Jews aim for world domination, all gypsies are thieves, all blacks abuse government assistance programs.
 
It's a national abomination that 1.3 million Americans lost their extended unemployment benefits over Christmas. Bring forth the myth: Extending benefits only causes the unemployed to prolong their search for work, or not to look for work at all. End the benefits and they'll find work.
 
This suggests that suddenly unemployment will fall nationally from 7 percent to who knows? Myths are great for ratiocination. Want to bet that ending extended unemployment benefits won't move the unemployment number at all?
 
Being unemployed isn't a vacation. It's not a glorious excuse to watch television at home and snigger at working stiffs who get a paycheck, have savings, take vacations, hope for promotions, and whose children will be able to afford to go to college.
 
Unemployment means cold economic fear — fear of not being able to provide for yourself and your loved ones; fear that your marriage will crumble; fear that your children will have the humiliation of not having the clothes, the electronic gadgets, the sports equipment, the vacations, the meals out and the college education, without which one is doomed to second-rateness.
 
What happens when a breadwinner loses a job? Fear for the future becomes a constant companion: it erodes the good times of family life and confiscates future plans. The specter of hunger and homelessness pushes out laughter and dreams. Worry moves in and begins to dominate a household; an unwelcome but palpable presence.
 
People who are sick to their stomachs with economic worry don't laugh much. Joblessness silences the normal joys of life.
 
Unemployment is not something I've read about. As a young man, I suffered its debilitating privations both in London and in New York. I was even evicted from an apartment in New York because I couldn't pay the rent. Where will I go? How will I eat? What will become of me. These survival fears are multiplied a hundredfold when there are dependent children.
 
The jobless, although they may be so through no fault of their own, blame themselves and sink into self-flagellating despair. The desire to work where there is no work is a hunger to belong, a hunger to be useful, a hunger to provide for loved ones, and a hunger for the simple dignity of going to work.
 
Going to work is a beautiful thing. Not going to work is an ugly thing – ugly in all the horrors that can descend on a person or a family.
 
Unemployment insurance is not the solution, but it's a help; it's not a substitution, just a help – a desperately important shelter in a storm. It's not, as one conservative commentator suggested, about paying people not to work. It's about paying people to live, until they find work in an economy that is changing the very nature of work.
 
In his masterpiece “The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway wrote:
 
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
 
If Congress follows Senate Majority leader Harry Reid's plan to pass a three-month unemployment benefits extension when it reconvenes on January 6, then a ghastly Christmas nightmare will be somewhat alleviated for 1.3 million Americans, who gradually or suddenly fell out of work – and some into bankruptcy – and will still have to pound the pavements, looking for those elusive jobs that will bring hope and dignity back into their shattered lives.
 
No unemployment checks for our fellow Americans is an abomination, originating with congressional indifference, buttressed by conservative mythology. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate