Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

More than half of Lake County’s steel jobs have vanished since 1990

More than half of Lake County's steel jobs have vanished since 1990

A steelworker oversees an operation at ArcelorMittal’s Indiana Harbor operations. More than half the steel mill jobs in Lake County have vanished since 1990. An ArcelorMittal steelworker moves an order of steel in the slabyard in Plant 2 at the East Chicago mill. More than half the steel mill jobs in Lake County have vanished since 1990. Steelworker jobs have been declining since the 1970s, but the job losses in the steel industry that built Northwest Indiana have been accelerating over the last few decades.

Lake County had 26,761 in Primary Metal Manufacturing as recently as 1990, according to the […]

Editorial: Labor, in all its forms, is to be celebrated on this day

Editorial: Labor, in all its forms, is to be celebrated on this day

Buy Now — John Gorka, folk singer

Much has changed, of course, in more than a century. “Delving and carving” by the workforce is more likely performed now with a computer mouse than a hammer and nail. Much of the “grandeur we behold” now is created in front of a glowing monitor, not forged in a steel mill’s blast furnace — virtual worlds built via coded programs, so many binary 1s and 0s processing our very lives. “Rude nature,” mostly, has been civilized or exploited (given your world view).

Progress and automation, true, may have changed the face of employment […]

Climate change linked to India’s decreased economic output in hot years

Climate change linked to India’s decreased economic output in hot years

New Delhi: Unusually hot weather is related to falling economic growth in countries around the world, a recent study has shown. It said that high temperatures lead to less productive workers which meant a less productive business and thus a less productive economy.

The study analysed 15 years of data from almost 70,000 plants across India and found that the value of output declined by about 3 per cent for every degree above the average temperature. This loss was large enough to explain the entire reduction in India’s economic output in hot years, according to the study titled ‘The Impact […]

Automation in the Food Industry

Automation in the Food Industry

kmcardoza13@gmail.com

A notable symptom of our fast technological advances in the past few decades is the decline in simple positions in the workforce, like manufacturing jobs. No longer can a laborer expect their position to last for an extended period of time due to the advent of robotics. The decline of manual labor jobs is now creeping into the food industry with the introduction of automation, and the Bay Area is not exempt from this change. It’s truly the wild west in the food industry, as start-up companies flirt with automation in order to cut costs on production and employees, […]

Growth and productivity in information technology jobs outpaces other jobs

Growth and productivity in information technology jobs outpaces other jobs

Information technology jobs have outpaced most other jobs in growth and productivity since 2004 , a new study found. Positions in cybersecurity, and big data, for example, are information technology jobs. These types of jobs are providing workers in the US with long-lasting financial stability.

Giovanni Gallipoli and Christos Makridis wrote about their study and findings in the Journal of Monetary Economics (citation below) . Prof. Gallipoli is Associate Professor from the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Dr. Makridis Christos serves as a Digital Fellow at the MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy.

Prof. […]

Automation and The Future of Work: How fluent thinking can enhance your hireability and increase your value

Automation and The Future of Work: How fluent thinking can enhance your hireability and increase your value

Fluency of ideas is a highly desirable future work skill, and the ability to come up with multiple ideas around a given topic is something that can be learned and practiced

There is a new line of thinking emerging around the topic of our AI-powered future, and what awaits us in the future of work.

If, in past years, the tone of most conversations has been on the dire side—the robots are coming to take your jobs and such—the winds are blowing in fairer directions as people start to realize the opportunities ahead. In short, we’re discovering there is an […]

Workers less productive in hot weather, reveals study

Workers less productive in hot weather, reveals study

Nagpur: Hot weather can cause significant economic losses as workers tend to be “less productive” with the rise in mercury, reveals a latest study from India.
Carried out by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), India, the study analyses the productivity of workers in the country and co-relates it with high temperature. The analysis of labour-intensive manufacturing processes states that the productivity of workers engaged in cloth weaving or garment manufacturing dropped by 4% per degree, as temperatures rose above 27° Celsius.

However, while conducting a study on workers from the steel industry, it was found […]

Coming up next week on WRAL

Coming up next week on WRAL

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Rising temperatures harm worker productivity, causing global losses

Rising temperatures harm worker productivity, causing global losses

A new study finds higher temperatures may cause significant global economic losses because workers are less productive and absent more often when it is hot. Study finds climate change causes lower economic output in countries

From Montreal to Mount Washington, heat records are being broken this summer in places not accustomed to sweltering temperatures. Studies have found that unusually hot weather is linked to lower economic output in countries around the world. Although several factors—from poor crop yields to heat-related illnesses—probably share part of the blame, there is also a more fundamental variable at play: When we get […]

Automation, robots and the ‘end of work’ myth

Automation, robots and the ‘end of work’ myth

Can you imagine travelling to work in a robotic “Jonnycab” like the one predicted in the cult Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall? The image from 1990 is based on science fiction, but Mercedes Benz does have a semi-autonomous Driver Pilot system that it aims to install in the next five years and Uber is also waging on a self-driving future. Its partnership with Volvo has been seen as a boost to its ambitions to replace a fleet of self-employed drivers with autonomous vehicles.

Jonnycab might belong to futurology but if MIT academics Erik Brynjolfson and Andrew McAfee are right, we […]