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In Oakland, people worry that good jobs are out of reach

In Oakland, people worry that good jobs are out of reach

A mural on the wall of a public high school in West Oakland conveys the message "Knowledge is Power."

There’s a lot of talk in Silicon Valley about “basic income,” giving everyone a fixed amount of money to meet basic needs. In a world of precarious work – gig work, part-time and on-demand employment – the idea of a guaranteed minimum income is attracting attention. The tech startup incubator Y Combinator , based in Mountain View, California, is funding a basic income test in Oakland, where the gap between technology haves and have-nots is increasingly visible.

In this once-working […]

Fast Food Automation, an Old Idea, Gets New Life to Bash Fight for 15

Fast Food Automation, an Old Idea, Gets New Life to Bash Fight for 15

Vox‘s Timothy Lee has written this column several times now. Putatively liberal outlet Vox spends a great many column inches trying to stop the national labor movement known as “Fight for 15” from increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Its most frequent writer on the subject, Timothy Lee, is a former adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, and is on the record opposing any minimum wage (when debating between $12 and $15, he doesn’t mention that he prefers $0), so it’s entirely predictable he would consistently argue against Fight for 15: “What Bernie Sanders Misses About […]

Will Trump Bring the Robot Apocalypse?

Will Trump Bring the Robot Apocalypse?

In which we learn that Trump may entrust the well-being of working Americans to someone who wants to eliminate them altogether. (Photo: Shutterstock) The future was supposed to bring prosperity and leisure to working people, not joblessness and misery. But that was before the money guys took over.

This week Amazon announced that it’s planning to open a grocery store that has no cashiers or checkout lines. The corporation said that customers would be able to download an app, link their phones to electronic shopping carts that track the items they take from the shelves, then simply walk out with […]

Amazon’s Grocery Would Eliminate Thousands Of Jobs

Amazon's Grocery Would Eliminate Thousands Of Jobs

Employees stand outside the new Amazon Go grocery store in Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016. Amazon.com Inc. unveiled technology that will let shoppers grab groceries without having to scan and pay for them — in one stroke eliminating the checkout line. Photographer: David Ryder/Bloomberg There’s nothing wrong with profit or efficiency. If you’re in business, you probably have multiple reasons, but profit is a big one. Profit is how you pay yourself. It enables a company to offer more employment opportunities for more people. Investors see the results of profit, either as higher stock prices or […]

Sorry Luddites, Amazon Go Will Be a Huge Job Creator

Sorry Luddites, Amazon Go Will Be a Huge Job Creator

The majority of alarmist headlines yesterday were all about Seattle, WA-based Amazon’s latest profit-making venture. Expanding its operations into the grocery space, the retailer is set to open stores sans checkout clerks. Upon entry in Amazon Go stores set to be opened to the public in the next year, customers will choose items for purchase only to be billed electronically. The days of long checkout lines may well be over with if the experiment succeeds.

Readers can probably imagine that what’s great for the customer is apparently not great for the typical American worker if traditional media are to be […]

Is India prepared for ‘fourth industrial revolution’?

Is India prepared for ‘fourth industrial revolution’?

The disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, automation and Internet of Things (IoT) have become an integral part of our everyday lives. The disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, automation and Internet of Things (IoT) have become an integral part of our everyday lives. They will, in the next two decades, create digital factories and completely transform the IT service business models, which will have a huge impact on the job market.

The rise of these technologies is being called the fourth industrial revolution, which raises concerns over job security as many people, in the past, […]

This Is The Hidden Challenge In The Future Of Work

This Is The Hidden Challenge In The Future Of Work

[Photo: Rawpixel/iStock] On the heels of a mostly positive jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) (4.6% unemployment is the lowest it’s been in nine years), the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) released a more sobering snapshot of the world of work.

A briefing by MGI director James Manyika, compiled from the company’s extensive research, took a deeper dive into employment numbers. He writes: In the United States and the 15 core European Union countries (E.U.-15), there are 285 million adults who are not in the labor force—and at least 100 million of them would like to work more. […]

Forget Robots—People Skills Are the Future of American Jobs

Forget Robots—People Skills Are the Future of American Jobs

You might call it pink-collar work. Experts call it the future of the labor market.

Automation may be gutting American manufacturing jobs, but there’s one thing the robots still can’t beat us at: people skills.

It just so happens that the future of American labor will require a lot of them.The occupations projected to add the most jobs in the next 10 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics , all require people skills—like home health aides, registered nurses, and retail and service workers.Yet the jobs the president-elect has focused on reviving—mostly in manufacturing, dominated by men—are the ones most […]

PRESENTING: Yahoo Finance’s chart of the year

PRESENTING: Yahoo Finance's chart of the year

The biggest story in the world this year — markets, economics, politics, anything — was the US presidential election win by Donald Trump .

And no single chart told the story of Trump’s election better than the following, which revealed the inconvenient truth about US manufacturing employment and US manufacturing output.

What we see in this chart is the red line showing US manufacturing employment levels about 10% below where they were a decade ago. The blue line shows manufacturing output, which in contrast has fully recovered from the recession and then some.In short, we find that US manufacturing workers are […]

Robo-retail: Amazon’s checkout-free move sounds warning on jobs

Robo-retail: Amazon's checkout-free move sounds warning on jobs

Amazon Go stores will let customers grab groceries and just walkout with the total bill charged to their Amazon account.

In a prescient indicator of the future of retail, Amazon this week opened its first Amazon Go store in its home town of Seattle, an 167-square-metre grocery store that requires no checkout lines – not even self-checkout.

Instead, customers can just grab whatever items they want and leave the store – the order gets logged through instore sensors and charged to your Amazon account via a special app.The ambitious foray into physical retailing is just the beginning of Amazon’s plans to […]