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Future proofing your job

Future proofing your job

On Monday night, ABC Four Corners ran a ripper report entitled “Future Proof” , which examines the future of work in Australia and whether we are preparing our children properly for the future.

The report features a bunch of experts and commentators, some of who believe that up to 40% of current jobs (5 million) could disappear within 15 years as technological change takes hold, although many of these will be replaced by new jobs in areas that we probably haven’t even thought of.

Below are some key extracts from the transcript , beginning with the pessimistic news: GEOFF THOMPSON: Today […]

Barack Obama wrong about size of U.S. steel production, work force

Barack Obama wrong about size of U.S. steel production, work force

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, share a laugh with U.S. President Barack Obama after his address to Parliament in Ottawa, on June 29, 2016. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press via AP) Activity at the ArcelorMittal coke factory, which currently employs about 180 people, in Monessen, Pa., on June 30, 2016. (Jeff Swensen/New York Times) When Donald Trump made a high-profile speech outlining his approach to trade, he did it in Monessen, Pa., a town near Pittsburgh where a big steel mill has been shuttered for the past three decades.

A day after Trump’s speech, Barack […]

Politifact: Obama Wrong on Steel Production

Politifact: Obama Wrong on Steel Production

By Greg Richter | Tuesday, 05 Jul 2016 07:13 PM President Barack Obama got it wrong when he said last week that "The steel industry is producing as much steel in the United States as it ever was. It’s just (that) it needs one-tenth of the workers that it used to," Politifact says.
Obama made the claim during a summit in Ottawa one day after presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump slammed manufacturers for moving jobs into other countries. Trump was speaking near Pittsburgh, where the once dominant steel industry has been hammered in recent decades.

Obama took issue […]

The Enemies of Economic Independence

The founders sought more than political independence from Europe. They also sought to secure America’s economic independence. To that end, the second bill enacted by the first Congress was the Tariff Act of 1789 , the stated purpose of which was "the encouragement and protection of manufactures." The end result of America’s reliance on the tariff was both prosperity and economic independence, as American manufacturing became the envy of the world and Americans ended up relying on fellow Americans for most of the goods they purchased. This happy situation was brought to an end by our elites’ fatuous embrace […]

Robots are responsible for low wages, Trump and the Brexit

Robots are responsible for low wages, Trump and the Brexit

For decades, economic textbooks have highlighted the golden relationship between productivity and wages. As workers are able to produce more, employees reap the gains in the form of higher wages.

But this is no longer the case. View gallery . Wages and productivity climbed in lockstep between 1950 and 1980. However, there is a striking divergence between the 1980s and today. Even with the unemployment rate near multi-decade lows, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen highlighted concerns about the lack of wage growth and underemployment during her speech at Harvard last month.

“We’re close to an unemployment rate that I think most […]

Infosys, TCS and Wipro see a big jump in campus offers acceptance as jobs shrink with each passing year

Infosys, TCS and Wipro see a big jump in campus offers acceptance as jobs shrink with each passing year

At Wipro, job acceptance rates have risen to 85% from 65% three years ago, said an executive. Others said this mirrors the industry average of 80-85% now against 65-70% in FY12. BENGALURU: As the number of jobs in India’s $160-billion information technology industry starts shrinking with each passing year, engineering graduates across are scrambling for every vacancy in a sector that was once a big employment generator.

The percentage of fresh engineering graduates accepting campus offers from India’s largest software firms such as Tata Consultancy Services BSE -0.49 % , Infosys BSE -0.74 % and Wipro BSE 0.37 % has […]

Book review: The Rise Of The Robots

Book review: The Rise Of The Robots

The Rise Of The Robots—Technology And The Threat Of Mass Unemployment: By Martin Ford, Oneworld Publications, 334 pages, Rs.599. If the Industrial Revolution introduced the assembly-line production concept in factories, the 1950s and 1960s saw companies like General Motors introduce robotics on shop floors. These developments, however, will pale in comparison to what is in store for the human workforce a few decades from now, given the acceleration in capabilities of software automation and artificial intelligence (AI) driven predictive algorithms.

The Rise Of The Robots—Technology And The Threat Of Mass Employment by Martin Ford is a well-researched attempt to […]

Robots, Jobs and Productivity in the Manufacturing Industry

Robots, Jobs and Productivity in the Manufacturing Industry

Reprinted with Permission

The Association for Advancing Automation recently published a white paper discussing the impact of industrial robotics on productivity and employment in the manufacturing industry. We would like to share our thoughts about its main findings.

Figure 1 below illustrates the evolution of robot shipments and employment for almost 20 years. The relationship between those two is clearly visible. As the robot shipments slowed down (blue bars), like in 2001-2002 and 2007-2010, so did nonfarm employment (green bars). . The industrial robot shipments are linked with the growth in manufacturing labor productivity, as it can be seen in […]

Robots Don’t Create New Jobs For Us, Rather, Idle Human Beings Go Do New Things

We’ve yet another little report on what’s going to happen when the robots come to steal all our jobs. This one at least makes the point that while there have been hiccups before, interregnums if you like, past advances in technology have not left large parts of the population without work. So, why should this time be different? Entirely true that, although of course the claim from the other side is that robots are different and so therefore so will this time be.

However, I still think that the basic story being told here is wrong. Not entirely wrong, it’s […]

Automation to affect employment rate in Indian textile industry: Report

Automation to affect employment rate in Indian textile industry: Report

Image Courtesy: jacobinmag.com The textile and apparel industry of India, with recent declaration of ‘Special Package’, has an aim to create one crore new jobs in the sector, but according to a recent report by Texprocil – Ernst & Young, only 29 lakh jobs shall be created, owing to the possible technological advancements in the sector. The new technologies would lead to higher efficiency, but will however reduce job opportunities for the people of the country.

In the textile sector, particularly in spinning, machines like auto-coners and auto-splicers have reduced human intervention in the work by reducing the ‘man’ requirement […]