Tag: conservative

How to support yourself after the robot revolution

How to support yourself after the robot revolution

Steve Gardner

Here’s a startling prediction: if current labor trends continue, one out of three American men, ages 25-54, will be out of work by mid-century.

That’s what former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers expects. “Job destruction caused by technology is not a futuristic concern,” Summers wrote this fall. “It is something we have been living with for two generations.”Contract jobs, gig work and robots have all made work more precarious. Silicon Valley pioneered many of the changes, and now some tech entrepreneurs believe they have a solution to the economic anxiety they’ve helped create.Put bluntly, it’s free money. […]

Technology is coming for your retail jobs

Technology is coming for your retail jobs

Amazon recently unveiled a new type of grocery store — one that doesn’t require cashiers at all. Called Amazon Go, the brick-and-mortar location uses sensors and gates to automatically identify what you bought, calculate your total and charge you for your purchases when you leave. It gets rids of pesky long lines in front of cashiers or self-checkout kiosks, but also more or less eradicates the need for checkout counters altogether.

While that’s exciting for loathers of long lines (like me), it also sounds like it could cause a decline in employment, just as automation wiped out millions of manufacturing […]

Jobs For All

Jobs For All

Line for unemployment benefits in San Francisco, CA in 1938. Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress The new issue of Jacobin is out now. To mark its release, we’re offering discounted introductory subscriptions . ull Employment . . . has become an aim of Conservative policy and the strongest argument against socialist critics.” That’s famed economist Joan Robinson, in 1962 trolling to her left and her right. British unemployment had been below 2 percent for most of the period since the war, without runaway inflation. Keynes had solved the problem of unemployment, converted the Conservatives, and stolen the communists’ […]

Donald Trump’s victory brings the jobs vs. automation issue into the spotlight

Donald Trump’s victory brings the jobs vs. automation issue into the spotlight

Robots work on Ford F-150 trucks at a factory in Norfolk, Va. The plant was closed in 2007. (Ford Photo) Six months ago, computer scientist Moshe Vardi felt as if he was a voice crying in the wilderness when it came to automation’s anticipated effect on the job market . No political candidate, it seemed, was talking about the potential impact of autonomous cars and automated manufacturing on future employment.

Today, the topic still isn’t quite on President-elect Donald Trump’s radar screen. But his election has gotten a lot more experts talking about the issue.

“It went from being somewhat esoteric […]

Trump or Clinton … half of today’s jobs will be gone in 20 years

Trump or Clinton … half of today’s jobs will be gone in 20 years

The notion that Uber in London is a mosaic of 30,000 small businesses linked by a common ‘platform’ is, to our minds, faintly ridiculous,” said one of the judges on the employment tribunal. So the tribunal ruled that Uber’s 30,000 drivers in London were actually employees, and therefore entitled to be paid the minimum wage, to be given sick pay, even to have paid holidays.

Uber promptly appealed the ruling, because it would wreck its business model in the United Kingdom and, if the example spreads, worldwide. But it was only a temporary victory for workers’ rights, because just as […]

Automation is abolishing jobs

“The notion that Uber in London is a mosaic of 30,000 small businesses linked by a common ‘platform’ is, to our minds, faintly ridiculous,” said one of the judges on the employment tribunal. So the tribunal ruled that Uber’s 30,000 drivers in London were actually employees, and therefore entitled to be paid the minimum wage, to be given sick pay, even to have paid holidays.

Uber promptly appealed the ruling, because it would wreck its business model in the United Kingdom and, if the example spreads, worldwide. But it was only a temporary victory for workers’ rights, because just as […]

with Gywnne Dyer

Half the jobs are going “The notion that Uber in London is a mosaic of 30,000 small businesses linked by a common ‘platform’ is, to our minds, faintly ridiculous,” said one of the judges on the employment tribunal. So the tribunal ruled that Uber’s 30,000 drivers in London were actually employees, and therefore entitled to be paid the minimum wage, to be given sick pay, even to have paid holidays. Uber promptly appealed the ruling, because it would wreck its business model in the United Kingdom and, if the example spreads, worldwide. But it was only a temporary victory […]

Half the jobs are going

“The notion that Uber in London is a mosaic of 30,000 small businesses linked by a common “platform” is, to our minds, faintly ridiculous,” said one of the judges on the employment tribunal.

So the tribunal ruled that Uber’s 30,000 drivers in London were actually employees, and therefore entitled to be paid the minimum wage, to be given sick pay, even to have paid holidays.

Uber promptly appealed the ruling, because it would wreck its business model in the United Kingdom and, if the example spreads, worldwide.But it was only a temporary victory for workers’ rights, because just as the real […]

Smart Machines Will Eat Jobs–Except Where Smart People Create Them

Smart Machines Will Eat Jobs--Except Where Smart People Create Them

Automation will eat employment. That warning has been issued at every turn in history, with the printing press, the advent of electricity, and the rise of robotics. Phases of automation, and the new trade patterns and agreements that accompany them, destroy jobs that involve repetitive tasks while creating new jobs.

“No office job is safe,” said Sebastian Thrun , Stanford CS professor and MOOC pioneer. “Lots of lawyers, accountants, even surgeons will be automated away. Having spent my career watching the long, slow carnage of my own industry, I have some insight into how that will feel, and how to […]

How trade impacts American jobs: Research roundup

How trade impacts American jobs: Research roundup

Container ship (Photo: Pixabay) Economic dogma asserts that free trade improves everyone’s wellbeing. For decades, both major American political parties have hailed free trade with other countries as critical to voters’ well being. But candidates in the 2016 presidential election have raised piercing questions about the benefits, with both major party nominees distancing themselves from the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a pact with bilateral support that was seven-years-in-the-making. The Republican nominee is even proposing to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement ( NAFTA ), a signature policy of the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations.

Rapidly increasing […]