Tag: conservative

Nostalgia for manufacturing won’t bring better jobs for UK workers

Nostalgia for manufacturing won’t bring better jobs for UK workers

Workers leaving the Ford Motor works in Detroit, circa 1930. Novelist Erskine Caldwell called it the ‘eight-finger city’ because industrial accidents in manufacturing were so rife © Fox Photos/Getty Everyone loves manufacturing jobs. In the US, a fondness for factories is something President Joe Biden shares with his predecessor Donald Trump. “I don’t buy for one second that the vitality of American manufacturing is a thing of the past,” Biden said in January as he signed an executive order to encourage more federal government purchases of American-made goods. In the UK, the ruling Conservative party is drawn to the […]

Letting the Economy Create Jobs for Everyone Is (Sadly) Radical

Letting the Economy Create Jobs for Everyone Is (Sadly) Radical

Everyone in American politics believes that jobs should be plentiful and wages should be high — they just disagree about how to achieve those outcomes.

Or so our nation’s political rhetoric might lead one to believe.

When Republicans lambaste Joe Biden’s proposed corporate-tax hike, they do not warn of smaller dividends for shareholders but rather fewer jobs and lower wages for working people. And when Democrats advocate for their president’s climate plan, they don’t promise higher returns for green investors but good-paying jobs for blue-collar laborers. In fact, it can be hard to find an argument for or against any economic […]

Germany’s Auto Giants Are Going Electric — But It Won’t Save Jobs

Germany’s Auto Giants Are Going Electric — But It Won’t Save Jobs

Volkswagen employee checks an ID.3, a new electric model, in the light tunnel of the Transparent Factory in Dresden. (Photo by Matthias Rietschel / picture alliance via Getty Images) German auto production employs around eight hundred thousand people — with a further 1.8 million jobs indirectly linked to the industry. But even these figures don’t convey quite how important it really is. Apart from the fact that brands like Volkswagen are known the world over, the sector drives industrial knowhow upon which the German economy’s strength relies.

Today, the industry faces severe crisis. Tens of thousands were laid off last […]

Focus On Productivity: How COVID taught us to do more with less resources…

Focus On Productivity: How COVID taught us to do more with less resources...

Focus On Productivity: How COVID taught us to do more with less resources…

According to the Global Travel Staffing Barometer, due to the pandemic, travel companies around the world have laid off or furloughed over half a million people, and the number of LinkedIn users in the hospitality space applying the #opentowork hashtag to their profiles grows day after day. Most hotels are struggling to run operations with skeleton crews only, yet they do not have any real alternative. In some countries, in fact, the financial help coming from governments is close to zero, so the only option for […]

Keir Starmer was right on one thing in his reshuffle – we need a Future of Work Secretary

Keir Starmer was right on one thing in his reshuffle - we need a Future of Work Secretary

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner, Deputy Leader visit the Liberty Steel Pipe Mill in Hartlepool. (Photo by Ian Forsyth/Getty Images) After a poor set of local election results and a botched reshuffle, Labour hasn’t had the best of weeks. But one thing it may have gotten right is the appointment of Angela Rayner as “shadow secretary for the future of work”. While it is easy to mock the elaborate titles bestowed on the deputy leader after she was sacked from as party chair and national campaign coordinator, her brief is nothing to scoff at. The […]

Why Trump Still Has Millions of Americans in His Grip

Why Trump Still Has Millions of Americans in His Grip

Beginning in the mid-1960s, the priorities of the Democratic Party began to shift away from white working and middle class voters — many of them socially conservative, Christian and religiously observant — to a set of emerging constituencies seeking rights and privileges previously reserved to white men: African-Americans, women’s rights activists, proponents of ethnic diversity, sexual freedom and self-expressive individualism.

By the 1970s, many white Americans — who had taken their own centrality for granted — felt that they were being shouldered aside, left to face alone the brunt of the long process of deindustrialization: a cluster of adverse economic […]

Cancel work: The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that work is not a virtue

Cancel work: The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that work is not a virtue

Several years ago, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released an overview of the Green New Deal that mentioned guaranteeing "economic security" for people who are "unable or unwilling to work." When conservative critics noticed those last three words, they pounced. Fox News waxed poetic about the "dignity of work" and Breitbart sneered at the "self-described Democratic Socialist" whose "radical proposal" ignored that even "traditional American liberalism regarded full employment as its goal because of the importance of work to society and the individual."

Indeed, there is a deep-seated belief in American society that one’s survival is tied to work — and, thus, those […]

Why people should get paid to let AI do their jobs for them

Why people should get paid to let AI do their jobs for them

The idea of a universal minimum/basic income (UBI) isn’t new or nearly as radical as those both in favor and opposed to it would have you believe. Dozens of cities across the globe are either currently running or have run UBI test programs. And the results are usually positive.

Simply put: the outcomes for people who receive a UBI are typically demonstrably better than people in similar financial and economic situations who don’t.

But a significant number of people ranging from laypersons to economics experts believe that paying people for what they consider “not working” is a bad idea.The solution, of […]

Why You Should Read “The Rise of The Robots” by Martin Ford

Why You Should Read “The Rise of The Robots” by Martin Ford

Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash At General Motor’s peak in 1979, GM earned $11 billion and employed 850,000 workers. In 2012, Google earned $14 billion (1979 value) with 38,000 employees. Although technology creates new jobs, we can all agree that the employment prospects are not that bright for the labor force. Simply stated, the future is full of robots, but there are very few jobs for humans. This is surely unsettling.

As employees, we are all understandably anxious about the upcoming automation and AI revolution. As robots, machines, and algorithms do our jobs quicker and better than us, will […]

Post-Work Migration and the End of America

Post-Work Migration and the End of America

People have always moved to live, from early agrarian societies seeking fertile land to the undocumented workforce that currently powers this country’s agricultural sector. More recent, though, are the systematized and codified restrictions on that movement—telling us who can move where and for how long—and one of their preeminent categories through which this sorting is done has been the all-encompassing notion of “work.”

In the United States, where much of that migration is currently directed, there were more than 28 million foreign-born people working as of 2019, collectively comprising more than 17 percent of the country’s entire workforce. Most are […]