Tag: consumption

Esquel – From making shirts to making a difference

Esquel – From making shirts to making a difference

An automatic needle inspection machine in operation at Esquel Hong Kong-based textile and apparel giant Esquel Group has made it its mission to weave sustainability into its core values, and across a vertical supply chain that spans every step from cotton farming to retail. Using fewer but more skilled workers, increasing productivity, investing in robotics and automation, micro-financing cotton farmers, and even selecting the whitest cotton fibres to reduce the bleaching process are among the initiatives outlined by managing director Edgar Tung.

"As an industry we have a bad reputation when it comes to sustainability," says Edgar Tung, managing […]

Economic Growth Is No Longer Enough

Economic Growth Is No Longer Enough

As new technologies subject the world’s economies to massive structural change, wages are no longer playing the central redistributive role they once did. Unless the decoupling of productivity and wages is addressed, the political convulsions many countries are experiencing will only intensify.

MADRID – Macroeconomic data from the world’s advanced economies can be mystifying when viewed in isolation. But when analyzed collectively, the data reveal a troubling truth: without changes to how wealth is generated and distributed, the political convulsions that have swept the world in recent years will only intensify. Consider, for example, wages and employment. In the United […]

Will you lose your job because of artificial intelligence?

Will you lose your job because of artificial intelligence?

Every week, whether in the press or blog posts, social media, and around our surroundings, we read or hear about artificial intelligence (AI) and its relationship with employment – and majority of that content tends to paint a negative relationship between these two subjects.

If it’s not Mark Zuckerberg advising tech giants to stop blowing AI dangers out of proportion, it is Elon Musk warning governments to regulate the sector before it gets out of hand or Vladimir Putin giving leadership to any country that leads in AI. But to the ordinary employee, the advancement of AI technology could pose […]

Automation creates jobs in Mexico, but it also reduces wages, new study suggests

Automation creates jobs in Mexico, but it also reduces wages, new study suggests

Automation in the manufacturing sector is more likely to create new jobs in Mexico than increase unemployment, however, the trend will lead to a decline in wages even when other countries have experienced the opposite effect, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

Mexico combines significant automation in the automotive sector (accounting for 20% share of manufacturing employment in 2015), more modest automation in electronics (about 12% of manufacturing employment), and virtually no robot usage in textiles and apparel (9% of manufacturing employment), says the study (PDF format) .

In the automotive sector […]

Industrial robots and the new China Syndrome

Industrial robots and the new China Syndrome

Sean Culey Last year, China bought 66,000 industrial robots. This might not seem like an extraordinary figure for a country of over a billion people, but when you consider that each of these machines can do the jobs of 15 or more full-time employees, the impact begins to look more significant: it means that 66,000 robots could potentially do the work of one million people.

China purchased one-quarter of all the industrial robots manufactured in 2016. So, using these figures, we could make a reasonable claim that manufacturing jobs alone may already be falling to the machines at a rate […]

How will Hong Kong fare in the new wave of automation?

How will Hong Kong fare in the new wave of automation?

A technician prepares SoftBank Robotics ‘Pepper’, a humanoid robot, at the 2017 World Robot Conference in Beijing on August 22, 2017. Photo: Reuters Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has a favourite saying: ‘Your margin is my opportunity’. Photo: AFP With revolutionary developments in robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, the concept of automation replacing human jobs is quickly becoming a reality.

But there is serious debate about the consequences of automation on labour and economic markets, with a clear division between optimists and pessimists. Optimists believe that new forms of technology will lead to higher labour productivity, which in turn, will […]

The Meaning of Work in a Sustainable Society

The Meaning of Work in a Sustainable Society

Employees of the workers’ cooperative Scop-Ti at the their factory in Gemenos, southern France. The workers’ cooperative took over the factory, formerly Fralib Gemenos, after struggling nearly four years with the multinational Unilver to prevent the relocation of the factory. John Bellamy Foster is the editor of Monthly Review . His latest book is Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce , forthcoming from Monthly Review Press.

This article is a revised version of “ The Meaning of Work in a Sustainable Society: A Marxian View ,” published in March 2017 by the Center for the Understanding of Sustainable […]

The radical future has to become a radical present. Interview with Nick Srnicek

The radical future has to become a radical present. Interview with Nick Srnicek

Jakub Dymek: What’s behind the idea of a ‘radical future’ on which you and Alex Williams just wrote a book?

Nick Srnicek*: The core argument is the idea that the left has given up on the idea of the future and we have to reclaim it. With changes to the labour market, through automation, we can start building towards something like a post-work society. We have to get rid of the centrality of work to our lives. We have to build alternatives. There are four demands. One, to push for automation – let’s automate all the drudgery and […]

Robots will not lead to fewer jobs but the hollowing out of the middle class | Larry Elliott

(MENAFN Editorial) iCrowdNewswire – Aug 21, 2017 Weak wage growth could already be a sign automation creating economy in which small number of very rich employ armies of poor Throughout modern history there has been a recurrent fear that jobs will be destroyed by technology. Everybody knows the story of the Luddites, bands of workers who smashed up machinery in the textile industry in the second decade of the 19th century. The Luddites were wrong. There has been wave after wave of technological advance since the first Industrial Revolution, and yet more people are working than ever before. Jobs […]

Automation, Unemployment and Moravec’s Paradox

Automation, Unemployment and Moravec’s Paradox

Writing in the Guardian , here’s Larry Elliott on automation. The whole article is well worth a read, even if it’s too simplistic to argue (as he does) that the Luddites were wrong. Over the longish term they most certainly were. The industrial revolution paved the way for an immense improvement in living standards. But what that happy history omits is the fact that it took a while to do so, a phenomenon known as the ‘Engels pause’: In the first half of the nineteenth century, the real wage [in Britain] stagnated while output per worker expanded. The profit […]