Many types of tech, not just robots
by Mike Kimel
Many types of tech – not just robots – have been affecting and are going to affect the service sector. When someone develops an inexpensive sign you can stick on top of television sets, racks of clothes, or appliances that will change itself whenever someone in the headquarters decides to change the price of the product, its going to eliminate entire departments of people (or move them to doing something else), plus reduce the workload at every retail store in the system.
(The normal cadence for us is to enter prices more than a week before they take effect. We do have over-rides that allow the process to take place in 24 hours, but the amount of work needed to reduce errors
in that process is mind-boggling, not to mention wasteful given it results in hard printing of the wrong signs as well as the right signs.)
As of yet, I’m not sure automation reduced white collar work. What it has done is created a race to efficiency. Now companies scrape competitor data. They analyze prices to try to determine which generate highest margins. They analyze floor plans for the same purpose. I cannot imagine that being done 10 years ago – both in my previous life as a consultant, and my current life working for a major retailer, we can barely get the data systems to provide the data for those types of analysis properly now. Ten years ago it would have been impossible anywhere outside the military. Ten years from now, data pulls that I need an analyst to spend a week and a half doing, and then another week and a half cleaning, will be spit out in minutes (I hope). That analyst won’t be pulling data and organizing it – I’ll have her doing analysis instead. Margins will be even tighter because all our competitors will be doing the same analysis, without which nobody survives.
Where the job losses will come from is not that my employer or its competitors will have fewer analysts, because, as I noted, more analysis will be needed just to stay competitive. Instead, it will come from shuttering some of the companies in the field. There will be fewer retailers – and they’ll all be bigger.
Mike
Not all is lost.
In 1974 we were told computers would eventually eliminate most accountants and operations research quants would eliminate most managers (by making most of the decisions with a computer).
Guess not.
Have you heard? Illinois is firing all its pothole mending crews. The Koreans invented a shovel that stands by itself. 🙂
umm…i am old enough to remember the kitchens of the future from the 50s, where everything was automated and automatic…so i aint holding my breath…
“Everything” doen’t have to be automated – all it takes is an erosion of the amount of labor and – most critically – the skill level of the labor to make a real effect on wages. And since the decisions and funding come from people whose incentives are aligned with reducing the share of non-managerial labor, that’s the way the systems will be designed. IT is a cummulative and accelerating force. What I don”t understand is how more education and creative education is supposed to help. The lump of labor thing is not a total fallacy when there’s a saturation of demand.
from the BLS: The 30 occupations with the largest projected employment growth, 2010-20
of the top ten, only teachers and nurses require a degree…and 4 dont even require a high school diploma…
living labor tends to be replaced by means of production [machines, ITC, etc] when doing so results in higher profit – as tstockman notes, this is a cumulative process [other than for the first user which, due to productivity differential, achieves relative or absolute gain pretty quickly].
parodoxically, competition driven generalization of the new MoP -tends- to reduce avg rate of profit, so affects employment dynamics, e.g., greater casualization, greater intensity, et cetera.
Juan
”“The number of workers engaged in production is falling both relatively, and sometimes absolutely…Moreover, the third industrial revolution substitutes machinery for mental work. . . Office workers, accountants, checkers are being replaced…by electronic computers . . . Technocrats even envisage the creation of a society from which [workers]…will be completely eliminated . . .”
[Ernest Mandel, 1962]
”News | 07 December 2012
GENEVA (ILO News) –
Wage growth remains far below pre-crisis levels globally and has fallen into the red in developed countries, despite continuing increases in emerging economies, according to an ILO report.
Global monthly wages* grew by 1.2 per cent in 2011, down from 3 per cent in 2007 and 2.1 per cent in 2010, the Global Wage Report 2012/13 says. These numbers are even lower if China is excluded from the calculations.
“This report clearly shows that in many countries, the crisis has had a strong impact on wages – and by extension, workers,” said ILO Director-General Guy Ryder. “But the impact was not uniform.”
http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_193553/lang–en/index.htm
Geneva (ILO News) – Nearly 21 million people are victims of forced labour across the world, trapped in jobs which they were coerced or deceived into and which they cannot leave, according to the ILO’s new global estimate.http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_181961/lang–en/index.htm
GENEVA (ILO News) – The world faces the “urgent challenge” of creating 600 million productive jobs over the next decade in order to generate sustainable growth and maintain social cohesion, according to the annual report on global employment by the International Labour Organization (ILO).
“After three years of continuous crisis conditions in global labour markets and against the prospect of a further deterioration of economic activity, there is a backlog of global unemployment of 200 million,” says the ILO in its annual report titled “Global Employment Trends 2012: Preventing a deeper jobs crisis”. Moreover, the report says more than 400 million new jobs will be needed over the next decade to absorb the estimated 40 million growth of the labour force each year.
The Global Employment Trends Report also said the world faces the additional challenge of creating decent jobs for the estimated 900 million workers living with their families below the US$ 2 a day poverty line, mostly in developing countries.
“Despite strenuous government efforts, the jobs crisis continues unabated, with one in three workers worldwide – or an estimated 1.1 billion people – either unemployed or living in poverty”
http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/media-centre/press-releases/WCMS_171700/lang–en/index.htm
Hey Mike, Does your old yahoo email from back in the good old days (2008) still work for you?
”we find strong evidence that the elimination
of positions is more likely in high-tech industries,
consistent with the notion that job losses (and gains)
are more common in technologically dynamic industries.
However, there is less consistent evidence of a correlation between technology and other forms of
displacement, notably plant closings. Furthermore,
we find no support for the hypothesis that the technology
–displacement relationship disproportionately
affects low-skilled or older workers. These results are
reasonably consistent across the five technology
measures.
http://www.chicagofed.org/digital_assets/publications/economic_perspectives/1999/ep2Q99_2.pdf
”About a billion people worldwide operate in the informal sector. Davis tells us they constitute ‘the fastest-growing . . . social class on earth’. In the neoliberal model they are ‘the heroic self-employed’, operating in a paradise of deregulation where initiative and entrepreneurialism will eventually triumph to the benefit of all. In practice, the growth of the informal sector has not even brought about the satisfaction of rudimentary needs – clean water, medical care, a stab at education – for most people living in the 21st-century slum. ‘Informal survivalism’ is Davis’s expression for the economic regime under which they live. Even though there are sweatshop sectors and other labour-intensive niches in this informal economy, there simply aren’t enough jobs to go around.”
Mike Davis in http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/jeremy-harding/it-migrates-to-them
If any question of documentation, pick up a copy of his book ‘Planet of Slums’. Capital has a ‘little’ problem creating sufficient employment but then that’s been known for some time.
On the other hand, paralegal work is getting clobbered by document scanners and text search technology. This is even hitting legal employment as a lot fewer human eyeballs are needed.
I think a number of other job categories have been hit by information processing, for example, there are fewer garage mechanics doing “tune ups”, fewer bank tellers, fewer supermarket check out people, fewer HR people reading resumes and so on. Even manufacturing is shedding jobs to industrial robots and computer aided product simplification.
Granted, the process is still ongoing. I remember reading an article about a middle class guy back in 1939. He made his living assigning phone numbers given the location of the new land line. You can bet his job no longer exists thanks to AMFM technology.
Denis Drew
oddly enough I think this reply to your funny applies in principle to the other comments as well:
those folks holding up the shovels are standing there waiting for you to get out of their way so they can get back to work.
sounds like we’re heading to a future where all the indentured college graduates spend their lives working off their student debt by emptying the bedpans of us old codgers….