The End of Jobs...Hurray?

This appeared in the April 2014 edition of the Mensa publication, The Intelligencer.

The End of Jobs…Hurray? 

by Marty Nemko

By now, everyone knows the unemployment rate severely masks the true employment situation. Not only does it not count people who have given up on looking for work, it doesn’t count the underemployed: for example, college-degree holders with jobs that don’t require a degree, or people working part-time/temp when they’d prefer a full-time, secure position.

Ever more jobs are automated. Bank teller jobs have been replaced by ATMs, supermarket cashier jobs by self-checkout, tolltakers by FastTrak. In the face of increased minimum wage and living wage ordinances, robotic fast-food preparers and servers have been developed: custom burger and burrito makers in California, sushi makers in Japan, cookie makers in Poland. The automated barista may replace that failsafe job—Starbucks barista. There’s a robot bookstore clerk and IBM is developing a robot retail clothing clerk.  Many but not all customers will prefer that to the $10 an hour pushy but often incompetent sales clerk. And retail employers will prefer not having to worry about employees taking sick days when not sick, being bad with customers, and/or quitting soon after being trained—turnover in retail is over 100 percent. Bartending jobs are at-risk. I just went to a dance at a venue where the bartender was a machine: stick your credit card in, pick your drink from the screen, and out it comes, just like from a soda vending machine. Leading companies such as Google, FedEx, and Amazon are investing big in driverless vehicles—bye-bye jobs as taxi drivers, truck drivers, bus drivers, even train engineers. Even home-building is at risk. 3D-printers are projected to be able to print homes out of concrete in under a day—bye-bye thousands of construction jobs.
 

And of course, there’s offshoring. While politicians keep urging more Americans to major in a tough science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) field, ever more of those tech jobs are being offshored, notably to India and China, which have a long tradition of valuing science, math, and technology, and populations many times the size of the U.S.’s. Already, there's an oversupply of STEM graduates. Evidence:THIS  and THIS and THIS and THIS.That can only accelerate as ever more work product can be sent over the internet. Ever more companies are figuring, “Why should I pay American wages plus Workers Comp, Disability, Social Security, ObamaCare, paid family leave, Americans with Disabilities Act compliance costs, plus that of ever increasing employee lawsuits, when I can get someone in Asia for a small fraction of the cost? Are American workers really so superior?”

In a TED talk, Dr. Thomas Frey, Google’s top-rated futurist speaker, projects that, by 2030, half of all jobs worldwide, two billion, will be lost. An Oxford University study projects that half of U.S. jobs will be lost just to automation. One could quibble with the percentage but our job security certainly will be at ever greater risk.

Then what will happen?

It’s easy to project a dystopian scenario: mass unemployment leading to mass destitution, armed robberies, and drug abuse to anesthetize the pain. 

But I thought it would be more interesting here to do a thought experiment in which the end of jobs would actually be a net positive for society.

With fewer people earning good incomes, only companies that provide basic products and services will thrive. That will be good for the environment. For example, car manufacturing will shrink and sell only affordable, economical cars. And people will repair and repair their old vehicles rather than buy new. Even if government takes over the airlines, the cost of planes, fuel, maintenance, and personnel will discourage people from flying. Again, good for the environment.

Also, today’s materialistic society tempts people to cut ethical corners to make more money so they can buy more stuff: new car, nicer clothes and jewelry, fancier vacations, live in 3,000 fancy square feet rather than 1,000 serviceable ones. In an economy in which fewer people are working let alone earning big bucks, materialism would be less core to societal values, reducing those pressures to be unethical.

Plus, with people having more time, more people will replace gratification from “stuff” with gratification from learning, creative arts, and in relationships from mentorship to family to involvement in pro-social organizations: from Rotary to SmileTrain to Mensa.

In the meantime
Even if you have a good job, might this column’s look at the future justify reconsidering your priorities? Yes, perhaps do more to secure your employment: upgrade your skills, work a little harder, build relationships with people who can abet your career, consider starting a business. But might replacing a materialistic lifestyle with a more meaningful one be good preparation not only for a scarce-jobs future but for your current life?

Days of Our Work Lives: An unvarnished look at work today: Part I: David's Saga. Episode 3: Heart-to-Heart

Days of Our Work Lives

Part I: David's Saga

Episode 3

Heart to Heart

In the previous episode, David helped decide who'd get laid off in the next round. 

Mike had already been told he was adios. Big Enchilada acts fast--she was trained that bosses, especially female bosses, need to be seen as decisive.

Confident he'd never get laid off, Mike had agreed to his wife's request that she stay home. After all, he was working for a big, solid company and he could program in Python, Ruby, C, Visual Basic, and Hadoop--among the most in-demand languages. And while no one could accuse Mike of being a workaholic or a ninja programmer, he certainly wasn't a lay-about.

Mike's ending up on The List was pretty much bad luck. If only that up-and-comer hadn't tried to show how cost-conscious he was by suggesting that The Company could find plenty programmers with five-star customer ratings on ODesk for 15 bucks an hour, no benefits, no security of employment.

David was no hugger but this was a rare time he actually wanted to hug the person, not as the now-obligatory evidence of being a modern male but because he truly felt for Mike...and maybe to soothe himself. After all, if one comment could put a good employee like Mike on the unemployment line, all it would take is for some coworker to say, "David's snarkiness is hurting morale" and he too would be pounding the pavement. And David couldn't bear to be Mr. Mom and collect unemployment checks.

Suddenly, David felt pressure in his chest. "Probably just the stress of thinking my job might not be so secure." But when the pain shot up into his neck and down his left arm, he knew he was having a heart attack.  "Mike, call 911."

The next episode is HERE.

America the Jobless

To keep clients from giving up, career counselors need to appear optimistic. And to avoid our feeling disingenuous, in reading the tea leaves, we unconsciously tend to overweight the positive.

But I just read the cover story of the March 2010 issue of The Atlantic: "How a New Jobless Era will Transform America." (Thanks to reader Scott Steinbrecher for emailing it to me.) After reviewing a wealth of research, it concludes that, especially for men and for people without a designer-label sheepskin, ever fewer people will be earning a middle class living.

The article's negativity somehow gave me license to, for this article at least, to replace my optimistic bias with a truly honest appraisal of America's job future.

My career counseling clients, especially the men, are having a helluva time landing a decent job. Perhaps I'm a lousy career counselor or my clients are a bunch of losers but I don't believe either. I think the unemployment rate and even the underemployment rate grossly underestimates how difficult it is to land a white-collar job that pays a middle-class wage.

The severity of the problem is made clear from an example cited in that Atlantic article:

Last spring, an organization called JobNob began holding networking happy hours to try to match college graduates with start-up companies looking primarily for unpaid labor. Julie Greenberg, a co-founder of JobNob, says that at the first event, on May 7, she expected perhaps 30 people, but 300 showed up. New graduates didn’t have much of a chance; most of the people there had several years of work experience—quite a lot were 30-somethings—and some had more than one degree. JobNob has since held events for alumni of Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard; all have been well attended (at the Harvard event, Greenberg tried to restrict attendance to 75, but about 100 people managed to get in), and all have been dominated by people with significant work experience.When experienced workers holding prestigious degrees are taking unpaid internships, not much is left (for everyone else.)

And it's not surprising. Unless absolutely necessary, why in the world should an employer pay an American $50,000-$100,000 a year, plus benefits including health care, social security, disability, retirement, worker's comp, 12 weeks unpaid (and some in the Obama Administration want it to be paid leave.) unemployment insurance, fear of wrongful termination suits, etc., etc.? Increasingly, employers are choosing to get work done by automation, part-time/temp workers, and offshoring. The latter is becoming ever more prevalent even for the previously thought-to-be-immune knowledge work, as Asian universities are revamping their curriculum to emphasize creativity, entrepreneurship, etc. And all those Asian workers can be hired for a fraction of the cost of an American.

Too, the uncontrolled inflow of illegal immigrants exerts downward pressure on salaries. The average illegal immigrant has little education and poor English skills and so is willing to do low-level jobs, on which they pay little or no tax. That floods the market of applicants for higher level jobs thus driving their salaries down, and making it harder to land a job at all.

I don't believe there's a solution that won't require decades. In a previous article, I've touted using K-16 schools to create a nation of entrepreneurs, but that would require a generation or two. Until American wages and benefits decline to near the world average, unless you're a star, the main source of well-paying jobs will be self-employment (often risky) and the U.S. government. And those jobs will dwindle as there's less worker income to tax and the government must stop going deeper into debt and printing more money lest China and other lenders deem the U.S. utterly credit-unworthy and/or call in their existing loans to us.

For the foreseeable future, ever more Americans will have to settle for $10-an-hour jobs, living very modestly, paycheck to paycheck, with little or nothing saved for retirement. We'll work 'til we drop...if we're lucky enough to have a job. It's part of the decline and fall of the American empire.

How to Outsource, Offshore to India

Silicon Valley insider and India specialist, Sramana Mitra says you can get your low-level work, such as data entry done in India for $2 an hour, basic programming for $5 an hour, and webmaster-level work for $10 an hour.

And it's easy to find such workers: elance.com, odesk.com, and guru.com.

She does recommend you interview them (Skype video and audio calls are free worldwide) and ask for references. Be sure they can communicate effectively verbally and in writing--You want to be sure they understand what you want done.

Also, try them out on a $50 or $100 project before hiring them for a biggie.

I'd imagine that reading this is scary to Americans who have invested a fortune in college and expect $30-100 an hour, plus benefits, 12 weeks a year of Family and Marriage Leave, rights to sue for wrongful termination, etc.