The Jobs Really Most Threatened by Machines [feedly]

The Jobs Really Most Threatened by Machines
https://prospect.org/article/jobs-really-most-threatened-machines

Cashiering is the third largest occupation in the United States, according to 2019 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and 73 percent of cashiers are women. 

In August, Amazon opened two more of its Amazon Go cashierless stores—one in San Francisco, the other in New York. The high tech convenience stores, which were first introduced in 2018, represent one of Amazon's newest campaigns to alter the brick-and-mortar retail experience. To shop at Amazon Go, customers have to scan in with their Amazon Go app simply to enter; once inside, hundreds of cameras and sensors identify products that customers take off the shelves and put into bags. Their Amazon accounts are then docked accordingly based on the merchandise with which they exit the store (a process Amazon has dubbed "Just Walk Out" technology). No checkout, no cashiers, no waiting in line. 

The company has announced plans to unveil a London location in the near future; in the longer term, they've set their sights on opening 3,000 such grocery and convenience stores by 2021. So far, there are just 15 of these stores in operation.

For a company with such imperial ambitions, spanning sectors from web hosting to freight logistics, 15 stores may not seem a particularly consequential project. But Amazon is not the only company pursuing automated retail. Such grocery giants as Carrefour, Tesco and the Walmart-owned Sam's Club (which rolled out a 32,000 square foot cashierless operation in Dallas in late August), are also setting up cashierless locations. Tech companies like Microsoft, and a smattering of startups, have gotten themselves in the game as well. 

In fact, according to a recent survey by the advisory firm International Data Corp, 28 percent of retailers are currently testing or piloting cashierless systems. According to The Wall Street Journal, the firm found roughly 100 companies worldwide currently engaged in the process of going cashierless.

The looming threat of automation encroaching from all sides has become a dominant theme in the media. Impending automation in factories has become a regular feature of doomsday McKinsey reports, and has been blamed for the closure of the GM plant in Lordstown. It's been a staple of the conversation about driverless cars, which were supposed to imminently replace the fleets of Uber and Lyft. It has threatened to radically reshape the trucking and freight industries. A 2017 Pew study found that 72 percent of Americans are worried about the threats to job security posed by automation.

All of that has fed into the "robot apocalypse" being prognosticated by presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who prophesies a profound mass unemployment to which the only logical response is his $1,000/month universal basic income proposal. "All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society," Yang has told The New York Times.

But Yang mistakes the immediate risk for a more distant one. In fact, few of these threats have actually come to fruition. The timeline for driverless vehicles continues to be extended. GM shifted much of its Lordstown operation to Matamoros, Mexico, not for its robot density, but for a more traditional reason: its exceptionally low wages.

The real epicenter of the automation crisis has been the check-out line. 

While it may not convey the stark visual jolt of a fleet of driverless semis barreling down the highway, the impact of cashierless automation could be huge. According to 2019 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, cashiering is the third largest occupation in the United States, employing 3.6 million workers, just a hair less than all food services and preparation. And these cashier jobs, which tend to be low wage, are disproportionately held by women and people of color. Indeed, 73 percent of cashiers are women. 

With the retail sector already in the midst of major job losses brought on by private equity raidership, as in the case of Sears, and the rise of e-retail, cashier jobs were already under threat. Inroads made by automation are only exacerbating that crisis. "Cashiers are the canary in the coal mine," Marc Perrone, international president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, told me.

The concern isn't just that Amazon Go will become the next big thing. It's also that Amazon, by dint of sheer size, is the trendsetter in the retail sector. Even if the thousands of cashierless stores Amazon has predicted don't materialize, the fact that Amazon has developed the technology—a cocktail of data analysis, image processing, and artificial intelligence—means that it will likely be made available (for a fee, of course)  to other retail stores in the future. "It's a crisis without a clear solution," said Mark Cohen, the director of retail studies at the Columbia School of Business.

There are still plenty of obstacles to implementation. Walmart trotted out a cashierless system based on scanning barcodes for roughly 100 of its stores, but discontinued the program in April 2018. And theft remains a big issue: spend just a few minutes at a self-checkout kiosk at any CVS and that should become clear. For the time being, the high powered data analysis the startup world has to offer has been unable to solve that problem entirely.

Crucially, it's unclear if customers will like cashierless stores. So far, self-checkout has not proven to be much of a crowd pleaser. With mounting concerns over privacy in the tech sector, there may be good reason to be distrustful of the technology. 

There are also consumer access issues when it comes to cashless-only transactions. Some cashierless stores, like the aforementioned Sam's Club in Dallas, don't accept cash at all, while the Amazon Go store requires a smartphone with the Amazon Go app to permit entry. That means that those without phones, credit cards, or formal banking, which is a meaningful percentage of the country's population, won't be able to shop in these stores. That's caused multiple cities, including New York and Philadelphia, to outlaw cashless retail altogether. Amazon has since softened its cashless dictum accordingly.

Even with all those complications, the proliferation of cashierless stores may come down to a simple analysis of cost. If the technology is cheap enough to subsidize the occasional shoplifter, it would be no surprise to see such stores spread. For an economy oriented around retail, the fate of cashiers—not drivers or assembly line workers—could soon become the real destabilizing force at the center of our great automation debate. 

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Krugman: The Frauding of America’s Farmers [feedly]

The Frauding of America's Farmers
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/opinion/trump-trade-farmers.html

Donald Trump is unpopular, but he retains the loyalty of some important groups. Among the most loyal are America's farmers, who are a tiny minority of the population but exert disproportionate political influence because of our electoral system, which gives 3.2 million Iowans as many senators as almost 40 million Californians. According to one recent poll, 71 percent of farmers approve of Trump's performance — which is down somewhat from previous polling, but remains far above the national average.

Yet farmers are hurting financially. Investors are worried about a possible recession for the economy as a whole, but the farm recession is already here, with falling incomes, rising delinquency rates and surging bankruptcies. And the farm economy's troubles stem directly from Trump's policies.

This apparent contradiction — Trump is inflicting the greatest harm on the people who supported him most — isn't an accident. Farmers' past support for Trump was predictable: The demography and culture of (white) rural America make it fertile ground for politicians promising to restore traditional society, and especially traditional racial hierarchy. But farmers' financial distress should also have been predictable: While rural America may dislike and distrust cosmopolitan elites, the U.S. farm economy is hugely dependent on global markets, and it has inevitably been a major victim of the Trumpian trade war.

The questions, looking forward, are whether farmers understood what they were getting themselves into, whether they understand even now that their distress isn't likely to end anytime soon, and whether economic pain will shake their support for the man who's causing it.


At one level, it's not hard to see why farmers supported Trump. Hostility to nonwhite immigrants was central to his campaign, and such hostility tends to be highest in places where there aren't actually many immigrants. So rural America, with its still tiny immigrant population, was a receptive audience for his fear-mongering. More generally, Making America Great Again — which was basically about setting back the clock racially and culturally — was a message that played well in places that still tend to think of themselves (and are told by politicians to think of themselves) as the Real America, as opposed to the big metropolitan areas where most Americans actually live.

On the other hand, while farm country may be notably lacking in ethnic diversity and feels generally distrustful of globalists, the farm economy is in fact deeply integrated with and dependent on world markets. On the eve of Trump's trade war, America exported 76 percent of its cotton production, 55 percent of its sorghum, half its soybeans, and 46 percent of its wheat.

Overall, U.S. agricultural exports are almost 40 percent of the value of farm production, up from just 15 percent circa 1970. Globalization hurt some parts of U.S. manufacturing, with particularly harsh effects on some small industrial cities. But the rise of China and the growth of world trade have been nothing but good news for farmers.

And here's the thing: It shouldn't have been hard to predict that Trumponomics would be bad for farmers. Trump's desire for a trade war was out in the open from the beginning; protectionism is right up there with racism and anti-environmentalism as one of his core values. And a trade war was bound to hurt farm exports. Did anyone really imagine that China, an economic superpower with its own fierce nationalism, wouldn't retaliate against U.S. tariffs?

So what were farmers thinking? My guess is that they let the will to believe override their judgment. Trump seemed like their kind of guy. He certainly seemed to share their dislike for urban elites who, they imagined, looked down on people like them. So they convinced themselves that he knew what he was doing, that he would win his trade war and that they would be among the victors sharing the spoils.



Even now many farmers seem to believe that the pain will end any day now, that Trump will soon announce a deal that restores all the old markets and more.

In short, farmers' support for Trump should be seen as a form of affinity fraud, in which people fall for a con man whom they imagine to be someone like them.

And as is often the case in such frauds, the con man and his associates actually have contempt for their marks.

Recently Sonny Perdue, the agriculture secretary, let the mask slip during a meeting with farmers complaining about their plight. "What do you call two farmers in a basement?" he snarked. "A whine cellar."

Trump's own remarks about trade with Japan were even more telling. According to a White House transcript, Trump complained that while Japan sends us millions of cars, "We send them wheat. Wheat. (Laughter.)" Do farmers realize that their president considers their livelihood a joke?

So what will happen as the trade war drags on? Don't expect farmers to suddenly exclaim en masse, "Hey, we've been had!" Real life doesn't work that way. But they have, in fact, been had, and they may finally be starting to realize it.
 -- via my feedly newsfeed

America’s future of work [feedly]

from McKinsey, a consulting firm, a provocative read on job shifts. Bad news for rural and slow growth areas, mixed for urban centers, where connectivity (human and digital) is much greater.

America's future of work
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/americas-future-of-work

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/the-future-of-work-in-america-people-and-places-today-and-tomorrow  

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Brad DeLong: Grand Narrative: An Intake from Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, 1870-2016 [feedly]

There is much to dispute in Brad DeLong's Grand Narrative, from a socialist perspective, but much with which to concur as well. Its a good scan and refresher of a 20th century economic history.

Grand Narrative: An Intake from Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, 1870-2016
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/08/grand-narrative-an-intake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-twentieth-century-1870-2016.html

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Dean Baker: Severance Pay: Corporate Obligation to Long-Term Workers [feedly]

Severance Pay: Corporate Obligation to Long-Term Workers
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/severance-pay-corporate-obligation-to-long-term-workers

Dean Baker
Austin American-Statesmen, August 30, 2019

See article on original site

In recent months there have been a number of large retail companies that went into bankruptcy, most notably Sears and Toys "R" Us. In these and other cases, the public is naturally concerned about the plight of long-term workers who have often spent decades working for the same company.

We know from much research that many of these workers will never be able to find employment again at comparable wages, especially older workers in their 50s and 60s. In situations where workers are fortunate enough to have unions, they are generally entitled to some amount of severance pay, based on their years of employment. However, with the share of the private sector workforce in unions now under 7.0 percent, most workers can expect nothing if their employer shuts the doors.

U.S. workers are the exception in this area. Every other wealthy country in the world guarantees long-term employees some amount of severance pay if they lose their job. Only Montana guarantees any compensation to workers who are dismissed without cause.

There has been some recent movement to have the United States catch up to the rest of the world in this area. Senator Tammy Baldwin has proposed legislation which would require private equity funds to pay severance to workers they lay off.

This is a good start, but there is no obvious reason to treat workers employed by private equity differently from other workers. It would be reasonable to guarantee all workers severance pay if they are dismissed without cause.

A reasonable scale would be two weeks of pay for each year of service up to a maximum of 40 weeks. This would ensure that long-term workers at least get something when their company makes large-scale layoffs.

But more important than the money being paid to workers is the altered incentive structure for employers. If an employer can lay off a worker after 25 years, and not give them a dime, they won't think twice about dumping a worker that they don't think they need.

That story changes substantially if employers have to provide a long-term employee with 40 weeks of pay. In that situation, employers have a strong incentive to find ways to keep the worker employed. If the reason for the layoff is that they are changing their line of business so that the worker's position is no longer needed, then the severance pay requirement gives the employer an incentive to retrain the worker to fit into the new line of business.

On the job worker training is an area where the United States seriously lags other countries, most notably Germany. While we will not be able to catch up to the best practices in other countries with a single measure, making it more difficult for companies to lay off workers will be a big step in the right direction.

A way to think about the severance pay requirement is that it requires the company to bear a burden that would otherwise fall on the worker and the government. Longer-term employees are likely to experience long periods of unemployment and then see substantial reductions in pay if and when they find a new job. This is a huge burden to them and their family.

In addition, they will likely to be drawing unemployment insurance and other benefits from the government, quite possibly for an extended period of time. Severance pay forces companies to internalize some of these costs.

Just to be clear, a severance pay requirement does not prevent employers from firing workers who are not doing their job, violate workplace rules, or provide other grounds for dismissal. Severance pay only applies to workers who are losing their job only for business reasons, not for cause. There will always be some borderline cases, but that is a small price to pay for giving long-term workers some measure of job security.

There is a new push, at both the state and federal levels, to provide U.S. workers with many of the benefits that workers in other countries have long taken for granted. The list includes paid family leave, paid sick days, and paid vacation. Severance pay should also be on this list. It should not be as easy to discard a worker who put in a quarter-century with the company as it is to take out the garbage.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Hong Kong Protesters Wave U.S. Flags, Urge Trump to Take Action

At least part of this movement has nothing to do with reform, as this is a perfect pretext/invitation for China, previously restrained, to decisively repress this movement. Of course, how often in history is "decisive" DECISIVE??

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-31/hong-kong-protesters-wave-u-s-flags-urge-trump-to-take-action

Bill Dudley on the fed and Trump's manufactured trade wars

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2019-08-27/the-fed-shouldn-t-enable-donald-trump?__twitter_impression=true