Automation and the Future of the American Workforce
In November of 2019, the first autonomous semi-trailer truck carried a haul of butter from Tulare, California to Quakertown, Pennsylvania. A 2,800-mile drive with 40,000 pounds of butter on board and no human ever even touched the steering wheel (Linder). This is a significant milestone for the trucking industry and the approximately 3.5 million truck drivers employed in the United States (Linder), whose jobs are suddenly at risk. Couple this with the estimated 2 million Americans who drive for ride sharing apps (Berry) and the number of people who could lose their job because of self-driving technology over the next 20 years, starts to look pretty bleak. Those aren’t the only industries facing the approaching doom of automation either. McDonalds has invested heavily in self-service kiosks that they intend to roll out all over the country, threatening the 5.4 million workers who are employed by the fast food industry (BLS) with job loss. Amazon Go recently opened a checker-less grocery store where customers just pick up their groceries and walk out. No hassle, no fuss, no checkers, and no good news for the 4.8 million grocery store workers in the U.S (Bishop). The robots are here, and they want your job. Overall, one Oxford study found that an estimated 47% of all jobs in the U.S. are at risk of being automated (Frey and Osborne). That’s not just grim, its apocalyptic. Job markets have remained fairly resilient through the years and there are those who argue automation should not be a cause for concern. However, any historical comparisons must be looked at skeptically. Decision makers in the United States need to be preparing for a future where there simply are not enough jobs to go around. Technology is advancing at a pace exponentially faster than ever before and with it comes the likelihood that millions of jobs will be rapidly replaced by automation.
There are people who claim that concerns about job loss due to automation are unfounded and that the data paints a different picture. In 1900, the agriculture industry comprised over 40% of the American workforce (Lebergott 4). Today it’s down to 1.3%, a decline precipitated by tremendous strides in technology. Historically, as some jobs decline, others rise to take their place. Today there are emerging job markets across all kinds of industries. Some people believe automation and artificial intelligence will actually spark job growth, not stifle it. Joseph Michael Newhard, assistant professor of economics at East Tennessee State, writes, “there has always been a demand for the services provided by firemen, police, professors, doctors, lumberjacks, sanitation workers, athletes, yoga instructors, app developers, and social media managers…at one time none of these services were provided professionally. Automation made such careers possible (Newhard)”. Some of those functions have existed since ancient times, others are a product of new technology. Few could have imagined giant wind turbines in 1919, when coal was the dominate energy source in America. Back then 700,000 Americans, nearly 2% of the labor force, earned their living mining coal. Today, about 50,000 people work in coal (Lehrer). To put that into perspective, there are now more yoga instructors than coal miners in the U.S. A hundred years ago the idea that there would be airplanes flying faster than the speed of sound, massive wind farms in the ocean and 67,000 Americans making a living teaching people how to stretch would have sounded like science fiction. Just as the jobs people have today were unimaginable to Americans then, the jobs people will have 100 years from now are inconceivable to us today.
Furthermore, while predictions about jobs 100 years from now are impossible to make predictions about jobs eight years from now have already been made. In 2018 the U.S. Bureau of labor statistics (BLS) projected an increase in overall job numbers by 2028; they predicted growth in markets such as, health care, banking, education and technology. One of the most promising industries for growth in the coming years is clean energy. Spurred by increasingly efficient technology, clean energy now employs double the labor force than the fossil fuel industry. Building wind turbines and installing solar panels are tasks that require blue collar workers but the technology that makes them affordable requires automation. There’s a case to be made that this means a world with less pollution, no car accidents, more health care workers, educators, technologist and, in fact, more jobs overall. Technological advances aren’t killing jobs, they’re creating more, and these jobs are better than the ones they’re replacing.
That doesn’t mean there is no cause for concern. BLS projections are just that, projections. There’s no guarantee the number of jobs will increase and even if they do, those jobs might not be very good, especially for those without a college degree. Prior to 1973, the total output of products and goods in the U.S., otherwise known as “net productivity,” increased roughly along the same lines as wages. Meaning, productive companies shared their increased profits with their employees. Since 1973, productivity and wage growth have separated dramatically with the economy seeing a 74.4% increase in productivity and wages increasing by only 9.3% (Bivens and Gould and Mishel). As technology drives this net productivity increase, corporations are not passing these increased profits onto their workers anymore. Technology also has huge implications for Unions. As grocery stores become increasingly automated grocery store unions lose their ability to effectively bargain for increased wages and decent health care. Grocery store unions are only one example; unions and their ability to collectively bargain could become less powerful as jobs become more specialized.
There could end up being more high-end jobs, but those jobs require education. Educations that are increasingly out of reach for young people without means or will require them to go into massive debt. Still, young people will be entering a job market they should be equipped to handle. What happens to the millions of middle aged, blue collar workers who are facing job loss due to automation? In a speech given last December, Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, said about coal miners, "anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can learn to program” (Kelly). The same could be said about anyone who can drive 3,000 miles, but this belies a few things worth noting. Federal job retraining programs have existed for decades, but have been largely underfunded and ineffective (Selingo). Without rethinking these programs, there’s no realistic way they become more effective when dealing with increasing numbers of unemployment. That is not the most problematic part of that statement, though. The idea that people in these industries who are largely uneducated middle-aged men will easily be able to pivot into a job writing code defies common sense. There may be industries they could be retrained for; construction is going to be one of the few industries untouched by automation in the foreseeable future, but even that is a pipe dream. Those jobs are hard on your body and require years to perfect. A 50-year-old trucker who’s making $80,000 a year does not want to be a carpenter’s apprentice making ten dollars an hour to sweep floors and pick up trash on a job site. The reality is that there will be millions of workers with simply no way of replacing the income they’ll lose due to automation. Even if the economy successfully shifts and overall jobs remain steady these Americans will be casualties of their generation, stuck in a kind of job purgatory.
There was a version of this job purgatory once before, and some economists, like Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz’s believes that as people lost their jobs in the agriculture industry due to automation it created a dearth of opportunity for blue collar workers and that unemployment was the root cause of the Great Depression (Stiglitz) not the stock market crash. It wasn’t until the enactment of the jobs programs of the New Deal, that unemployment started to turn around and with it, the economy (BLS). One of the draw backs to a free market economy is that corporations don’t just employ people out of the kindness of their heart. There are times when government intervention is necessary to keep the economy afloat, and it appears, our country is headed into one of those times. The question is not if automation will eliminate millions of jobs, it’s when. Only time will tell how resilient the job market will be as it evolves but there will be hard working Americans who get caught in the undertow. Whether it’s job programs, retraining programs, universal basic income, or some combination of those things, law makers need to have a plan in place for how to deal with the impending crisis. Ignoring it or telling people to learn how to code is not a solution, it’s a copout.
There are some things that can be done proactively to help people and law makers should be considering these measures sooner rather than later. In the most recent Democratic presidential primary, one of the more popular figures was an entrepreneur named Andrew Yang. Yang ran on a single-issue platform, universal basic income (UBI). He called it the, “freedom dividend” and the concept was to give every American, regardless of income, $1000 dollars a month (Ghenis). There are other versions of UBI but Yang’s is a particularly popular one right now. The idea is that the extra money will spur the economy and allow people some freedom. It’s a liberal idea but even some conservatives see it as a way to lessen the burden on safety net programs in the U.S. While UBI could be effective and may someday be necessary, it wouldn’t supplant a displaced worker’s entire salary and it could never replace the satisfaction one feels from gainful employment. Retraining programs, as stated before, have been largely underfunded and ineffective, but there are some ideas out there that could help them become successful. In Minnesota, there’s a non-profit training program named Twin Cities Rise, that focuses on personal empowerment versus training for a specific job. Twin Cities Rise, places people in jobs that are entry level but one of the key components, and the reason it’s been successful in saving the state money (Orenstein), is that students are not considered graduates until they’ve held a job for a year. They help students navigate problems like daycare and car repairs, so they don’t lose their job for things that are sometimes out of one’s control (Orenstein). These types of approaches should be explored by the federal government now. If done well, properly funded retraining programs will provide a useful stop gap while the economy transitions. However, in a world where there aren’t enough jobs retraining can only do so much. Job programs, like the ones in the New Deal, have the best chance of being successful and as citizens we get something out of them. The Works Progress Administration (WPA), which was created as part of the New Deal, made the government the largest employer in the nation and oversaw infrastructure improvements and new construction; such as, building new roads, bridges and the Griffith Observatory among other things. Today some law makers have proposed the Green New Deal, which would incorporate job growth as well as clean energy. These are some of the concepts that need to be explored to help workers inevitably displaced by automation.
Ultimately, the government needs to be proactive in curbing the effects of job loss due to automation. While, there are those who argue automation will free us up for other pursuits, envisioning a utopian world where we’re all artists or musicians or poets and pollution is a thing of the past. There’s a reality where rising unemployment means greater stress on our social safety net programs, more families living in poverty, children who don’t have enough food to eat and higher rates of suicide and violent crime. There will be truly terrifying consequences on our society and while no one knows exactly what the future holds the challenges are clear. Those challenges can only be met by leaders with foresight and a citizenry that holds them accountable. There are considerations that go beyond automation, like outsourcing and globalization that are not in the scope of this paper but will factor into job loss, as well. There are also other things our law makers could do that will ensure a better future for all Americans, like decoupling healthcare from employment and guaranteeing affordable college educations, especially for those pursuing jobs in fields where people are needed. Technology is not going to stop and let us catch our breath, nor should it. Innovation and technological advances are vital to our nation and need to be encouraged. However, the challenges automation presents and the impact it will have on the American workforce cannot be met with cobbled together reactionist policies. Clear progressive policies that focus on guaranteeing every American has the opportunity for gainful employment in a changing job market are needed more than ever before.
Work Cited
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