 The front page of Sunday’s Los Angeles Times headlined with “Laboring in the shadow of recession,” which is actually a story about freelancing out of necessity in the bleak job market. Individual cases of human struggles to survive economically are told along with the some of the societal changes which contribute.
There are a few statistics but for an economics article, the piece is surprisingly vague. Perhaps the haziness indicates the LA Times has no clue what’s wrong. It mentions “automation and outsourcing” in one sentence to explain business’ lack of hiring but with no further analysis. Immigration and the surplus of unskilled foreign workers are not discussed at all, even though Los Angeles County (which is jammed with non-Americans) has nearly two million discouraged, somewhat employed persons, 17.8 percent.
The story doesn’t discuss California’s oppressive business regulation, but the topic shows up among numerous comments:
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Historically small business hire the most. I owned a small business for over 30 years. I sold it 3 years ago and I’m now happily retired. My company had around 50 employees; sometimes more, sometimes less. It was primarily a blue collar type operation. Dealing with employees is never easy. For a small company without a sophisticated HR department it has become incredibly difficult and stressful.
New regulations are constantly piled on. The lawyers are always coming up with news ways of blackmailing you and making your life miserable. A few years ago it was ADA suits. The latest is time issues; breaks, OT, etc.
The worst thing to deal with is probably workers’ compensation issues. A claim may start out with a legitimate injury. Once the doctors, clinics and lawyers get involved, a minor injury can easily balloon to over a $100,000 claim. Soon your workers’ comp insurance becomes unaffordable.
My company always paid 100% of our employees medical insurance. If an employee goes to the doctor or visits emergency, the first question they are asked is often if the reason for the visit is work related. Language issues may mistakenly cause a non-work related problem become one. Once it is classified work related, it is difficult to undo. Before the company becomes aware of the “injury”, thousands of dollars may have been spent on tests, etc. One or two if such erroneous claims in a year will cause your insurance to skyrocket.
My point is why have employees if you can use contractors or off the books help?
Or illegal aliens.
California once again seems to be the periscope to the dysfunctional future. Nobody in the political class knows or cares that automation and robotics are quietly taking jobs that were earlier performed by humans. From milking cows to turning speech into text, the need of business for humans is shrinking.
The graph below comes from a July CIS report Immigrant Gains and Native Losses In the Job Market, 2000 to 2013. The paucity of jobs created over 13 years is particularly noteworthy, while population growth is moving ever upward.
Certainly, over-regulation, growing use of smart machines and a huge surplus of alien or immigrant workers have combined to create a terrible job climate for American workers in California. Near the end, the piece quotes an estimate that by the end of the decade, half the American workforce could be freelance. They might be the lucky ones in the increasingly post-human economy.
Freelance workers a growing segment of California economy, Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2014
A short gig doing security for the True Blood television show. A stint driving for a rental car company. A week as a customer service representative at a retail store.
This is how Delvontaie Antwine, 34, makes do in California’s economic recovery — earning a few scattered paychecks a month from odd temp jobs while living with relatives in Silver Lake.
Each week, he goes to a career center, where recently he was looking into positions transporting patients for Kaiser Permanente.
“I just need something consistent; otherwise, I’m like a puppy chasing its tail,” he said. “I’m at the bottom of the totem pole right now.”
It’s a purgatory sometimes called the gray economy. Although the official state unemployment rate dropped to 7.4% in June, 16.2% of Californians — or about 6.2 million — were either jobless, too discouraged to seek work, working less than they’d like or in off-the-books jobs.
That’s the highest rate in the country, tied with Nevada. The rate is higher, at 17.8%, in Los Angeles County, where nearly 2 million people aren’t fully employed.
It’s hard to track the growth of the gray economy because so many employers hide workers for tax purposes. Experts generally agree, however, that the ranks of the underemployed swelled during the recession — more than in past downturns — and have remained substantial in an unsteady recovery.
“This segment of the labor market is a barometer for the economy as a whole,” said Nik Theodore, an urban planning professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “As employment insecurity spreads across the economy, more and more workers are being forced to turn to the street, to odd jobs, to becoming on-call workers. The question is whether this is a cyclical change, a blip or a signal of something much more fundamental.” Continue reading this article
The image of illegal aliens in agriculture persists, since they occupy 53 percent of farm labor, but in the near future we may be seeing fewer of them.
The reason: robots and automation are replacing human workers on the farm just as surely as on the factory floor. A few years back, simple automatic harvesters and weeders began to appear in the fields.
Now the technical advances are startling: robots can see a vegetable ready to be harvested and pick it automatically with no human required.
Below, a robotic “hand” picks a pepper.
Keep in mind that a 2013 Oxford University study found that 45 percent of US jobs are vulnerable to computerization in the next 20 years.
So the next time you hear someone like Paul Ryan say there will be future labor shortages because of Boomers leaving the workforce, tell him that technology will more than cover the jobs being left open by retirement.
America certainly doesn’t need to double legal immigration, as planned in the Senate Gang of Eight bill, particularly with unskilled peasants from Mexico and points south who will only be additions to the permanent welfare-using underclass.
Given the shrinking need for workers generally because of technology, the correct number of immigrants is ZERO.
Robots Able to Pick Peppers, Test Soil, and Prune Plants Aim to Replace Farm Workers, SingularityHub.com, July 14, 2014
At the turn of the last century, nearly half of the American workforce was dedicated to agriculture. Industrial inventions like the steel plow had made farming easier, but it was still grueling labor performed by men, women, and work animals.
The invention of the combustion engine changed all that. The mechanization of farm labor drove massive productivity gains, and today, agricultural workers make up just over 2% of the workforce.
Now, another revolution is underway—the outright automation of farming. Farm robots are increasingly capable of autonomously performing complex tasks including plowing, plant and soil surveillance, and even the harvesting of fruit and vegetables.
Thanks to a combination of cheap sensors and computer vision, machines are capable of more freely navigating and performing other complex tasks. The tech uses a combination of infrared sensors and stereoscopic cameras to drive autonomous telepresence robots in hospitals and allow advanced industrial bots to recognize, differentiate, and pick irregular shapes like haphazardly stacked boxes. (Computer vision is also behind Google’s Project Tango 3D-seeing smartphone and tablet.)
Clearly, these skills are also useful on the farm where many jobs have historically been beyond the average robot. Picking an apple, for example, requires visually examining an object that varies in shape and may be hidden in a chaotic canopy of leaves. Is it ripe? Workers must check for color and size. Continue reading this article
Things are changing down on the farm. Smart machines in the form of milkbots are lightening the load a bit for dairy farmers, removing the pressure of needing to have someone in the barn every twelve hours 365 days a year. After a little training, the cows walk into the milking contraption whenever they feel like it and voila — automatic milk.
The technology is a particular plus because it relieves farmers of depending on illegal alien workers. For that reason, this application of robotics is welcome, unlike many others.
The farmers in today’s story are happy because the milkbots allow them more interaction with their animals beyond milking and help create a less regimented lifestyle vis-a-vis time.
With Farm Robotics, the Cows Decide When It’s Milking Time, New York Times, April 22, 2014
EASTON, N.Y. — Something strange is happening at farms in upstate New York. The cows are milking themselves.
Desperate for reliable labor and buoyed by soaring prices, dairy operations across the state are charging into a brave new world of udder care: robotic milkers, which feed and milk cow after cow without the help of a single farmhand.
Scores of the machines have popped up across New York’s dairy belt and in other states in recent years, changing age-old patterns of daily farm life and reinvigorating the allure of agriculture for a younger, tech-savvy — and manure-averse — generation.
“We’re used to computers and stuff, and it’s more in line with that,” said Mike Borden, 29, a seventh-generation dairyman, whose farm upgraded to robots, as others did, when disco-era milking parlors — the big, mechanized turntables that farmers use to milk many cows at once — started showing their age.
“And,” Mr. Borden added, “it’s a lot more fun than doing manual labor.”
The view is improved as well. “Most milking parlors, you see, you really only see the back end of the cow,” Mr. Borden’s father, Tom, said. “I don’t see that as building up much of a relationship.”
The cows seem to like it, too.
Robots allow the cows to set their own hours, lining up for automated milking five or six times a day — turning the predawn and late-afternoon sessions around which dairy farmers long built their lives into a thing of the past. Continue reading this article
If the powerful of business and politics have their way, America will be burdened with a historical high percentage of immigrants.
As shown by Census figures for 2010, the United States is already headed for a record proportion of foreign-born, even without the monstrous Senate bill which doubles legal immigration and hands out millions of work permits like candy.
Forty million immigrants is clearly excessive. (Or is the number 45 million, as asserted in the article following?) Washington’s crazed open-borders policy is not what Americans want or need.
A rare honest survey on the subject shows a strong preference for sharply less immigration: Americans want legal immigration cut in half: poll, Feb 21.
Plus, America is plain full up. As the late nature photographer Ansel Adams said, “When the theater’s full, they don’t sell lap-space.”
In California, now in a historic drought, there is not enough water for those already here, as shown by growing calls for mandatory restriction. While agriculture uses the majority of water, when there is a shortage, the citizens are called upon to cut back. Millions of additional water users would not be a good idea in California, population 38 million.
Business likes to complain that retiring boomers are leaving a worker shortage. However employers aren’t telling the whole truth about the future employment landscape: as robotics and automation perform increasingly complex tasks, humans are being phased out of many jobs. (See my article, Three Stakes in the Heart of the American Dream.)
A 2013 report from Oxford University estimated that 45 percent of American jobs will be automated within the next 20 years.
The roboticized future workplace will not require tens of millions of immigrant workers. We don’t need them.
A ‘Second Great Wave’ of immigration?, The Hill, March 2, 2014
If Congress passes immigration reform legislation this year, it will dramatically add to what the Census Bureau is calling the “Second Great Wave” of immigration in U.S. history.
Opponents of the legislation have seized on the Census Bureau’s analysis of migration patterns to warn of an explosion of foreign-born population over the next few decades.
“Once again, the country is approaching a percentage of foreign-born not seen since the late 1800s and early 1900s,” the Census Bureau wrote on its blog this week. “Will this proportion continue to increase, perhaps exceeding the high of nearly 15 percent achieved in both 1890 and 1910?”
The agency estimates that 40 million people living in the United States in 2010 were born elsewhere, approximately 12.9 percent of the population. That is the highest population of immigrants, percentage-wise, since the 1920s, according to the Census Bureau.
Opponents of granting citizenship to 11 million illegal immigrants and expanding legal immigration flows have pounced on the study.
“After 40 years of large-scale immigration, rising joblessness, failing schools and a growing welfare state, would not the sensible, conservative thing to do be to slow down for a bit, allow wages to rise, assimilation to occur, and to help those struggling here today?” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said Thursday, when he delivered the keynote address to commemorate the Tea Party Patriots’ fifth anniversary.
An aide to Sessions estimated the number of foreign-born people living in the United States has now reached 45 million.
Sessions’s office estimates that number could swell by at least 30 million over the next decade if Congress passes the Senate immigration bill.
The legislation would expedite permanent legal status for an estimated 5 million people waiting for green cards and increase the number of green cards issued each year from 1 million to 1.5 million. Continue reading this article
When the brilliant futurist, biochemistry professor and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov visited the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City, he was inspired by the array of new technology to prognosticate about how American society would look five decades hence.
The Business Insider recently had a fascinating analysis of the many things he forecast accurately: In 1964, The Brilliant Isaac Asimov Wrote Some Predictions For 2014 — Wait Until You See How Right He Was.
Below, the interior of Google’s self-driving car, now under development. In 1964, Asimov predicted “roboticized cars” for our time.
He was concerned about automation’s effect on society, with one problem being that of widespread boredom: “The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction.”
In 2014, we are beginning to see the effects of automation and robots on jobs of all sorts. Schools don’t train many machine tenders per se; instead numerous human jobs are quietly disappearing due to smart machines.
Asimov saw explosive population growth as dangerous to social order, as shown by his observation (not from the NYTimes article): “Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive [overpopulation]. Convenience and decency cannot survive [overpopulation]. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears.”
The US Census has a live counter for American and world population. The snap below is from January 5, 2014:
Below, I’ve excerpted the section about population, although the rest of the piece is fascinating as well:
Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014, New York Times, By ISAAC ASIMOV, August 16, 1964
[. . .] As I stood in line waiting to get into the General Electric exhibit at the 1964 fair, I found myself staring at Equitable Life’s grim sign blinking out the population of the United States, with the number (over 191,000,000) increasing by 1 every 11 seconds. During the interval which I spent inside the G.E. pavilion, the American population had increased by nearly 300 and the world’s population by 6,000.
In 2014, there is every likelihood that the world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. Boston-to-Washington, the most crowded area of its size on the earth, will have become a single city with a population of over 40,000,000. Continue reading this article
Powerful business elites insist they need a massive immigration amnesty and vastly increased legal immigration because boomers are aging out of the workforce, so America needs to import tens of millions as replacement models.
However, the labor market has been gradually changing with increased efficiency in many occupations, from office work to agriculture, and much of that evolution stems from advances in technology and robotized machinery. Humans are becoming less necessary in many areas of employment because of robot replacement.
There is some good news here — fewer illiterate Mexicans are needed to tend fields of growing food because robots can do the strenuous ag work more cheaply.
Below, a computerized robot weeds a lettuce field in California.
The harvester shown below from a few years ago was advertised as replacing 35 laborers.
Robots to revolutionize farming, ease labor woes, Associated Press, July 13, 2013
SALINAS, Calif. (AP) — On a windy morning in California’s Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds.
The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can “thin” a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand.
The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization — fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because they’re sensitive to bruising.
Researchers are now designing robots for these most delicate crops by integrating advanced sensors, powerful computing, electronics, computer vision, robotic hardware and algorithms, as well as networking and high precision GPS localization technologies. Most ag robots won’t be commercially available for at least a few years.
In this region known as America’s Salad Bowl, where for a century fruits and vegetables have been planted, thinned and harvested by an army of migrant workers, the machines could prove revolutionary.
Farmers say farm robots could provide relief from recent labor shortages, lessen the unknowns of immigration reform, even reduce costs, increase quality and yield a more consistent product. Continue reading this article
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