7 ms·

The coming labour scarcity will shift the balance of power, pushing up wages

30 points by andrebalza1 11y ago

SixSigma 11y ago
And the home secretary is going to say today that immigration is bad for the economy ! In my sector, Supply Chain Management, we are facing a skills shortage. * Warehouse operatives are moving from many low skilled pickers to a few skilled robot sitters and the latter are in short supply. * Procurement - moving from the soft skills of buying person to person over the phone to electronic exchange and online bidding - again a skills shortage is looming for the non-managerial staff. * Driving - HGV is facing a short supply as the retiring workfoce is not being replaced by young people and more demand for last mile drivers for the shift to single package delivery. * Supply chain managers - a relatively new title and one that few young people consider. The Novus Trust in the UK is promoting the career path in a hope to encourage new entrants.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  Ah the old story Industry doesn't want to pay for training
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    Industry is willing to pay but individual companies are not, especially in the days of "job for 5 years". For instance The NOVUS Trust [1] is a Supply Chain / Logistics undergraduate scheme that guarantees a job for those graduating with a 2:1 or over that is sponsored by industry members. [1] http://www.novus.uk.com/ http://www.novus.uk.com/
    - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
      I don't see industry calling for the introduction of training Levys or to stop uskilled Mc Jobs being promoted as apprenticeships to avoid paying the minimum wage.
      - SixSigma 11y ago
        "Industry" is quite a wide generalisation.
- gregjwild 11y ago
  Interestingly, there is pressure on both sides there - greater automation means that new skills are needed for the few jobs left, but the fact you're talking about training a handful, rather than training at scale makes for more expensive training per head.
  - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    Well Amazon still has a large number of bodies I live near the UK's big warehouse and overheard some interesting gossip about that. Basically the rumor is that Amazon might have similar problems to Ford did in the UK where Junior supervisors are playing favorites
- VLM 11y ago
  One observation is they're just not paying enough. Oddly enough, if you're willing to drop $150K there is no shortage of software developers worldwide. People can dehydrate themselves crying in their beer over there being no truck drivers at $20K/yr, but once they offer more than $30K/yr, people will start to line up. For the last couple generations this has been a dog whistle for immigration or H1B style indentured slavery; "We can't find anyone (for $7.25/hr) so we'll have to import". Another observation is some of your jobs are extremely temporary, like becoming a cable TV installation technician, once the metropolis is wired up in the mid 80s, 99.999% of them are permanently unemployed. So you're going to have to offer fat stacks of cash to drive a truck until permanently replaced by an automated truck in a couple years or have this years flavor of the month of robot certified system engineer cert holders or whatever, because in five or ten years they'll be permanently unemployable or at absolute best case be unemployed and retraining. You can't expect to pay people a low career level wage for an extremely short term job. A final observation is for real long term careers you've listed, when business people say there's a skill shortage, they rarely mean a shortage of people with skills, because the skills are often pretty widespread and trivial, but a shortage of business people and HR personnel who can CYA on hiring decisions via authority like diplomas and govt licenses, or an established hierarchy like "top 100 biz/med/legal school lists". None of those skills listed are weird or rare in your average human population; you're not asking for research grade theoretical physicists; every house that has a roll of toilet paper in the toilet paper holder has some human who at least vaguely understood logistics; you only need to hire the top 0.001% of that enormous proven skilled population. Its just if you make a mistake in the hiring process you can't act all blameless because he had a MBA from Harvard so I'm not responsible for hiring the wrong guy, or he had a license from the state bureau claiming he was qualified, or he held journeyman papers. Or in summary, its a management CYA behavior problem not a real workforce skill problem.
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    You can't just up wage offers and see results. HGV driving already pays good wages here - upwards of $750 p/w and it costs something like $1500 to get qualified. Even if you only work for a year, you will recoup your investment so I don't think it can possibly be people thinking that "I'm not going to be an HGV driver because robots will take my job, I shall stay here in McDonald's on minimum wage" So it can't be a purely wage issue that keeps millions of people in low pay / unemployment and not behind an HGV steering wheel.
SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
A newspaper which is pro the right-of-center government, pro big business says that there is no need to reign in big business; because despite their winning streak over the last few decades and the mounting criticism of mounting inequality, things are going to turn against them any day now, honest! Film at 11.
- RobertoG 11y ago
  I think the important message is more general: "don't worry because markets equilibrium will solve all the problems. Don't look too hard to the last 30 years, it was not a policy problem, it was just a demographic anomaly. Our theories are good and worked perfectly." What surprise me is that they use the capital vs. workers narrative.
  - gregjwild 11y ago
    The right wing press just loves to fain Marx when it suits their own narrative. That said, I often wish the mainstream left would diversify their own font of knowledge. Especially given most don't read him.
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      The left don't read Marx because Das Kapital is one of the slowest most boring reads I've ever encountered... On the other hand the basic concept of labour and capital as market objects with values controlled by supply and demand makes a lot of sense.
  - dandare 11y ago
    Politics aside, unless you challenge the data it was an demographic anomaly. Do you think it had no effect on the markets?
- gadders 11y ago
  The mounting criticism of mounting inequality is a political position. It's not an objective statement of fact. They are free to ignore it if they disagree with it.
mschuster91 11y ago
This might be true for high-skilled jobs, yes. But the vast armies of uneducated, second-or-third-generation-jobless people will have their jobs slaughtered by automation. Truck/cab/freight delivery will be automated, freight handling and shipping will be automated, cleaning of public and private areas will be automated. The only field I can see which will depend on low-skilled worker armies is construction. And with the refugee crisis we just magnify the problem because the refugees will have to be integrated, they have to learn German and still lots of them will be lower educated than the rest :/
- SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
  > The only field I can see which will depend on low-skilled worker armies is construction. I don't think that the construction industry will be immune to automation. Google up "house build robot" or "construction robotics" to see what's already being done.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  Truck drivers are in short supply. There is also a trend in mainand Europe to schedule more freight into the hinterland from ports on trains and waterways - so called Synchromodal Transport [1] The new APM automated continer port in Rotterdam [2] is set to handle 4m containers per year using automated vehicles and cranes - with few operators on the dockside (just for the two train cranes and one barge crane) - the other 8 cranes are operated by remote control. [1] http://www.dinalog.nl/en/themes/synchromodal_transport/ http://www.dinalog.nl/en/themes/synchromodal_transport/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHVF6xEjArA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHVF6xEjArA
  - iofj 11y ago
    Luckily they're on it : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3258829/Driverless-truck-tested-German-autobahn-time-using-radar-cameras-stop-crashing-motorists.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3258829/Driverless-t... Everybody's missing the really bad thing about these trucks and self-driving cars though. Everything is patent encumbered. So they will transform a bottom up industry (dependant on people to drive the trucks, trucks which can be produced by any of a 1000 companies) into a top-down patent-encumbered capital-intensive industry (because only one company will get self-driving cars thanks to our patent system). There will be one company driving these trucks, not many like today. This will destroy truck drivers, yes, absolutely. However something it will also do is sink every KMO that has trucks driving, which is a a lot of them here in Germany. So give it another 10 years and "oh no hell no to self driving trucks/cars" will be one of the few things socialists and capitalists/liberalists agree on, because it will destroy the constituency of both parties. I also seriously doubt they can reliably deliver cargo in the central streets of Germany's cities. The ones built in the 14th century which are about wide enough for a single horse carriage (very tight for a car, and truck drivers actually manage to squeeze in (you -often- have to forgive some damage of course))
kartan 11y ago
When the article talks about Piketty it says that he makes "sweeping neo-Marxist claims". While at the same time tries to justify Professor Goodhart bold statements telling us that he uses "large assumptions". Awful article that shows from beginning to end its bias with a wishful thinking justification of letting big-business reign over the rest of society.
lmm 11y ago
So what are Japan's special circumstances? The theory makes sense, but when our one real-world example shows the exact opposite, I'm inclined to be skeptical.
- dandare 11y ago
  Japan does not exist in a vacuum.
mindcrash 11y ago
As if the labour scarcity will not be dealt with using completely new working class as a replacement. http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply is a real eye opener.
redwood 11y ago
With hardly a mention of automation. ..
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  Automation (at the moment) requires a skilled workforce to e.g. build or program the automated system.
  - redwood 11y ago
    Orders of magnitude fewer workers though...
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      But far higher paid. And therefore the few good industrial jobs building and running the automated systems should be able to support a large number of service jobs in the wider economy.
      - redwood 11y ago
        Except not if the service jobs are all being automated.

30 points by andrebalza1 11y ago

And the home secretary is going to say today that immigration is bad for the economy ! In my sector, Supply Chain Management, we are facing a skills shortage. * Warehouse operatives are moving from many low skilled pickers to a few skilled robot sitters and the latter are in short supply. * Procurement - moving from the soft skills of buying person to person over the phone to electronic exchange and online bidding - again a skills shortage is looming for the non-managerial staff. * Driving - HGV is facing a short supply as the retiring workfoce is not being replaced by young people and more demand for last mile drivers for the shift to single package delivery. * Supply chain managers - a relatively new title and one that few young people consider. The Novus Trust in the UK is promoting the career path in a hope to encourage new entrants.

spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
Ah the old story Industry doesn't want to pay for training
- SixSigma 11y ago
  Industry is willing to pay but individual companies are not, especially in the days of "job for 5 years". For instance The NOVUS Trust [1] is a Supply Chain / Logistics undergraduate scheme that guarantees a job for those graduating with a 2:1 or over that is sponsored by industry members. [1] http://www.novus.uk.com/ http://www.novus.uk.com/
  - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    I don't see industry calling for the introduction of training Levys or to stop uskilled Mc Jobs being promoted as apprenticeships to avoid paying the minimum wage.
    - SixSigma 11y ago
      "Industry" is quite a wide generalisation.
gregjwild 11y ago
Interestingly, there is pressure on both sides there - greater automation means that new skills are needed for the few jobs left, but the fact you're talking about training a handful, rather than training at scale makes for more expensive training per head.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  Well Amazon still has a large number of bodies I live near the UK's big warehouse and overheard some interesting gossip about that. Basically the rumor is that Amazon might have similar problems to Ford did in the UK where Junior supervisors are playing favorites
VLM 11y ago
One observation is they're just not paying enough. Oddly enough, if you're willing to drop $150K there is no shortage of software developers worldwide. People can dehydrate themselves crying in their beer over there being no truck drivers at $20K/yr, but once they offer more than $30K/yr, people will start to line up. For the last couple generations this has been a dog whistle for immigration or H1B style indentured slavery; "We can't find anyone (for $7.25/hr) so we'll have to import". Another observation is some of your jobs are extremely temporary, like becoming a cable TV installation technician, once the metropolis is wired up in the mid 80s, 99.999% of them are permanently unemployed. So you're going to have to offer fat stacks of cash to drive a truck until permanently replaced by an automated truck in a couple years or have this years flavor of the month of robot certified system engineer cert holders or whatever, because in five or ten years they'll be permanently unemployable or at absolute best case be unemployed and retraining. You can't expect to pay people a low career level wage for an extremely short term job. A final observation is for real long term careers you've listed, when business people say there's a skill shortage, they rarely mean a shortage of people with skills, because the skills are often pretty widespread and trivial, but a shortage of business people and HR personnel who can CYA on hiring decisions via authority like diplomas and govt licenses, or an established hierarchy like "top 100 biz/med/legal school lists". None of those skills listed are weird or rare in your average human population; you're not asking for research grade theoretical physicists; every house that has a roll of toilet paper in the toilet paper holder has some human who at least vaguely understood logistics; you only need to hire the top 0.001% of that enormous proven skilled population. Its just if you make a mistake in the hiring process you can't act all blameless because he had a MBA from Harvard so I'm not responsible for hiring the wrong guy, or he had a license from the state bureau claiming he was qualified, or he held journeyman papers. Or in summary, its a management CYA behavior problem not a real workforce skill problem.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  You can't just up wage offers and see results. HGV driving already pays good wages here - upwards of $750 p/w and it costs something like $1500 to get qualified. Even if you only work for a year, you will recoup your investment so I don't think it can possibly be people thinking that "I'm not going to be an HGV driver because robots will take my job, I shall stay here in McDonald's on minimum wage" So it can't be a purely wage issue that keeps millions of people in low pay / unemployment and not behind an HGV steering wheel.

SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago

A newspaper which is pro the right-of-center government, pro big business says that there is no need to reign in big business; because despite their winning streak over the last few decades and the mounting criticism of mounting inequality, things are going to turn against them any day now, honest! Film at 11.

RobertoG 11y ago
I think the important message is more general: "don't worry because markets equilibrium will solve all the problems. Don't look too hard to the last 30 years, it was not a policy problem, it was just a demographic anomaly. Our theories are good and worked perfectly." What surprise me is that they use the capital vs. workers narrative.
- gregjwild 11y ago
  The right wing press just loves to fain Marx when it suits their own narrative. That said, I often wish the mainstream left would diversify their own font of knowledge. Especially given most don't read him.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    The left don't read Marx because Das Kapital is one of the slowest most boring reads I've ever encountered... On the other hand the basic concept of labour and capital as market objects with values controlled by supply and demand makes a lot of sense.
- dandare 11y ago
  Politics aside, unless you challenge the data it was an demographic anomaly. Do you think it had no effect on the markets?
gadders 11y ago
The mounting criticism of mounting inequality is a political position. It's not an objective statement of fact. They are free to ignore it if they disagree with it.

mschuster91 11y ago

This might be true for high-skilled jobs, yes. But the vast armies of uneducated, second-or-third-generation-jobless people will have their jobs slaughtered by automation. Truck/cab/freight delivery will be automated, freight handling and shipping will be automated, cleaning of public and private areas will be automated. The only field I can see which will depend on low-skilled worker armies is construction. And with the refugee crisis we just magnify the problem because the refugees will have to be integrated, they have to learn German and still lots of them will be lower educated than the rest :/

SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
> The only field I can see which will depend on low-skilled worker armies is construction. I don't think that the construction industry will be immune to automation. Google up "house build robot" or "construction robotics" to see what's already being done.
SixSigma 11y ago
Truck drivers are in short supply. There is also a trend in mainand Europe to schedule more freight into the hinterland from ports on trains and waterways - so called Synchromodal Transport [1] The new APM automated continer port in Rotterdam [2] is set to handle 4m containers per year using automated vehicles and cranes - with few operators on the dockside (just for the two train cranes and one barge crane) - the other 8 cranes are operated by remote control. [1] http://www.dinalog.nl/en/themes/synchromodal_transport/ http://www.dinalog.nl/en/themes/synchromodal_transport/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHVF6xEjArA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHVF6xEjArA
- iofj 11y ago
  Luckily they're on it : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3258829/Driverless-truck-tested-German-autobahn-time-using-radar-cameras-stop-crashing-motorists.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3258829/Driverless-t... Everybody's missing the really bad thing about these trucks and self-driving cars though. Everything is patent encumbered. So they will transform a bottom up industry (dependant on people to drive the trucks, trucks which can be produced by any of a 1000 companies) into a top-down patent-encumbered capital-intensive industry (because only one company will get self-driving cars thanks to our patent system). There will be one company driving these trucks, not many like today. This will destroy truck drivers, yes, absolutely. However something it will also do is sink every KMO that has trucks driving, which is a a lot of them here in Germany. So give it another 10 years and "oh no hell no to self driving trucks/cars" will be one of the few things socialists and capitalists/liberalists agree on, because it will destroy the constituency of both parties. I also seriously doubt they can reliably deliver cargo in the central streets of Germany's cities. The ones built in the 14th century which are about wide enough for a single horse carriage (very tight for a car, and truck drivers actually manage to squeeze in (you -often- have to forgive some damage of course))

kartan 11y ago

When the article talks about Piketty it says that he makes "sweeping neo-Marxist claims". While at the same time tries to justify Professor Goodhart bold statements telling us that he uses "large assumptions". Awful article that shows from beginning to end its bias with a wishful thinking justification of letting big-business reign over the rest of society.

lmm 11y ago

So what are Japan's special circumstances? The theory makes sense, but when our one real-world example shows the exact opposite, I'm inclined to be skeptical.

dandare 11y ago
Japan does not exist in a vacuum.

mindcrash 11y ago

As if the labour scarcity will not be dealt with using completely new working class as a replacement. http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply is a real eye opener.

redwood 11y ago

With hardly a mention of automation. ..

JupiterMoon 11y ago
Automation (at the moment) requires a skilled workforce to e.g. build or program the automated system.
- redwood 11y ago
  Orders of magnitude fewer workers though...
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    But far higher paid. And therefore the few good industrial jobs building and running the automated systems should be able to support a large number of service jobs in the wider economy.
    - redwood 11y ago
      Except not if the service jobs are all being automated.