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It's the scale, not the pace so much. We have a terrible history of giving the opportunity to switch careers. I suggest you look into the history of former min

It's the scale, not the pace so much. We have a terrible history of giving the opportunity to switch careers. I suggest you look into the history of former mining or steel towns in the US and UK. The majority of "regeneration" has been from younger people coming into the market rather than former workers being given opportunity. A significant proportion spend their lives depressed, broken and unemployed for the rest of it. Some of those communities never recovered. If government gave retraining - by which I mean REAL retraining rather than a cheap (lowest private sector bidder running it, minimal quality requirements) course to draft a CV and perhaps import some low job security call centre work. It wasn't "a problem" in the past as the scale meant that it was possible to ignore - unless you happened to live near one of those former industrial towns. This time the scale is such that ignoring it will potentially take us near anarchy. It will have to get very close for governments to do something actually substantive.

monk_e_boy 10y ago
I'm retraining at the moment. I've taken out huge loans and as a family we have decided that we'll just have to be super poor for the next few years while I'm training. It's a huge investment, and super scary when you are not guaranteed a job at the end of it. I totally understand why people put it off and hope that a job comes up that they are currently qualified for.
- eabraham 10y ago
  I'm very curious about your experience. What career are you leaving/retraining for?
  - monk_e_boy 10y ago
    Was programmer (PHP, Drupal, Python, Linux stack, Web. MySQL, Oracle etc) Training to be an IT/CompSci teacher - 11 to 16 year olds.
    - megablast 10y ago
      You can no longer get a job as a programmer?
      - monk_e_boy 10y ago
        I've been doing it for 20 years, there is no progression for coders in my local area. I started on about 22K and progressed to 30K over many jobs. There is no way into management or team leader as most companies are too small. For the last few years the coding has been eroded by automation. Yep. Automation. Most of our clients want websites to sell some stuff. This no longer needs a team of 10, now you need an Amazon account, Facebook and Twitter, eBay, Etsy... or Drupal and other shopping templates make it too easy for designers to cobble something together that is 'good enough' that a team of coders can't compete on price. In the good old days we were bashing out 30K websites and running them for our clients. These days no one spends that much on a website. We have a few companies left, SEO (lots of interesting coding there) Cloud computing (Perl and Python) Games (cut scenes, testing etc) not enough to support many coders. And again, you can get a job, but no pension, no perks, minimum holiday, no job stability (each time we lost a contract half the team would be laid off) and for me, no progression. I'd like to think in 10 years time I would be running a team of coders. No chance in my local area.
vacri 10y ago
Miners learn 'on the job' for the most part. Obviously the engineers don't, but miners don't go to 'miner college' for a few years to get their certification. So I'm not sure what you mean by 'REAL retraining' - what would suit a demographic that largely isn't interested in tertiary education? What would you train them in, anyway? There aren't many skilled industries that are looking for that many fresh folks. There's plenty of crappy labour jobs to be filled in places like agriculture, though even these are fading, and only certain places like fruit picking are hard to automate. What kind of jobs do you see this demographic doing?
- intrasight 10y ago
  Not at all true. There are LOTS of jobs in the service economy in most any region. Robots won't be building or maintaining the physical plant any time soon. We need carpenters, electricians, plumbers, HVAC, gardeners - the list goes on. The market will do it's thing to match this supply and demand. The successful retraining programs that I've witnessed just use small carrots and sticks to facilitate this transition.
sedachv 10y ago
> If government gave retraining - by which I mean REAL retraining rather than a cheap (lowest private sector bidder running it, minimal quality requirements) course to draft a CV and perhaps import some low job security call centre work. Real retraining would be free, universal access to vocational schools and higher education. You are very correct in pointing out the shortfalls of current US retraining programs. Most of thoes came about during the Reagan administration and I think they are first of all a Republican trick to distract people from the need for free universally accessible vocational and higher education, and second of all a privatization scam to benefit people running the private retraining programs. Recommended reading on the topic: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100040300 http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=8014010004030...
- zip1234 10y ago
  I think it is a bad idea to have free higher education as you say. Studying doesn't help. Studying the correct things does. Free education in no way encourages people to study the correct things (the in-demand skills that pay). All it does it make people raise the bar for hiring to 'college educated' for jobs that probably don't require it.
  - sedachv 10y ago
    > Studying the correct things does. Free education in no way encourages people to study the correct things (the in-demand skills that pay). Your argument implies that everyone is too stupid to go to school for the "correct things." Do you realize that the truck drivers had to go to truck-driving school to get their truck-driving jobs? Implying that people are incapable of choosing a field of study that will lead to employment, to argue for denying people the right to education, is a vicious and idiotic lie of the "kill the poor" variety. You should be ashamed for even suggesting it.
    - Kalium 10y ago
      The argument could be made that non-zero numbers of people currently choose courses of study that very rarely lead to employment in that field. In such a context, is it unreasonable to consider that perhaps this might continue to occur in an environment where tertiary education is free? You may also wish to consider dialing back the vehemence of your rhetoric. Accusing people of adopting "kill the poor" rhetoric in response to relatively polite disagreement may potentially be seen as a somewhat less that reasonable reaction.
Kalium 10y ago
For many people in dying rust belt towns, no amount of "real retraining" is going to make a difference. Universal access to all the skills in the world is of little use when realizing that value means having to leave your family home, the only community you've ever known, and move to a scary metroplex. Everything costs more there! The people are different - they look different, talk different, think different, work different. The obvious response to this, of course, is that if people in dying rust belt towns have skills then jobs will come to them. This makes sense! Why put your factory or office in an expensive city when it can go in a cheap small town? Clearly a ridiculous notion, right? The problem is that whole towns don't re-skill at once. Ten or twenty or fifty thousand people don't become educated, experienced professionals all at once. It happens in drips and drabs, a little bit at a time. If you're in a major metro area, this means the professionals come to you. If you're in a small town, you've probably either shut down or paid out the nose to import a handful of experienced and educated professionals to run the automation. And all of this is making some pretty big assumptions, too. Not everyone wants to start over at the age of 40- or 50-something. Not everyone has the mental or physical acuity to do so or wants to go head-to-head with more energetic 20-somethings. It's humiliating, to a great many people, to have to accept that the trajectory of their lives has been a dead-end. It's a terrifying risk to leave behind everything you know and look for a new life and a new career. Even if all the education and training in the world was 100% free in every way, those would still be true.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >For many people in dying rust belt towns, no amount of "real retraining" is going to make a difference. Universal access to all the skills in the world is of little use when realizing that value means having to leave your family home, the only community you've ever known, and move to a scary metroplex. Everything costs more there! The people are different - they look different, talk different, think different, work different. Then we have to talk about the fact that under capitalism, these people are condemned to starve. Only something like a basic income can really help them.
  - Kalium 10y ago
    OK. Let's talk about it! Let's also talk about the fact that under a basic income, these people will be absolutely miserable. They don't want money. They want work. Their identities revolve in no small part around dignity rooted in a fair day's work for a fair day's wage. Accepting charity is humiliating for them because it implies they cannot earn money. How do you think these people would feel about the prospect of being paid a basic income for life when they cannot work? It's humiliating beyond words. It's patronizing as all hell. It strips them of all respect, all dignity. It leaves them unable to look at themselves in the mirror, because they are now worthless in their own eyes. What do you think that does to a person? I'll tell you. Meth, heroin, obesity, heart disease... and burning hatred. In one sense, you're absolutely right. Only something like a basic income can really save them. In another, also very important sense, a basic income will destroy them. Not by death, but by unmaking who they are.
logfromblammo 10y ago
If I ever get swept to the curb with the detritus of destroyed jobs, I might just teach former truckers how to hijack automated trucks, and then charge for the course on how not to get caught. Many of the people in those dead Appalachian coal mining communities distill untaxed alcohol, deal prescription painkillers, cook meth, or grow cannabis to pay their bills. If you don't retrain people into lawful careers, they might just retrain themselves into prohibited ones. And that spills over onto everyone else around them.

monk_e_boy 10y ago

I'm retraining at the moment. I've taken out huge loans and as a family we have decided that we'll just have to be super poor for the next few years while I'm training. It's a huge investment, and super scary when you are not guaranteed a job at the end of it. I totally understand why people put it off and hope that a job comes up that they are currently qualified for.

eabraham 10y ago
I'm very curious about your experience. What career are you leaving/retraining for?
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  Was programmer (PHP, Drupal, Python, Linux stack, Web. MySQL, Oracle etc) Training to be an IT/CompSci teacher - 11 to 16 year olds.
  - megablast 10y ago
    You can no longer get a job as a programmer?
    - monk_e_boy 10y ago
      I've been doing it for 20 years, there is no progression for coders in my local area. I started on about 22K and progressed to 30K over many jobs. There is no way into management or team leader as most companies are too small. For the last few years the coding has been eroded by automation. Yep. Automation. Most of our clients want websites to sell some stuff. This no longer needs a team of 10, now you need an Amazon account, Facebook and Twitter, eBay, Etsy... or Drupal and other shopping templates make it too easy for designers to cobble something together that is 'good enough' that a team of coders can't compete on price. In the good old days we were bashing out 30K websites and running them for our clients. These days no one spends that much on a website. We have a few companies left, SEO (lots of interesting coding there) Cloud computing (Perl and Python) Games (cut scenes, testing etc) not enough to support many coders. And again, you can get a job, but no pension, no perks, minimum holiday, no job stability (each time we lost a contract half the team would be laid off) and for me, no progression. I'd like to think in 10 years time I would be running a team of coders. No chance in my local area.

vacri 10y ago

Miners learn 'on the job' for the most part. Obviously the engineers don't, but miners don't go to 'miner college' for a few years to get their certification. So I'm not sure what you mean by 'REAL retraining' - what would suit a demographic that largely isn't interested in tertiary education? What would you train them in, anyway? There aren't many skilled industries that are looking for that many fresh folks. There's plenty of crappy labour jobs to be filled in places like agriculture, though even these are fading, and only certain places like fruit picking are hard to automate. What kind of jobs do you see this demographic doing?

intrasight 10y ago
Not at all true. There are LOTS of jobs in the service economy in most any region. Robots won't be building or maintaining the physical plant any time soon. We need carpenters, electricians, plumbers, HVAC, gardeners - the list goes on. The market will do it's thing to match this supply and demand. The successful retraining programs that I've witnessed just use small carrots and sticks to facilitate this transition.

sedachv 10y ago

> If government gave retraining - by which I mean REAL retraining rather than a cheap (lowest private sector bidder running it, minimal quality requirements) course to draft a CV and perhaps import some low job security call centre work. Real retraining would be free, universal access to vocational schools and higher education. You are very correct in pointing out the shortfalls of current US retraining programs. Most of thoes came about during the Reagan administration and I think they are first of all a Republican trick to distract people from the need for free universally accessible vocational and higher education, and second of all a privatization scam to benefit people running the private retraining programs. Recommended reading on the topic: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100040300 http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=8014010004030...

zip1234 10y ago
I think it is a bad idea to have free higher education as you say. Studying doesn't help. Studying the correct things does. Free education in no way encourages people to study the correct things (the in-demand skills that pay). All it does it make people raise the bar for hiring to 'college educated' for jobs that probably don't require it.
- sedachv 10y ago
  > Studying the correct things does. Free education in no way encourages people to study the correct things (the in-demand skills that pay). Your argument implies that everyone is too stupid to go to school for the "correct things." Do you realize that the truck drivers had to go to truck-driving school to get their truck-driving jobs? Implying that people are incapable of choosing a field of study that will lead to employment, to argue for denying people the right to education, is a vicious and idiotic lie of the "kill the poor" variety. You should be ashamed for even suggesting it.
  - Kalium 10y ago
    The argument could be made that non-zero numbers of people currently choose courses of study that very rarely lead to employment in that field. In such a context, is it unreasonable to consider that perhaps this might continue to occur in an environment where tertiary education is free? You may also wish to consider dialing back the vehemence of your rhetoric. Accusing people of adopting "kill the poor" rhetoric in response to relatively polite disagreement may potentially be seen as a somewhat less that reasonable reaction.

Kalium 10y ago

For many people in dying rust belt towns, no amount of "real retraining" is going to make a difference. Universal access to all the skills in the world is of little use when realizing that value means having to leave your family home, the only community you've ever known, and move to a scary metroplex. Everything costs more there! The people are different - they look different, talk different, think different, work different. The obvious response to this, of course, is that if people in dying rust belt towns have skills then jobs will come to them. This makes sense! Why put your factory or office in an expensive city when it can go in a cheap small town? Clearly a ridiculous notion, right? The problem is that whole towns don't re-skill at once. Ten or twenty or fifty thousand people don't become educated, experienced professionals all at once. It happens in drips and drabs, a little bit at a time. If you're in a major metro area, this means the professionals come to you. If you're in a small town, you've probably either shut down or paid out the nose to import a handful of experienced and educated professionals to run the automation. And all of this is making some pretty big assumptions, too. Not everyone wants to start over at the age of 40- or 50-something. Not everyone has the mental or physical acuity to do so or wants to go head-to-head with more energetic 20-somethings. It's humiliating, to a great many people, to have to accept that the trajectory of their lives has been a dead-end. It's a terrifying risk to leave behind everything you know and look for a new life and a new career. Even if all the education and training in the world was 100% free in every way, those would still be true.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>For many people in dying rust belt towns, no amount of "real retraining" is going to make a difference. Universal access to all the skills in the world is of little use when realizing that value means having to leave your family home, the only community you've ever known, and move to a scary metroplex. Everything costs more there! The people are different - they look different, talk different, think different, work different. Then we have to talk about the fact that under capitalism, these people are condemned to starve. Only something like a basic income can really help them.
- Kalium 10y ago
  OK. Let's talk about it! Let's also talk about the fact that under a basic income, these people will be absolutely miserable. They don't want money. They want work. Their identities revolve in no small part around dignity rooted in a fair day's work for a fair day's wage. Accepting charity is humiliating for them because it implies they cannot earn money. How do you think these people would feel about the prospect of being paid a basic income for life when they cannot work? It's humiliating beyond words. It's patronizing as all hell. It strips them of all respect, all dignity. It leaves them unable to look at themselves in the mirror, because they are now worthless in their own eyes. What do you think that does to a person? I'll tell you. Meth, heroin, obesity, heart disease... and burning hatred. In one sense, you're absolutely right. Only something like a basic income can really save them. In another, also very important sense, a basic income will destroy them. Not by death, but by unmaking who they are.

logfromblammo 10y ago

If I ever get swept to the curb with the detritus of destroyed jobs, I might just teach former truckers how to hijack automated trucks, and then charge for the course on how not to get caught. Many of the people in those dead Appalachian coal mining communities distill untaxed alcohol, deal prescription painkillers, cook meth, or grow cannabis to pay their bills. If you don't retrain people into lawful careers, they might just retrain themselves into prohibited ones. And that spills over onto everyone else around them.