3 ms·

One thing I don't understand is that despite automating more and more of the work away, we seem to have fewer and fewer humans available for anything that's lef

by nicbou 3y ago

One thing I don't understand is that despite automating more and more of the work away, we seem to have fewer and fewer humans available for anything that's left. I have to scan my own groceries, I can't ever talk to an actual human at any business, I order my food from a machine. Where is everyone?

mistercheph 3y ago
Didn't you know? Everyone is engaged. What did you think the point of all those engagement metrics were? To get everybody engaged. I like it better like this, before, almost no one was engaged.
b112 3y ago
The boomers are retiring. Yes, really, that's what's happening. And it is going to get far, far worse.
- letrowekwel 3y ago
  The boomers are retiring, and the US economy is strong. Here in EU boomers are also retiring, but many countries still have high youth unemployment, and there is no real worker shortage even if businesses like to complain about one.
_jal 3y ago
> Where is everyone? Get used to it. The emerging model is a virtual vending machine - if what you want isn't there, tough. If the machine breaks, well, sorry about your dollar, maybe it'll work next week. If you want to talk to a human, start by getting rich. That costs extra.
Meekro 3y ago
I've wondered about this myself. It's not just grocery scanning-- my parents used to get a bunch of bills in the mail every month, and send out a bunch of checks to pay them. It's stunning to think about how many people were needed at every step of that pipeline to make the whole thing work. All of that's automated now, and you can find similar things in many industries. That should have freed up lots of people to handle the special cases that fall through the cracks of the automation, but they're nowhere to be found.
vineyardmike 3y ago
As you may have heard, in the US at least, there’s record low unemployment. There’s literally not enough people to do those jobs. It’s complex why… 1. Demographic changes means more retirees, and smaller workforce. Literally less people to go around. 2. With low unemployment, everyone’s doing something else. Something harder to automate, or otherwise more valuable. It’s not like people are sitting around unemployed (except retirees). What are they doing? It’s hard to know without combing through data in this moment, but people are surely avoiding minimum wage and low skill customer service jobs if alternatives exist in their area. Anecdotally, I hear people don’t like working in anything customer facing due to rude customers. I know someone in TX working at Amazon warehouses at an hourly rate much higher than retail workers rate. They used to work at a gym in rural California. Until we get rising low-skill immigration to cover more of the low-wage work, expect service work to be understaffed. Or rising birth rates, or a drop in white collar workers.
- Tanoc 3y ago
  It's not just that people are going for "better" jobs to avoid the lowest of low tier schlock jobs. It's that a dedicated chunk of those jobs refuse to hire because the employers are trying to downsize that part of their overall workforce and thus reduce costs. An example of this has been the rail shortage, where despite needing twice as many workers as they actually have in order to keep things from collapsing the rail companies are ignoring the collapse and trying to cut fifty or even hundred car trains down to single man crews. You also cannot trust the Department Of Labor's official statistics by themselves since there's multiple ways that the U.S. government covers up actual unemployment numbers. For example stay at home parents aren't included in the unemployment statistic even if they worked previous to that situation. People who have been unemployed for more than a year are not included. People on disability but who are in an employable state are not included. Gig workers such as GrubHub drivers are not included. Certain methods of self-employment such as traveling musicians are are not included. They pulled this trick a decade ago and they're doing it again to try and prevent another panic. The one difference this time is that instead of people losing a single full-time job like they did in 2008, many are now working multiple part-times and thus inflating the employment statistic slightly since technically they're never unemployed. Then there's the gap that happens for employees. If someone has a part-time job and gets scheduled from noon to nine for closing back to back for four days and then gets nothing for the next three days that means they're not getting paid the equivalent of a full-time job despite possibly working just as many if not more hours. When you have lulls like this you need a second part-time job to fill them in, leading to things like ten percent of the current counted national workforce having at least two jobs. But many part-time jobs in retail and services want to monopolize the person's time since scheduling is based on the employer's availability and not the employee's, meaning that sometimes the employee will have to purposely dedicate days of their week to waiting in case either job calls them in. If the person doesn't have a free day and are called in while working one of their two jobs, they may be fired from the other job. When enough places and people have an incongruent schedule like this places run short staffed and the person is still wasting a day or maybe more idle. Then there's the other half of that coin of scheduling abuse, the supposed part-time job that uses that flexible scheduling to transform into a full-time job. I know that Wal-Mart will schedule you for no more than thirty hours a week and will stack your shifts back to back, sometimes with as little as eight hours in-between, just so they have enough leftover hours in your schedule that they can call you back to cover someone without pushing you into full-time or paying overtime. This makes working for Wal-Mart hell because you're rushed and then all but told to be on standby, giving you very little time for things like other jobs, appointments, household chores, and even self care. The end result of being yanked between two part-times or being held hostage by a full-time masquerading as a part-time is that eventually the potential employee gets cynical and stops applying for that kind of work entirely.

by nicbou 3y ago

mistercheph 3y ago

Didn't you know? Everyone is engaged. What did you think the point of all those engagement metrics were? To get everybody engaged. I like it better like this, before, almost no one was engaged.

b112 3y ago

The boomers are retiring. Yes, really, that's what's happening. And it is going to get far, far worse.

letrowekwel 3y ago
The boomers are retiring, and the US economy is strong. Here in EU boomers are also retiring, but many countries still have high youth unemployment, and there is no real worker shortage even if businesses like to complain about one.

_jal 3y ago

> Where is everyone? Get used to it. The emerging model is a virtual vending machine - if what you want isn't there, tough. If the machine breaks, well, sorry about your dollar, maybe it'll work next week. If you want to talk to a human, start by getting rich. That costs extra.

Meekro 3y ago

I've wondered about this myself. It's not just grocery scanning-- my parents used to get a bunch of bills in the mail every month, and send out a bunch of checks to pay them. It's stunning to think about how many people were needed at every step of that pipeline to make the whole thing work. All of that's automated now, and you can find similar things in many industries. That should have freed up lots of people to handle the special cases that fall through the cracks of the automation, but they're nowhere to be found.

vineyardmike 3y ago

As you may have heard, in the US at least, there’s record low unemployment. There’s literally not enough people to do those jobs. It’s complex why… 1. Demographic changes means more retirees, and smaller workforce. Literally less people to go around. 2. With low unemployment, everyone’s doing something else. Something harder to automate, or otherwise more valuable. It’s not like people are sitting around unemployed (except retirees). What are they doing? It’s hard to know without combing through data in this moment, but people are surely avoiding minimum wage and low skill customer service jobs if alternatives exist in their area. Anecdotally, I hear people don’t like working in anything customer facing due to rude customers. I know someone in TX working at Amazon warehouses at an hourly rate much higher than retail workers rate. They used to work at a gym in rural California. Until we get rising low-skill immigration to cover more of the low-wage work, expect service work to be understaffed. Or rising birth rates, or a drop in white collar workers.

Tanoc 3y ago
It's not just that people are going for "better" jobs to avoid the lowest of low tier schlock jobs. It's that a dedicated chunk of those jobs refuse to hire because the employers are trying to downsize that part of their overall workforce and thus reduce costs. An example of this has been the rail shortage, where despite needing twice as many workers as they actually have in order to keep things from collapsing the rail companies are ignoring the collapse and trying to cut fifty or even hundred car trains down to single man crews. You also cannot trust the Department Of Labor's official statistics by themselves since there's multiple ways that the U.S. government covers up actual unemployment numbers. For example stay at home parents aren't included in the unemployment statistic even if they worked previous to that situation. People who have been unemployed for more than a year are not included. People on disability but who are in an employable state are not included. Gig workers such as GrubHub drivers are not included. Certain methods of self-employment such as traveling musicians are are not included. They pulled this trick a decade ago and they're doing it again to try and prevent another panic. The one difference this time is that instead of people losing a single full-time job like they did in 2008, many are now working multiple part-times and thus inflating the employment statistic slightly since technically they're never unemployed. Then there's the gap that happens for employees. If someone has a part-time job and gets scheduled from noon to nine for closing back to back for four days and then gets nothing for the next three days that means they're not getting paid the equivalent of a full-time job despite possibly working just as many if not more hours. When you have lulls like this you need a second part-time job to fill them in, leading to things like ten percent of the current counted national workforce having at least two jobs. But many part-time jobs in retail and services want to monopolize the person's time since scheduling is based on the employer's availability and not the employee's, meaning that sometimes the employee will have to purposely dedicate days of their week to waiting in case either job calls them in. If the person doesn't have a free day and are called in while working one of their two jobs, they may be fired from the other job. When enough places and people have an incongruent schedule like this places run short staffed and the person is still wasting a day or maybe more idle. Then there's the other half of that coin of scheduling abuse, the supposed part-time job that uses that flexible scheduling to transform into a full-time job. I know that Wal-Mart will schedule you for no more than thirty hours a week and will stack your shifts back to back, sometimes with as little as eight hours in-between, just so they have enough leftover hours in your schedule that they can call you back to cover someone without pushing you into full-time or paying overtime. This makes working for Wal-Mart hell because you're rushed and then all but told to be on standby, giving you very little time for things like other jobs, appointments, household chores, and even self care. The end result of being yanked between two part-times or being held hostage by a full-time masquerading as a part-time is that eventually the potential employee gets cynical and stops applying for that kind of work entirely.