Rage Against the Machine

As much as the media has been inundated with future of work stories that read like a Sci-Fi-like robot apocalypse, the future of work, in a very real sense, is already here. And what’s really at stake is inequality.

The real question for the future of work is not whether automation, robots and AI will replace jobs - they will. And, if history is any guide, as-yet unimaginable jobs will be created. Over 60 percent of the jobs today didn’t exist in 1940, according to MIT researchers. The real question is - will the jobs that are created be “big enough” for workers and families to thrive, much less survive.

And, given the current trajectory we’re on, the answer is no.

Since the 1980s, automation, globalization, the financialization of the U.S. economy and policies that rewarded capital instead of labor have led to a sharp polarization of the U.S. workforce. Middle class jobs lost have been replaced by increasingly unstable, precarious jobs - involuntary part-time, low-wages, with scant access to benefits like health care, and unpredictable schedules.

But, as economist David Autor and his colleagues at MIT argue, that polarization is a choice. And we could come together as a society and make a different choice for the future. If we don’t, he warns, we are building toward a stratified society of “the servers and the served.”

Guests

• Joe Liebman, warehouse picker in St. Louis making $17.50/ hour. Lost his white collar job in the 2008 Great Recession - and his house, his family, his sense of wellbeing.
• David Autor, economist, MIT, co-chair of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future.

Resources:

• MIT Future of Work Task Force
• Future of Work Initiative, Aspen Institute
• Extending the Race Between Education and Technology, Autor, Goldin, Katz, 2020
• The Future of Warehouse Work, UC Berkeley Labor Center
• Worker Voices: Technology and the Future for Workers, Molly Kinder, Amanda Lenhart, New America, 2019
• The Future of work and its impact on Health, Blue Shield of California Foundation and the Institute for the Future, 2020
• The Future of Jobs Report 2020, World Economic Forum (Automation projected to eliminate about 85 million jobs in the next five years—potentially displacing up to half of the United States workforce with no clear path for them to connect to the new jobs likely to be created by these technological changes)
• BLS fastest growing occupations 2020-2030