It is not just the factory, more middle class jobs disappearing

[neddy]

Blame the Fed

Two big disappointments in the recent recovery have been the sluggish job growth and the continued underemployment of many people who had solidly middle class jobs before the recession but are now struggling to make ends meet with much lower incomes. Rick Newman recently detailed how routine jobs which used to help populate the middle class are disappearing.

Essentially, lots of low-wage jobs are hard to automate and the same is true for most high-skill jobs. Unfortunately, many middle class jobs are “routine” according to the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank and can be automated. Thus, machines replace people and we get a jobless recovery. What is missing from this story is the villain, but I can reveal its identity here.
While many are bemoaning the lack of job growth in the recovery, policy makers need to understand that they are a large part of the cause.
We may be moving toward what some are calling a dumbbell economy where most of the jobs are at either the lower or upper end of the income spectrum, with few jobs left in the middle class.

The idea is that yard work, stocking store shelves, and similar jobs do not easily lend themselves to automation. Ditto for neurosurgeons or movie stars.

However, rule-based jobs like accounting and many intermediation-type jobs (travel agent, bank teller, even some stock brokers) can now be replaced by computers.

Additionally, manufacturing jobs that were another common route to a middle class income are continually under pressure from automation as every manufacturer strives to produce more using fewer employees.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffrey...-are-disappearing-and-the-fed-is-the-culprit/

 

[neddy]

Catherine Mulbrandon of Visualizing Economics has created a graph looking at the industries where job growth has been fastest between 2000 and 2011, breaking it down by income:

 

[neddy]

In the UK,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mURhNIjc-Kw

To Voltaire, the British class system could be summed up in a sentence. The people of these islands, he said, ‘are like their own beer; froth on top, dregs at bottom, the middle excellent’. A harsh judgment, perhaps, but one that might still have some truth in it today. Yes, we have horrible poverty in our council estates and toffery on our country estates. But Britain is a country that has always taken pride in what we think of as middle-class virtues — hard work, honesty, thrift and self-help.

The great stabilising force in our society is disappearing fast

Respectable middle-class jobs do not pay what they once did. A number of factors are at play here, but the most significant is technology and competition from abroad, which wiped out large numbers of working-class jobs in the last century and threatens to do the same to middle-class jobs now. When goods and services can be imported at a pittance from overseas, the Brits who used to provide these services see their income squeezed.

Jaron Lanier, the Silicon Valley philosopher and author of Who Owns The Future?, has shown how technology and the free-flow of information are removing secure, middle-class jobs. Far from being egalitarian, the digital revolution has reduced financial rewards for those in the middle — and concentrated wealth at the very top. While outsourcing of clerical work is hardly new, it has started to affect the middle office — not just the back office. Once, it was production-line workers who found themselves laid off and their jobs shipped to the Far East. Now it’s research chemists, paralegals and clerks who are finding their jobs outsourced. Firms such as Microsoft, Pfizer and Philips increasingly carry out their research in China.


http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9000951/the-missing-middle/

More UK girls turn to adult industry.

 

[The_Hypocrite]

So i guess the moral of the story is either be a high level civil serpent, a politician, a rich businessman or a cockroach..cant believe that low level low class jobs are now back into play,,,a fuckup world we live in,,,

 

[neddy]

​http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/2014/06/26/why-technology-is-going-to-destory-middle-class-professions

Today I am going to talk about the nature of work in the years ahead. This is a critical question and it’s the one that so many Irish parents are faced with when advising their children what to do in life. We often think the jobs that paid well in our day or in our parents’ day are still the ones to go for. But is this the case? And what if many of these jobs haven’t even been imagined yet?

Changing technology means that the middle classes are about to get it in the neck and it will be interesting to see how they react. The public sector will change forever and the returns to many professions that are now the bastions of the Irish middle classes – such as solicitors, accountants and doctors – will be destroyed by disruptive technology in the years ahead. I wonder will anyone speak up for them? Or will the rest of society be silent as the broad middle class was when the industrial class was decimated here?

The major agent for change will be mobile phones, or at least the emergence of personal computers on our phones and tablets, which will bring technological change into everyone’s back pocket. The instrument of change will be apps which will allow ordinary individuals to do lots of stuff for themselves that in the past had been the preserve of experts from one guild or another, such as the Law Society. Why would you pay for a lawyer to advise you about contract law, for example, when you will have an app to do this for you?

Lots of work that we term “professional” is in fact mind-numbingly dull, repetitive and eminently suited to being cannibalised by machines. Think about the paperwork and form-filling which constitutes lots of legal work, of the tedious spreadsheet-based grunt work that is the bread and butter of many accountants. Could these jobs be done by machines? Absolutely. And it will be cheaper, without doubt.

 

[neddy]

​

So i guess the moral of the story is either be a high level civil serpent, a politician, a rich businessman or a cockroach..cant believe that low level low class jobs are not back into play,,,a fuckup world we live in,,,

Interestingly, the jobs that were displaced initially by globalisation – the jobs where people made things – are coming back into vogue precisely because they are hard to do. The master builder, the skilled tradesman, the mechanic who can actually fix things and who can redesign and customise, are now among the safest jobs you can have right now. What used to be dismissed as manual labour, such as a good carpenter, isn’t manual at all. Building a table is actually extraordinarily cerebral involving a myriad of decisions, opinions, techniques and contacts.

 

[The_Hypocrite]

In Singkieland,,that just means a majority of the people are screwed,,1st by the Pappies and now this world economy bullshit,,,singkieland has outsourced all these tradies etc to the mudlanders and ah tiongs,,,so thanks to the pappies and local attitudes towards the tradies have caused this problem...there are damn few locals who are electricians etc etc,,,guess singkies are partly to blame for this,,,and now a local cant go into this industry as all local network is all dominated by mudlanders,,,

I still remember the days,,,going to VITB (now ITE) was a death sentence to a singkie,,and that if one was a mechanic to electrician etc,,one was looked down upon,,,look at the attitudes of local educated women towards men of lower social economic standing,,,,now guess such attitudes has come back to haunt us,,,

​


Interestingly, the jobs that were displaced initially by globalisation – the jobs where people made things – are coming back into vogue precisely because they are hard to do. The master builder, the skilled tradesman, the mechanic who can actually fix things and who can redesign and customise, are now among the safest jobs you can have right now. What used to be dismissed as manual labour, such as a good carpenter, isn’t manual at all. Building a table is actually extraordinarily cerebral involving a myriad of decisions, opinions, techniques and contacts.

 

[neddy]

Australia's middle class is about to get minced

• Paul Wallbank
• <time title="Wednesday, 2nd July 2014 - 11:07am [Melbourne]" class="meta--published-at" datetime="2014-07-02">59 min ago</time>

For the past four decades it’s been the working class that has suffered the brunt of the effects of globalisation and automation in the workforce. Now machines are taking middle class jobs, with serious implications for societies – like Australia's – that have staked their future on white collar, knowledge-based service industries.

Yesterday, the Associated Press announced it was replacing business journalists with computer programs, following sports reporting where algorithms have delivering match reports for some years.

Some cynical media industry commentators would argue rewriting PR releases or other people’s stories -- the model of many new media organisations -- is something that should be done by machines. Associated Press’ management has come to the same view with business data feeds.

AP’s managing editor Lou Ferrara explained in a company blog post how the service will pull information out of company announcements and format them into standard news reports.

Ferrara wrote of the efficiencies this brings for AP: "Instead of providing 300 stories manually, we can provide up to 4,400 automatically for companies throughout the United States each quarter."

The benefit for readers is that AP can cover more companies with fewer journalists, the question is how many people can afford to read financial journals if they no longer have jobs?


Making middle managers redundant

Many of those fields that cheered the loss of manufacturing are themselves affected by the same computer programs taking the jobs of journalists; any job, trade or profession that is based on regurgitating information already stored on a database can be processed the same way.

For lawyers, accountants, and armies of form processing public servants, computers are already threatening jobs -- as with journalism, things are about to get much worse in those fields, as mining workers are finding with automated mine trucks taking high-paid jobs.

Most vulnerable of all could well be managers; when computers can automate financial reports, monitor the workplace and make many day-to-day decisions then there’s little reason for many middle management positions.

To make matters worse for white collar middle managers, many of their positions are only needed in organisations built around paper based communication flows; in an age of collaborative tools there’s no need to gatekeepers to control the movement of information to the executive suite.

Irish economist David McWilliams -- his television series on the rise of the Celtic Tiger, The Pope’s Children, and the causes of the Global Financial Crisis, Follow The Money, are highly recommended viewing – last week suggested that the forces that disrupted the working classes in the 1970s and 80s are now coming for middle classes.

“The industrial class was undermined by both technological change and globalisation, but rather than lament this, many people who were unaffected by this social catastrophe labelled what happened from 1980 to 2010 as the “inevitable consequences” of global competition.” Mc Williams writes.
Those ‘inevitable consequences’ are now coming for the middle classes, asserts McWilliams.

On the right side of progress

While this is sounds frightening it may not be bad for society as whole; the Twentieth Century saw two massive shifts in employment -- the shift from manufacturing to services in the later years, and the shift from agriculture to city-based occupations earlier in the century.
A hundred years ago nearly a third of Australians worked in the agriculture sector; today it’s three per cent. Despite the cost to regional communities, the overall economy prospered from this shift.

The question today though is what jobs are going to replace those white collar jobs that did so well from the 1980s? The Maker Movement may have answers for governments and businesses wondering how to adapt to a new economy.

Two weeks ago President Barack Obama welcomed several dozen leaders of America’s new manufacturing movement to a Maker Faire at the White House, where he proclaimed "Today’s DIY Is Tomorrow’s 'Made in America'".

In Singapore, the government is putting its hopes on these new technologies boosting the country’s manufacturing industry in one of the world’s highest-cost centres.


“The future of manufacturing for us is about disruptive technologies, areas like 3D printing, automation and robotics,” Singapore’s Economic Development Board Managing Director Yeoh Keat Chuan told Reuters earlier this year.

Britain too is experimenting with modern technologies, as the BBC’s World of Business reports about how the country is reinventing its manufacturing industry.

Tim Chapman of the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre describes how the economics of manufacturing changes in a high-cost economy with a simple advance in machining rotor disks for Rolls-Royce Trent jet engines.

"These quite complex shaped grooves were taking 54 minutes of machining to make each of these slots. Rolls-Royce came to us and said can 'can you improve the efficiency of this? Can you cut these slots faster?'"

"We reduced the cutting time from 54 minutes to 90 seconds."

"That’s the kind of process improvement that companies need to achieve to manufacture in the UK."

While leaders in the US, UK and Singapore ponder the future of manufacturing, Australian governments continue to have faith in their 1980s models of white collar employment -- little illustrates how far out of touch the nation’s political classes are with reality when they proclaim Sydney’s future as an Asian banking centre or Renminbi trading hub.

In the apparatchiks’ fevered imaginations this involves rooms full of sweaty white men in red braces yelling ‘buy’ into telephones as shown in 1980s Wall Street movies. In truth, the computers took most of those jobs two decades ago.

As McWilliams points out, the dislocations to the manufacturing industries of the 1970s and 80s were welcomed by those in the professions as the inevitable cost of ‘progress’.

Now progress might be coming for them. Our challenge is to make sure we're on the right side of that progress.

 

[winnipegjets]

It is not only Australia, it is everywhere ...so it is a matter of time before the lynching begins.

This zillionaire understands the issue better than his peers ....
http://www.politico.com/magazine/st...ng-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html#.U7NtgbFBlls

Economies have not recovered because the middle class has been decimated and shrinking. This is the big difference between this downturn and previous ones.

 

[bic_cherry]

Blame the Fed
Two big disappointments in the recent recovery have been the sluggish job growth and the continued underemployment of many people who had solidly middle class jobs before the recession but are now struggling to make ends meet with much lower incomes. Rick Newman recently detailed how routine jobs which used to help populate the middle class are disappearing.
Essentially, lots of low-wage jobs are hard to automate and the same is true for most high-skill jobs. Unfortunately, many middle class jobs are “routine” according to the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank and can be automated. Thus, machines replace people and we get a jobless recovery. What is missing from this story is the villain, but I can reveal its identity here.
While many are bemoaning the lack of job growth in the recovery, policy makers need to understand that they are a large part of the cause.
We may be moving toward what some are calling a dumbbell economy where most of the jobs are at either the lower or upper end of the income spectrum, with few jobs left in the middle class.
The idea is that yard work, stocking store shelves, and similar jobs do not easily lend themselves to automation. Ditto for neurosurgeons or movie stars.
However, rule-based jobs like accounting and many intermediation-type jobs (travel agent, bank teller, even some stock brokers) can now be replaced by computers.
Additionally, manufacturing jobs that were another common route to a middle class income are continually under pressure from automation as every manufacturer strives to produce more using fewer employees.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffrey...-are-disappearing-and-the-fed-is-the-culprit/

Yup, the FED is owned by/ controlled by bankers and run the greatest counterfeiting scandal in history: feathering their own nest for doing useless work: I.e. increasing GDP and inflation (which enriches mainly their banker friends (C-suite positions*) at the end of the day): thus the phenomenon as U mentioned of jobless recovery. : I.e. there is increase on GDP but also increase in wealth divide since human labour is now replaced by robots which are faster, better, cheaper to run even though the electricity (fossil fuels) they consume makes the world more polluted and less inhabitable for the rest of us.


*C-suite positions= CFO, CEO, CIO, COO etc.

 

[hammer]

If Singaporeans keep losing jobs, Singapore is in big bad trouble