{"id":13850,"date":"2019-12-22T20:04:02","date_gmt":"2019-12-23T01:04:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=13850"},"modified":"2020-01-23T18:18:26","modified_gmt":"2020-01-23T23:18:26","slug":"benanav-future-of-work-pt-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2019\/12\/22\/benanav-future-of-work-pt-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Aaron Benanav future of work"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Automation and the future of work: Part 1<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation and the future of work: Part 2<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As economic growth decelerates, job creation slows, and it is this, not technology-induced job destruction, which is depressing the global demand for labour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

it is crucial that we reconceive of the present situation as marked not by the imminent arrival of mass unemployment, as automation theorists suggest, but by continuously rising under-employment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

we are heading towards a \u2018good job-less future\u2019 <\/strong>rather than a \u2018jobless\u2019 one: \u2018workers have to keep working in order to feed themselves, so they take any jobs in sight\u2019, even those offering poor pay, limited hours or terrible working conditions. Automation theorists interpret this as a consequence of growing technological unemployment, occurring somewhere offstage. In reality, rapid automation of production is hardly taking place at all\u2014offstage or anywhere else<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet only about 17 per cent of the global labour force works in manufacturing, with an additional 5 per cent in mining, transportation and utilities. The vast majority of the world\u2019s under-employed workers therefore end up finding jobs in the highly heterogeneous service sector, which accounts for between 70 and 80 per cent of total employment in high-income countries, and the majority of workers in Iran, Nigeria, Turkey, the Philippines, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The post-industrial economy we have inherited\u2014now finally on a world scale\u2014is, however, rather unlike the one whose emergence Daniel Bell first predicted in 1973: instead of an economy of researchers, tennis instructors and Michelin-rated chefs, ours is predominantly a world of side-street barbers, domestic servants, fruit-cart vendors and Walmart shelf-stackers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the key to explaining this phenomenon is not the rapid pace of job destruction in specific branches, if it occurs, but the absence of a corresponding pace of job creation in the wider economy<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main explanation for that is not rising productivity-growth rates, as the automation theorists claim, but inadequate output demand<\/strong>, due to the proliferation of industrial capacities across the world, an associated over-accumulation of capital, and a consequent downshift in rates of manufacturing expansion and economic growth overall. These remain the primary economic and social causes of the slack in the labour market that is wracking workers across the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The basic pattern of employment growth in services, described by Princeton economist William Baumol in the early 1960s, helps explain why under-employment in the sector is such a major feature of today\u2019s economy\u2014and why the automation theorists\u2019 account falls askew.26 Baumol explained rising service-sector employment by pointing out that service occupations see lower rates of mechanization and productivity growth than the industrial sector. If demand for services increases, employment does too, and by almost as much (Figures 2 and 3)\u2014unlike in manufacturing, where most output growth is generated by rising productivity rather than expanding employment<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Service-sector demand must thus rely on income effects for its expansion\u2014the growth of demand for services depends on the growth of incomes across the wider economy. This means that as the rate of overall economic growth slows with the dilapidation of the industrial growth-engine, the pace of service-sector employment growth should slacken, too.
But despite advanced economies growing more slowly, service-sector employment expanded quickly in certain low-wage, precarious occupations. It is at this point that logics of under-employment <\/strong>come into play. It turned out to be possible to lower the prices of these services\u2014and so to expand demand for them\u2014without raising levels of productivity, by paying workers less, or suppressing the growth of their wages relative to whatever meagre increases in their productivity were achieved over time.28 The same principle applies to self-employed workers, who, by offering to work for less, are able to create demand for their labour at the expense of their incomes. The service sector is the choice site for job creation through super-exploitation because the wages of service workers make up a relatively large share of their final price.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As inequality intensifies, opportunities for super-exploitation expand; it begins to make sense for richer households to hire the poor to perform tasks they would otherwise do for themselves\u2014solely because of the extreme difference in the price of their respective labours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given this context, in which a capital strike would quickly push the economy deeply into crisis, we need to set our sights higher: on the conquest of production. Taking the power to control investment decisions away from capitalists and rendering the capital strike inoperative forms an essential precondition of our collective progress toward a post-scarcity future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harbouring a vision is crucial to reviving an emancipatory project today, not least because its future realization seems so far away. Nineteenth-century socialists knew they were far from achieving their goals, but they were nevertheless possessed by an idea of a freer future which animated their struggle. As late as 1939, Brecht could still write: \u2018our goal lay far in the distance \/ it was clearly visible\u2019.49 Few would say that today. Not only are we living in an era of stubbornly entrenched neoliberalism, provoking angry ethno-nationalisms and climate-induced catastrophes of growing frequency and scale, we also lack a concrete idea of a real alternative. Centralized state planning turned out to be both economically irrational and ecologically destructive, filling warehouses with shoddy products and proving susceptible to autocratic bureaucratization. European welfare states and Keynesian full-employment policies proved unable to adapt to a context of slowing growth and ongoing deindustrialization<\/p>\n\n\n\n

not the free giving of money, as the automation theorists have it, but rather the abolition of private property and monetary exchange.<\/strong> One of the reasons for their relinquishing this key objective is that they tend to begin from the wrong transitional questions: starting from the assumption that full automation will be achieved, they go on to ask how we would need to transform society in order to save humanity from the mass joblessness it would cause and create a world of generalized human dignity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it is possible to reverse this thought experiment, so that instead of presupposing a fully automated economy and imagining the possibilities for a better and freer world created out of it, we begin from a world of generalized human dignity and then consider the implications for technical change in working to realize that world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Automation and the future of work: Part 1 Automation and the future of work: Part 2 As economic growth decelerates, job creation slows, and it is this, not technology-induced job destruction, which is depressing the global demand for labour. it is crucial that we reconceive of the present situation as marked not by the imminent … Continue reading “Aaron Benanav future of work”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77,115],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class","category-precarity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13850"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13884,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13850\/revisions\/13884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}