Progress: ain’t no stopping it, so let’s make it work for us

The Fraunhofer Institute of Industrial Engineering has published a study sponsored by Germany’s labor unions and automobile industry which concludes that the transition to electric vehicles will lead to the loss of some 75,000 jobs in the EU powerhouse on the basis that by 2030 its car pool is still made up of 60% fossil fuels, 15% hybrids and 25% electric. If the transition is speeded up, job losses could reach 100,000, adds the report.

The German car industry employs some 840,000 people, of which 210,000 work in engine production: a battery factory requires only one fifth of the workforce required by an engine factory and assembling an electric vehicle requires 30% of the time needed to make a diesel or petrol car.

Of the 97 million vehicles sold around the world in 2017, only 2% were electric. However, the number of electric vehicles on the roads tripled between 2013 and 2015, and doubled again between 2015 and 2017. Both the range of electric cars and the number of recharging points have increased significantly, which offers some hope for the progressive adoption of this technology. In 2018, sales of electric vehicles are expected to reach 1.6 million and as manufacturing costs fall below conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles, a milestone due to be passed in 2030, evert year should see consecutive growth in sales, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance(BNEF). China is set to sell more than half of the world’s electric vehiclesthanks to government incentives and policies similar to those in California, resulting in an even greater increase in numbers and further economies of scale. As electric vehicles become the norm, the car industry will experience change not seen in decades.

The result of progressive automation and more efficient vehicles will hit jobs. What does the German automotive industry, its unions and governments around the world, intend to do? Avoid this? Really? What’s the alternative? Should we protect jobs by turning away from progress and the adoption of any innovation? The short answer is that we simply can’t.

If we want a minimally inhabitable planet and better living standards, we have to be ever-more efficient. If industry and the labor unions, rooted in the past and concerned only with maintaining an untenable situation have their way, we have no future. Despite protests, throughout history, jobs and sometimes entire industries have disappeared, to be replaced by new and previously unimaginable jobs, which in turn has helped in the transition toward a more efficient economy, sustained growth in the generation of wealth and better living standards and quality of life. There are many industries that, faced with a disruptive process, have resorted to lobbying to hold on to their profits, and it is more important than ever to ignore those efforts and show that progress will continue, with or without them.

Fighting for a more equitable distribution of wealth or for alternatives for those who lose their jobs makes sense, but only if we bear in mind that any brake on the adoption of technologies that generate greater efficiency goes completely against logic and common sense. We’re going to need more training and a workforce with new skills and possibly unconditional basic income models as we enter the next industrial revolution, but the loss of jobs can never be a brake for the adoption of technologies that generate higher efficiencies.

(En espa?ol, aquí)