Key jobs we’ve lost, and created
Bernard Salt AM
Corporate Speaker | Business Advisor | Columnist & Author | Podcast & TV Presenter | Media Commentator | (Former) Adjunct Professor | Business Founder & Executive Director | Director | LinkedIn Top Voice 2020, 2018
You know the how the story of employment and disruption goes.
Manufacturing jobs are being -disrupted by automation and globalisation causing blue-collar workers to lose their jobs and, with the advent of driverless cars, even more will be displaced. But this is only the beginning: the development of artificial intelligence systems that delivered the likes of IBM Watson will diminish white-collar jobs in accounting, law and even medicine. Work is becoming a scarce commodity.
Allow this disruption to fester for long enough and a schism opens up between knowledge workers, entrepreneurs and the investors, who participate in the productive process, and the displaced and the disempowered who become increasingly resentful about their lack of opportunity.
Disenfranchised voters quickly shift their allegiance to anyone who promises salvation.
Economic output continues apace courtesy of automation but with fewer actual contributors and even fewer owners, in farming, manufacturing, and professional services — income and wealth is increasingly concentrated into the hands of a few.
Our cities then begin to -assume the hue of the go/no-go zones that have long marked rigidly divided places like Los Angeles, Greater New York and Paris.
In this dystopian view of -Australian society by, say, 2030 the inflection point will be regarded as this decade’s disruption which so seduced us with promised efficiencies but which in hindsight were cost-savings achieved by rendering workers redundant.
And, to a certain extent, while economic output and the general tax base — or borrowing capacity — is rising there is always a way to salve the pain of the economy’s most marginalised workers.
That’s one view of the future of work. Another view is that while some jobs are lost others are created. Australia has added three million workers since 2000 and the unemployment rate has dropped from 6.3 to 5.7 per cent. If automation and disruption have the capacity to erode worker’s jobs it hasn’t happened yet...