From Our Swindon Correspondent:
No, This Simply isn’t Right
From The Guardian
We have now lived through what one might call Automation 1.0. The paradigmatic example is car manufacturing. Henry Ford’s production line metamorphosed into Toyota’s “lean machine” and thence to the point where few humans, if any, are visible on an assembly line. Once upon a time, the car industry employed hundreds of thousands of people. We called them blue-collar workers. Now it employs far fewer.
Given the vast benefits to all of both automation and trade I don’t tend to worry very much about the relative changes in position and income stemming from the same sources. But it’s worth reminding ourselves that there are indeed costs to go with the benefits:
Work of the past, work of the future
David Autor 19 March 2019
Labour markets in US cities today are vastly more educated and skill-intensive than they were 50 years ago, but urban non-college workers now perform much less skilled work than they did.…
See MoreWe are unlike any other nation, whilst only 25pc of our workforce are employed in manual occupations, 60pc of us believe we are yet to be liberated to the middle classes. Consider we don’t wish to be. The definition of one’s class is said to be distinguishable by occupation and assets, those who have nothing to sell other than their labour and skills. The definition is outdated, and yet the worldly perception of a quintessential British worker remains a salt-of-the-earth steal worker labouring to feed hungry children with mismatched shoes and mucky faces.…
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