Assignment
Write a memo in 100 words, bringing out the main points of the articles.
Document 1
Aug 21st 2013, 12:59 by R.A. | LONDON
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-markets-0
ANTHROPOLOGIST David Graeber has written an amusing essay on the nature of work in a modern economy, which seems to involve lots of people doing meaningless tasks they hate:
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
It is not the case, he writes, that people have to keep working to produce the consumer goods for which the rich world hungers. Outrageously, meaningless employment—in what he calls "bullshit jobs"—is concentrated in “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers”:
In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector...
Why in the world would firms spend extraordinary amounts of money employing people to do worthless tasks (especially when they've shown themselves to be exceedingly good at not employing people to do worthless tasks)? Says Mr Graeber:
The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s).
I am immediately bursting with questions. Such as, should we conclude that protesters around the world—in Brazil, India, North Africa, Turkey—are in fact too happy? How does the ruling class co-ordinate all this hiring, and if much of the economy's employment is useless in the first place why not just keep them on during recessions?
But there is actually an important point here. The place to start is to recognise that, romance aside, many of the industrial jobs that have been automated away were incredibly tedious and unpleasant for those doing them. The development of assembly line processes contributed to rising worker wages in part because of increased productivity...but also because employers were tired of training workers only to lose them once they realised they'd be affixing Tab A to Frame B, repeatedly, all day long.
Employers had to retain such workers—had to pay them a wage sufficient to keep them on the job despite its dreadful tedium—because the machines of the era lacked the manual dexterity to complete the required tasks, and so a line of human machines was the only way to make the highly productive assembly-line system work. As technology evolved, however, automating routine tasks became ever easier. And the high wages needed to compensate labourers for the soul-crushing repetitiveness of their work gave employers every incentive to automate routine tasks as soon as it was technically feasible.
Perhaps you see where this is going.
As technology has improved, it has become ever easier to dispense with human labour in mechanical processes. There are still jobs where a very high level of physical dexterity and task flexibility is needed—in construction, for example, or janitorial work—and people continue to do those jobs. But it is not surprising that employment growth has shifted elsewhere. And administrative jobs are the modern equivalent of the industrial line worker.
Over the past century the world economy has grown increasingly complex. The goods being provided are more complex; the supply chains used to build them are more complex; the systems to market, sell and distribute them are more complex; the means to finance it all is more complex; and so on. This complexity is what makes us rich. But it is an enormous pain to manage. I'd say that one way to manage it all would be through teams of generalists—craftsman managers who mind the system from the design stage right through to the customer service calls—but there is no way such complexity would be economically workable in that world (just as cheap, ubiquitous automobiles would have been impossible in a world where teams of generalist mechanics produced cars one at a time).
No, the efficient way to do things is to break businesses up into many different kinds of tasks, allowing for a very high level of specialisation. And so you end up with the clerical equivalent of repeatedly affixing Tab A to Frame B: shuffling papers, management of the minutiae of supply chains, and so on. Disaggregation may make it look meaningless, since many workers end up doing things incredibly far removed from the end points of the process; the days when the iron ore goes in one door and the car rolls out the other are over. But the idea is the same.
One question is why today's workers aren't rewarded with high wages for their suffering. And one possible answer is that, well, they are. Real wages for today's clerical workers are far higher than they were for manufacturing workers a century ago, and the work, for all its tedium, probably isn't nearly as unpleasant. Administrative workers get to sit down in climate-controlled offices, tweeting and playing fantasy football on their desktop when time allows. If firms had to pay more to get a body in the deskchair, they would.
Technology continues to improve, however. Just as robots became ever better at various manual tasks over the past century—and were therefore able to replace human labour in a growing array of jobs, beginning with the most routine—computer control systems are able to handle ever more of the work done by human administrative workers. Jobs from truck driver to legal aid to medical diagnostician to customer service technician will soon be threatened by machines. Starting with the most routine tasks. Human labour will not be eliminated entirely from these sectors. Jobs that require a particularly high level of task flexibility, or creativity, or empathy may continue to employ people (for a while). Yet most office jobs will eventually go the way of the dodo.
And at that point advanced economies may find it necessary to address what is really the central complaint in Mr Graeber's essay. The issue is not that jobs used to have meaning and now they don't; most jobs in most periods have undoubtedly been staffed by people who would prefer to be doing something else. The issue is that too little of the recent gains from technological advance and economic growth have gone toward giving people the time and resources to enjoy their lives outside work. Early in the industrial era real wages soared and hours worked declined. In the past generation, by contrast, real wages have grown slowly and workweeks haven't grown shorter.
The development of large-scale technological unemployment or underemployment, however, would force rich societies to revisit a system that primarily allocates purchasing power via earned wages. And that, in turn, could allow households to get by or even thrive while working many fewer hours than is now typically the case—albeit through a pretty hefty level of income redistribution. They would then be free to write poetry or tutor disadvantaged children, though we shouldn't be surprised if most use their new leisure to spend more time with a beloved video game.
We can't be certain that the robots are coming for all our jobs. Disemployment in administrative jobs could create new, and perhaps highly remunerative, work in sectors or occupations we can't yet anticipate. If we're lucky, that work will be engaging and meaningful. Yet there is a decent chance that "bullshit" administrative jobs are merely a halfway house between "bullshit" industrial jobs and no jobs at all. Not because of the conniving of rich interests, but because machines inevitably outmatch humans at handling bullshit without complaining.
Document 2
Apr 9th 2015, 15:12 by R.D.
WITH less than a month to go before Britain's elections on May 7th, the Labour Party is keen to show its left-wing credentials. The wealthy are one target: the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, wants to hit Britons who live in homes worth £2m ($2.9m) or more with a new “mansion tax”; foreigners (and Britons) who dip in and out of the country to duck taxes can expect a tougher time too. Mr Miliband also hopes to use Britain’s anaemic wage growth—in real terms, pay is still below its 2004 level—to his advantage, championing the plight of the worker and castigating greedy bosses. The main battle line is “zero hours” contracts, job deals which seem to give bosses the power to fire workers (by reducing their hours to zero) on a whim. Labour will limit the use of these contracts to short periods (12 weeks) if it wins in May. Is it right to do so?
The “zero hours” contract is a new name for an old idea. For centuries Britain’s fields and orchards have teemed with farmhands in August; the pickers and cutters know that once the harvest is in the work dries up. Factory workers experience varying hours too: even in Britain’s industrial pomp those toiling in Welsh mines and Manchester factories would be put on “short time” when growth slowed. For all its advances modern manufacturing still uses short time to cut costs when a shock hits: Toyota cut its staff hours in 2011 after the Japanese tsunami. But in the modern British economy over 80% of the GDP comes from the service sector and it is here, in shops, bars and restaurants, that zero-hours contracts are used by more than half of all firms. The contracts, which have no precise definition in British law, are typically built around a central clause: "The Company is under no obligation to provide work to you at any time and you are under no obligation to accept any work offered by the Company at any time.”
This uncertainty over hours has worried the British left for a while: Tony Blair, then leader of the opposition Labour party, pledged to end them in 1995. But since then they have flowered. In a 2015 study the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated that there were 697,000 people on these contracts between October and December 2014, working an average of 25 hours a week. The fact that this number—currently representing 2.3% of Britain’s 30m strong workforce—is growing may seem worrying. But while a third of the workers covered in the ONS study wanted more hours, the majority did not. Other studies show that some workers like the two-way flexibility the contracts provide. A 2013 study by the CIPD found that 47% of workers on zero hour contracts were "very satisfied" or "satisfied" with their deal, with 72% believing they had choice over the hours they worked. Workers in other countries like informality. In a 2009 study of Japan’s economy the IMF found that non-regular work had risen from 20% of the workforce in 1990 to 34% in 2007: survey evidence revealed that the arrangements were popular with Japanese workers, allowing women with young children and retired workers seeking a pension top up to enter the workforce.
Businesses that run on zero-hours contracts are against the ban. Firms including Sports Direct, a retailer, JD Wetherspoon, a pub chain, and both McDonald's and Burger King run on zero hours contracts, with more than 80% of their workforce on the flexible deals. While it is natural to wish, as Mr Milliband does, that a burger flipper were paid more it is too easy to forget the other side of the deal—workers are shoppers too. No-one in Britain expects these outfits to offer top-notch sports kit, the finest ales or the heartiest burgers—they go because they are cheap. If banning the contracts raises these firms’ costs it could lead to unpopular price rises. That is not to say Mr Miliband is entirely wrong. Firms that subvert labour laws by using zero hours contracts to avoid providing holiday, sick pay and other worker rights should be stopped from doing so. Bosses running businesses where reputation matters more than price (Buckingham Palace, the Tate and Premiership football clubs all use the contracts) should offer more stable deals. But simply outlawing them is wrong. Britain’s wages will grow only if unemployment continues to fall and productivity growth returns. Banning a form of contract that many firms and workers seem to like, and making the market less flexible, is not the way to achieve those goals.
Essay
300 words
Should this type of contract be used in France to create more jobs and a more fluid labor market?
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