Robots Aren't Stealing Your Job

We hear a lot about how economic downturns prompt investment in automation, but the authors don’t find that. 

By Cory Doctorow / pluralistic.net

You've probably heard a lot about how robutts are coming to steal your
jerb, but even a cursory look at both employment stats and the state of
automation tell a very different tale.

A pair of essays from Sareeta Amrute, Alex Rosenblat, and Brian Callaci
from Data & Society take a deep dive into the reality of precarious
employment and its relationship to automation.

In "Why Are Good Jobs Disappearing if Robots Aren’t Taking Them?" the
authors blame the disappearance of good jobs not on automation, but on
the ability of apps to circumvent employment law (the gig economy).

Tech also simplifies the process of outsourcing to low-waged, poor
workers overseas, and surveillance and real-time predictive tools allow
employers to shift the costs of slow business times onto their workers.

We hear a lot about how economic downturns prompt investment in
automation, but the authors don't find that. Rather, "firms restructure
in response to downturns in ways that create fewer permanent job
opportunities than in the past."

Crises allow for permanent changes in employment norms: " What is at
risk now, is that the management techniques of gig companies will become
protected by U.S. law and embedded in the national economy."

There are few robots on the horizon in the US workplace: "The rate of
productivity growth has been slowing, not accelerating, in recent
years...At the same time, investments in capital equipment, information
processing equipment, and software have been slowing since 2000."

On to part two: "The Robots are Just Automated Management Tools": the
hallmarks of the modern workplace are "Surveil, Schedule, Speed Up" and
all three are supercharged by tech.

Consider how workplaces use scheduling software to dynamically and
unpredictably assign shifts in 15-minute increments, while equipping
workers with trackers that monitor their every move and software
accelerates the pace of work.

It's cost-shifting, from employers to workers: workers have to be
on-call 24/7 but are guaranteed no work;  the breathing time a
stock-picker in a warehouse gets before picking up an item is squeezed
out by a light beam that skewers the item as soon as they are in position.

But the authors hold out hope for worker power, as the realization that
"essential workers" are the lowest-paid, worst-treated among us gives
workers a newfound sense of their power and the public a newfound
respect for their work.

"In short, the robots are coming, but slowly, and not in the ways they
are often portrayed. What’s actually happening is that precarious work
is becoming more visible, while management software hides the changing
the nature of working conditions."

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.