Voters need to understand that an effective federal government is essential to balance the interests of workers versus corporate executives and their investors. The last three decades of a declining federal government have resulted in the condition Businessweek describes in the column below.
Technology is replacing workers with machines at an accelerating rate, and corporations and their investors keep almost all of the benefits for themselves. Because the past three decades of anti-labor government (and globalization) corporations now have all the power and wages are stagnating or declining relative to inflation.
From Bloomberg Businessweek, January 15, 2012
Did That Robot Take My Job?
Companies have been buying technology instead of hiring, and Okun's Law is broken
The U.S. produces almost one-quarter more goods and services today than it did in 1999, while using almost precisely the same number of workers. It’s as if $2.5 trillion worth of stuff—the equivalent of the entire U.S. economy circa 1958—materialized out of thin air.
Although businesses haven’t added many people, they’ve certainly bulked up on machines. Spending on equipment and software hit an all-time high in the third quarter of 2011. “Huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less,” vaporizing jobs for everyone from steelworkers to travel agents, President Barack Obama warned in December.
So are robots getting all the good jobs? This year may provide the answer as the economy gathers steam. Most economists, cheered by 540,000 hires since Labor Day, say technology inevitably destroys some jobs even as it ultimately creates new ones. But with more than 20 million Americans still jobless or underemployed, others worry that something fundamental has changed.
“What’s different now is the speed and scale of what’s happening,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business. Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, co-authors of the recently published book Race Against the Machine, argue that the economy is in the early stages of a “Great Restructuring” that is hollowing out the labor market and exacerbating inequality….
Technology is not just revolutionizing the assembly line. Paralegals can’t match software in accurately searching thousands of documents for specific words or patterns. New software apps easily best journeyman sportswriters at penning routine game wrap-ups.
“The era we’re in is one in which the scope of tasks that can be automated is increasing rapidly, and in areas where we used to think those were our best skills, things that require thinking,” says David Autor, a labor economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As digital technology spreads, the classic relationship between rising output and rising employment—known as Okun’s Law—now appears to be broken. If the law, which postulates that every 3 percent gain in output should reduce the jobless rate by a percentage point, still applied, then today’s nearly 9 percent rate would be about 1 percent.
To better understand how government was responsible for reducing the standard workweek from 60 to 40 hours, 6 days to five, check out the file
the most important two-minute video for election 2012
Just as happened in 1938, work needs to be spread out and the lowest paid workers must receive a federally mandated minimum wage. If this seems unrealistic, it’s because people forget what economists, sociologists and “futurists” predicted in the 1960s. They cited the explosion in computers, robotics and technology generally, and predicted that by the year 2000 the average workweek would be 32 hours, 4 days.
Of course, it never happened, Government didn’t legislate conditions that would force corporations to share their increasing wealth with the workers who made them successful. Instead, they did what they always do when not forced to do otherwise: they minimized labor costs by terminating workers and increasing workloads.