Work or Welfare?
25th January 2022
It’s a compelling vision in some ways, but right now it looks dystopic. The ranks of what Marx called the “reserve army of the unemployed” are simply disengaging. A decade ago, Gallup’s Jim Clifton wrote about The Coming Jobs War, in which he predicted a global struggle for diminishing employment. Now there is plenty of work but people are not interested. In the US, labor participation rates have fallen from 80 percent in 1950 to 61 percent now, down from 64.4 percent in 2010. Nearly one-third of American working-age males are not in the labor force, suffering high rates of incarceration, or drug, alcohol, and other health issues.
And, to be sure, opportunities may be further reduced by technology, which could accelerate the loss of many kinds of jobs that once provided a means of upward mobility: postal workers, switchboard operators, machinists, computer operators, bank tellers, travel agents. For the 90 million Americans who work in such jobs—and their counterparts elsewhere—the future could be bleak. By 2030, Oxford Economics predicts that 20 million factory jobs worldwide will fall to automation—1.5 million in the US, 2.5 million in the EU, and 12.5 million in China.
The pandemic clearly accelerated this process, notably in the service sector. With the shift to online and takeout food, chains like McDonald’s are perfecting electronic delivery systems that reduce the need for human labor. Large capital investments are necessary for such adaptations, which—as France’s Thomas Piketty has noted—favors larger corporations as opposed to smaller family businesses.