Because the gains from increased productivity have been reaped by executives, not workers. You keep working the same hours to make your bosses more money, when you could be working less instead. This income gap has been widening since the 1970s[1,2].
That kind of misrepresents the situation because our social and economic systems screw over the employees whose jobs are automated away.
Initially there's the same amount of work, but if they don't find something else to do, they won't be able to pay their bills or buy food, and they'll be out on the street.
So we end up with crappy, low pay service jobs that only exist so people have some way to scrape out a living.
The business owners benefit from automation, the employees lose.
That’s because we use automation to solve problems and create needs we never had.
I mean, nowadays we solved pretty any need the average human had 100 years ago.
Our leaders are convinced that we must grow and grow, but we basically have everything we need to be a happy species in the long term.
What we are doing now is working (here 6 days a week) to solve inexistant problems marketers are creating while going full throttle both in burn-out and in the environmental wall.
In the meantime, while we are working hard releasing SaaS softwares, there have never been fewer farmers which, historically, have been the job of pretty any human in the last millennia.
If we don’t change this paradigm, we are at risk of dying stupidly from climate induced famine or wars just because we needed the latest smartphone.
Don’t get me wrong : I understand how at the end of the day, in the current system, all of this supports our basic needs. But we need to think about another system because we are going to destroy environment and human psyche.
Why would it? It’s not like the amount of work to do is fixed and once it’s done, everyone can relax for the rest of the year. There’s always work to do and progress just speeds up as work becomes more efficient.
It's a whole bunch of toxic factors working synergistically.
The Greek economy is dominated by low-wage tourist-oriented businesses, a whopping 20-30% of employed people are directly involved in them.
And they have to compete against Turkey, Egypt, and other low-income countries. These businesses simply cannot pay high salaries, there's no profit margin for it. So people don't want to work in these miserable conditions, and business owners have problems attracting labor.
One wonders if increasing the compensation offered for these jobs might result in less vacancies. I mean, I've heard theories (only theories, mind you) that this could have some effect. Seems unlikely, but maybe worth a try?
> From the construction industry to the tourism sector...
those are the jobs which robots cannot currently take. And even for jobs which robots can do (manufacturing), they won't be used if the salaries are so low that humans are cheaper.
People not working at all, or working significantly less, is not acceptable by any political system of the western countries. The proof here, is the exponential rate in which debt goes up. That debt is directly funding the anti-automation each political system imposes. In other words, automation has to be stopped, and it's gonna take as much money as it needs.
This anti-automation process, created the biggest bubbles in history, equity bubble, real estate bubble, government bond bubble, pharma bubble, cryptocurrency bubble, currency bubble in short TEB(The Everything Bubble).
That's gonna end of course, and soon. It has just started yesterday actually with some triple A derivatives blowing up again like in 2007. By the end of the summer, the first bubbles will start popping off. It's gonna be fun.
[EDIT] There are more bubbles, I just put some in there.
[EDIT] The triple A blowing up is not correct.
Automation's in its infancy. What makes you assume you can draw any conclusions about its effects in its maturity from the current economic situation in Greece?
Right. So they can optionally work weekends and get compensated with penalty rates. Can't really see an issue here? We have the same system in Australia for lower paid workers.
I'm confused because economically it doesn't add up.
Shortages of labor should lead to higher wages. Supply and demand.
So it would make sense to relax laws prohibiting working more than 40hrs in order to unleash additional economic output i.e. increase the amount of money made.
The article claims that for some reason that defies logic, it will just make employers demand more work for same amount of money.
I see two possibilities for that.
A country-wide collusion between employers to fix wages. That doesn't seem possible. If employer A has profit to spare and could make even more profit if he had more employees, what logic would lead him to NOT raise wages and steal workers from employer B? The wages should raise because workers would migrate to the highest paying jobs.
Or there just isn't profit to pay more in which case there's noting the government can do either way.
Greek workers have the option to work in any of the 27 EU countries, and a few non-EU countries like Switzerland and Norway.
Given that there is a shortage of skilled workers prompting this policy, it makes little sense to allow employers to demand more unpaid overtime of workers. That just means more Greeks working outside of Greece.
Greek workers already work more hours than any other EU country while making basically no money, so making Greeks work even more hours should probably not be a government priority.
Removing needless regulation and speeding up government permits would be a better idea.
> A country-wide collusion between employers to fix wages. That doesn't seem possible.
Why? I would rather guess that this is very common. Obviously, they cannot fix wages directly, but they might outsource the job of estimating wages to some agencies providing the market wages for relevant positions. If every employer asks the same agencies, they all arrive at the same wages, with minor variations.
You must have never worked a fast food job. Companies will do anything but raise wages, even if it allows them to have way more revenue and higher reliability.
In Belgium, the "loonnormwet" or "wage norm law" controls how much workers are paid to ensure the country stays competitive. Jobs are also classified into pay scales based on their type and the qualifications needed.
This means that even if technical jobs are in high demand, if you have a lower educational degree — which is often the case — you might not earn much more because of it. As a result, these jobs may not attract many job seekers.
This situation creates a cycle where lower wages make these jobs less desirable, which can lead to difficulties in finding enough qualified workers. Now, business lobby groups like VOKA are considering bringing in immigrants from Mexico and India to fill these lower-paying positions.
The country is basically a huge cartel. The business owners have colluded to fix prices, wages, supply. In every industry or business sector. It's just effed up. Whoever has normal goals, like having a family that they can support and give them a quality of live and not just make meets end, is trying to find job in another country.
or maybe economics is the study of spherical cows trading fungible goods and services in an efficient market with perfect information, and the real world is none of those things.
> If employer A has profit to spare and could make even more profit if he had more employees, what logic would lead him to NOT raise wages and steal workers from employer B?
The government service that does work inspections was soft-abolished. There is tons of immigrants that work in slavery conditions. Undocumented workers are everywhere because the taxes are too high for both workers and businesses. There was write-off of old debts for millionairs. The link below shows how government documents get stored in my home town. There are also images of people from a tax office "moving documents for storage" by throwing them out of the window to the back of a truck. We are a third world country.
That's only true because expectations rise. It's the old economics problem definition of finite supply and infinite demand, which may be true for a lot of people but not all.
It is easier to provide for "basic", however that is defined, needs such as food and clothing than ever before, and there are a lot of NEETs who live minimal lives without working because of this.
There are two sectors which have an inelasticity problem, healthcare and housing. Healthcare demand is inelastic, and housing supply is inelastic. (Housing demand is inelastic to a point where everyone is housed, and healthcare supply is inelastic because of the lag of training newer professionals, but these have less of an effect than the converse.) These are two of the sectors seeing the most price increases even as consumer staples fall in price. Housing is already correcting itself through reduced birthrates. Healthcare is the tougher problem to solve.
Theoretically the amount of work to be done is infinite, but practically people can trade work for free time, and accept the lower earnings, and still survive. Many people already do this to varying degrees.
"to be done" is doing a great deal of work in "The amount of work to be done..."
There's no fixed definition of how much work needs to be done. Different people may have different interests and standards that lead them to prefer that more, less and/or different work is carried out. The amount of work to be done can certainly be bounded for some people in some situations.
They faked their books, literally, and underrepresented their governmental debt and deficit[1] . I assume the parent post includes state borrowing and spending in assessing "wealthiest"
Greece should have left the EU when the price of membership was revealed to be a generation of ruthless recession and exploitation. Somehow the german bankers convinced them it was worth it even though grexit would've been much more expensive to them then loan forgiveness. I don't see what Greece got out of EU membership other than a brain drain as their ambitious youth is forced to leave their country.
How about others in the EU bailing them out when they found out you actually can't just increase spend forever? Grexit would have been certain bankruptcy
Isn't Greece's unemployment rate the highest in the E.U.? Yes, they may be "low-quality" workers applying for jobs, but if a company can't find "high-quality," they must make do.
> but if a company can't find "high-quality," they must make do.
At some point it isn't economical to "make do", because paying for in-training employees eats into margins. Especially if "training" means you have to teach to read and write properly and teach how to do more arithmetic than counting on your fingers. No Greek business is going to squirm at investing a few months of training, but the reality is that many people are lacking years.
Greece has been ranking near last in the EU on some important education metrics (specifically those that affect composition of their workforce, like early leavers and those who never went to school at all) until they recently got their stuff together and did a complete 180, but for now they're still stuck with a workforce whose education isn't a strong match for the kind of work that is available now.
There's very little work for people with tertiary education in Greece, and at the same time there's a large number of people who simply hadn't had any formal education at all or dropped out early. The middle ground is extremely under served.
Companies have no pension to tie people to those jobs, people make more money by job hopping, companies don’t give large enough raises to keep people, companies lay off people at the slight change in fortune. Correspondingly it doesn’t make sense to spend the time training someone if they leave as soon as they are productive.
The problem with training new hires is that they can leave with the the skillset you invested in them. I realize of course that employer loyalty erosion may be in large part to blame for that being a big risk, but the issue should be acknowledged in an era of increased job switching.
Readit News
1. people say that robots are taking all the jobs
2. countries raise retirement age & adopt 6 day work week, because there's too much work to be done
I am not entirely sure, but maybe robots are not that bad, assuming appropriate taxation to fund pensions & 5-day work weeks?
[1]: https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
[2]: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/
Initially there's the same amount of work, but if they don't find something else to do, they won't be able to pay their bills or buy food, and they'll be out on the street.
So we end up with crappy, low pay service jobs that only exist so people have some way to scrape out a living.
The business owners benefit from automation, the employees lose.
I mean, nowadays we solved pretty any need the average human had 100 years ago.
Our leaders are convinced that we must grow and grow, but we basically have everything we need to be a happy species in the long term.
What we are doing now is working (here 6 days a week) to solve inexistant problems marketers are creating while going full throttle both in burn-out and in the environmental wall.
In the meantime, while we are working hard releasing SaaS softwares, there have never been fewer farmers which, historically, have been the job of pretty any human in the last millennia.
If we don’t change this paradigm, we are at risk of dying stupidly from climate induced famine or wars just because we needed the latest smartphone.
Don’t get me wrong : I understand how at the end of the day, in the current system, all of this supports our basic needs. But we need to think about another system because we are going to destroy environment and human psyche.
What a bizarre situation.
The Greek economy is dominated by low-wage tourist-oriented businesses, a whopping 20-30% of employed people are directly involved in them.
And they have to compete against Turkey, Egypt, and other low-income countries. These businesses simply cannot pay high salaries, there's no profit margin for it. So people don't want to work in these miserable conditions, and business owners have problems attracting labor.
When I was there, they gave huge cash discounts for everything.
> From the construction industry to the tourism sector...
those are the jobs which robots cannot currently take. And even for jobs which robots can do (manufacturing), they won't be used if the salaries are so low that humans are cheaper.
As that fear recedes, elites feel more comfortable squeezing us.
This anti-automation process, created the biggest bubbles in history, equity bubble, real estate bubble, government bond bubble, pharma bubble, cryptocurrency bubble, currency bubble in short TEB(The Everything Bubble).
That's gonna end of course, and soon. It has just started yesterday actually with some triple A derivatives blowing up again like in 2007. By the end of the summer, the first bubbles will start popping off. It's gonna be fun.
[EDIT] There are more bubbles, I just put some in there. [EDIT] The triple A blowing up is not correct.
Shortages of labor should lead to higher wages. Supply and demand.
So it would make sense to relax laws prohibiting working more than 40hrs in order to unleash additional economic output i.e. increase the amount of money made.
The article claims that for some reason that defies logic, it will just make employers demand more work for same amount of money.
I see two possibilities for that.
A country-wide collusion between employers to fix wages. That doesn't seem possible. If employer A has profit to spare and could make even more profit if he had more employees, what logic would lead him to NOT raise wages and steal workers from employer B? The wages should raise because workers would migrate to the highest paying jobs.
Or there just isn't profit to pay more in which case there's noting the government can do either way.
Given that there is a shortage of skilled workers prompting this policy, it makes little sense to allow employers to demand more unpaid overtime of workers. That just means more Greeks working outside of Greece.
Greek workers already work more hours than any other EU country while making basically no money, so making Greeks work even more hours should probably not be a government priority.
Removing needless regulation and speeding up government permits would be a better idea.
Why? I would rather guess that this is very common. Obviously, they cannot fix wages directly, but they might outsource the job of estimating wages to some agencies providing the market wages for relevant positions. If every employer asks the same agencies, they all arrive at the same wages, with minor variations.
This means that even if technical jobs are in high demand, if you have a lower educational degree — which is often the case — you might not earn much more because of it. As a result, these jobs may not attract many job seekers.
This situation creates a cycle where lower wages make these jobs less desirable, which can lead to difficulties in finding enough qualified workers. Now, business lobby groups like VOKA are considering bringing in immigrants from Mexico and India to fill these lower-paying positions.
Don't assume the market is rational. History shows otherwise.
Cause employer B is his buddy and they regularly play together at the golf course? Collusion among the elite classes is extremely common. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/04/23...
https://www.lamiareport.gr/index.php/topika/item/282557-lami...
Paradoxically, efficiency generates more available work, not less.
The amount of work to be done is not finite.
That's only true because expectations rise. It's the old economics problem definition of finite supply and infinite demand, which may be true for a lot of people but not all.
It is easier to provide for "basic", however that is defined, needs such as food and clothing than ever before, and there are a lot of NEETs who live minimal lives without working because of this.
There are two sectors which have an inelasticity problem, healthcare and housing. Healthcare demand is inelastic, and housing supply is inelastic. (Housing demand is inelastic to a point where everyone is housed, and healthcare supply is inelastic because of the lag of training newer professionals, but these have less of an effect than the converse.) These are two of the sectors seeing the most price increases even as consumer staples fall in price. Housing is already correcting itself through reduced birthrates. Healthcare is the tougher problem to solve.
Theoretically the amount of work to be done is infinite, but practically people can trade work for free time, and accept the lower earnings, and still survive. Many people already do this to varying degrees.
There's no fixed definition of how much work needs to be done. Different people may have different interests and standards that lead them to prefer that more, less and/or different work is carried out. The amount of work to be done can certainly be bounded for some people in some situations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis
How did we lose the art of training new hires?
At some point it isn't economical to "make do", because paying for in-training employees eats into margins. Especially if "training" means you have to teach to read and write properly and teach how to do more arithmetic than counting on your fingers. No Greek business is going to squirm at investing a few months of training, but the reality is that many people are lacking years.
Greece has been ranking near last in the EU on some important education metrics (specifically those that affect composition of their workforce, like early leavers and those who never went to school at all) until they recently got their stuff together and did a complete 180, but for now they're still stuck with a workforce whose education isn't a strong match for the kind of work that is available now.
There's very little work for people with tertiary education in Greece, and at the same time there's a large number of people who simply hadn't had any formal education at all or dropped out early. The middle ground is extremely under served.