2020 Elections

[mahagonny]

However, I expect people to come forward to point out that a minimum wage of $15/h is much more likely to accelerate automation of certain jobs, especially in places where $15/h at full-time, year-round employment (~$30k) is currently the median household income, than helping current employees in that job category.  Even in my current small town, self-serve kiosks at restaurants and in the grocery store have sprung up, mostly in response to a local labor shortage even for the unionized grocery checkers.  The technology exists to replace repetitive tasks that don't require human thought and national chains are likely to continue to roll out that technology.

Given how many people need to work two minimum-wage jobs to get by, automization isn't necessarily a problem. I'm willing to bet that someone with two minimum-wage jobs would be pretty happy to have one $15-an-hour job instead. So for people in that demographic, a 50% switchover from service jobs to automation is a pretty good trade.

Perhaps I was unclear:  many of the people currently working two minimum wage jobs will end up with zero jobs as the tasks either go to robots or are foisted onto self-service by the customers.  Having workers be expensive will accelerate eliminating the humans for tasks that are easy to automate or are easy enough to make the public do.  Back offices used to have tons of clerks; now we enter our own class registrations, book orders, and travel expenses.

It's fun to speculate, isn't it? The technology for self checkout in the supermarket is hardly new. Yet I find most shoppers choose the lane with a live person in it, for some reason. Maybe we like the contact with human beings.
Then again there are also a few in our society whose blood boils at the idea of an elected official or a union pushing through a change that gives low earners a break, based on the idea that they deserve it.

[ciao_yall]

Regardless, a $12 000 UBI that replaces SNAP, SSI, etc. isn't going to be the solution, especially when it's funded by a VAT that gets passed on to the consumer.

(That said, I'm not at all against VATs!)

On the subject of automation and UBI, Andrew Yang has been profiled by The New York Times and was a guest on WBUR's On Point. In other words, he's getting more free publicity now that he's outlasted some of the other (former) Dem candidates. He makes self-deprecating remarks, in a humorous way, so I doubt he's afflicted by the kind of narcissistic arrogance that Trump has.

UBI doesn't solve the problem(s).

1) People want to contribute, not just collect money and sit around.
2) The more automated society becomes, the more tech jobs are created and need to be filled by educated people.
3) Throwing out a few dollars without making sure there is sufficient affordable housing, food and health care doesn't mean the people will have their basic needs met.

[polly_mer]

I agree that:

I'm willing to bet that someone with two minimum-wage jobs would be pretty happy to have one $15-an-hour job instead. So for people in that demographic, a 50% switchover from service jobs to automation is a pretty good trade.

and

Yet I find most shoppers choose the lane with a live person in it, for some reason.

are true.  However, that doesn't mean that what's going to happen within a system that has limited resources and individual actors have a wide array of individual priorities.  Adding new constraints on the system tends to not yield the exact results that people imposing those constraints would like because humans are individual actors.

For example, my husband will not do self-check out at the grocery store if any lane with a human is available.  When we moved here, my husband did a targeted study of how good the checkers were and would pick a lane based on which of his favorites were on duty. 

However, in the past six months, the grocery store went from 3 self-check stations (themselves new since we moved here not quite 3 years ago) to 20 and eliminated human-staffed lanes to make floor space.  My husband now comes home after every grocery store trip with a complaint about how long he spent in the human-staffed lane. 

I seriously doubt that if the human-staffed lanes went completely away, my husband would walk out of the store, leaving behind a full cart, multiple times until the human lane came back. There's only one grocery store in town and the next nearest comparable store from a different chain is 2 hours round trip of just driving. 

Visiting other chains within reasonable driving distance indicates the changes are not just our local branch.  Self-check is now the way I go unless I have something complicated enough that I will need substantial assistance.  If I'm just scanning bar codes, then I can do that as quickly as any other human and I'd rather get out of the store faster than stand in line longer.

I worry quite a bit what happens to the humans who are in jobs that can be automated/retasked to the general public.  What do we do as a society when we get to an even more severe split that has a minority of adults working very good jobs, some adults underemployed and yet still employed (much like many adjuncts now), and a large enough fraction of adults unable do any of the jobs available because having average intelligence and being of average physical ability is insufficient?  Ciao_yall is right with her points.

On the employing side, a BA/BS degree alone is already not sufficient for many jobs and requires either substantial internship experience or another several years of targeted on-the-job training, even for career-focused degrees like engineering.  It's true that someone who graduates from a good university with any field can be trained in various jobs, but they will always lose to the person who has a similar degree and experience when we don't need every college-degreed person to fill the jobs we have.  We're already seeing this situation on the employing side and this is one reason that many middle-aged adjuncts keep pushing back that they are applying for hundreds of jobs of all types and getting nothing other than another round of classes.

In my lifetime, full-serve gas stations as a standard amenity have gone away.  The secretarial pool is gone in favor of big wigs getting administrative assistants and everyone else dealing with the automated systems and doing their own typing/printing/copying/uploading.   The recent IHE article bemoaning the time we used to just send emails instead of filling out all the forms is a great illustration of the difference between what individual people want and what choices are made to change the system to use technology to shift tasks.  Technology has replaced the elevator operators, most of the telephone operators, and many other jobs that a person of average intelligence and willingness to learn could do with a little training.  Running a family farm with good machinery and modern business software is something that can be done with one or two individuals and no longer required many hired hands who are skilled, but not academically minded.

The question in my mind isn't how to raise minimum wage or support unions to tinker at the edges of a broken system.  The question in my mind is when we're going to get serious about addressing the increasing anger of people who realize they are getting a raw deal  and who are ready to do violence because the system is broken enough that a violent uprising is a better personal bet than continuing to be shafted under the system.  People who decide they have nothing left to lose tend to be dangerous when they group together.

The Iranian revolution happened in my lifetime and resulted in a modern country turning back the clock to live in third-world squalor.  The Syrian refugees include normal middle-class people who had every reason to believe they could live as their parents did and now the continuing tragedy is they have nowhere to go.  Reports like https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/01/clashes-may-day-protesters-march-cities-across-europe-paris worry me, especially as it becomes clear those were not one-time isolated incidents precipitated by one action.

Asserting that people like me just hate the little guy means missing the bigger picture of our true concerns.  Discussion then fails because viewing people with different priorities as just plain evil means those folks can be dismissed as unworthy of the time/effort required to understand and try to move forward together.  In the extreme situation, people then turn to violence because evil must be defeated and crushed out of existence.

[mahagonny]

I agree that:

I'm willing to bet that someone with two minimum-wage jobs would be pretty happy to have one $15-an-hour job instead. So for people in that demographic, a 50% switchover from service jobs to automation is a pretty good trade.

and

Yet I find most shoppers choose the lane with a live person in it, for some reason.

are true.  However, that doesn't mean that what's going to happen within a system that has limited resources and individual actors have a wide array of individual priorities.  Adding new constraints on the system tends to not yield the exact results that people imposing those constraints would like because humans are individual actors.

Are you referring to resources that are limited by an employer's ability to pay or resources limited by an employer's culture of greed? Big supermarket chains could pay an increased minimum wage and remain solvent. or some might think differently.   https://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/market-basket-loyalty.html

Asserting that people like me just hate the little guy means missing the bigger picture of our true concerns.  Discussion then fails because viewing people with different priorities as just plain evil means those folks can be dismissed as unworthy of the time/effort required to understand and try to move forward together.  In the extreme situation, people then turn to violence because evil must be defeated and crushed out of existence.

If you're thinking of me, don't worry yourself. The only violence I have experience with is falling in love. But your analysis supposes that everyone works together on everything. It's not true at all. People who don't deserve to be part of a solution can be fought or outvoted.

[Parasaurolophus]

Just saw the climate town hall. Watching Biden was incredibly painful. He's beyond doddering.

[marshwiggle]

I agree that:

I'm willing to bet that someone with two minimum-wage jobs would be pretty happy to have one $15-an-hour job instead. So for people in that demographic, a 50% switchover from service jobs to automation is a pretty good trade.

and

Yet I find most shoppers choose the lane with a live person in it, for some reason.

are true.  However, that doesn't mean that what's going to happen within a system that has limited resources and individual actors have a wide array of individual priorities.  Adding new constraints on the system tends to not yield the exact results that people imposing those constraints would like because humans are individual actors.

Are you referring to resources that are limited by an employer's ability to pay or resources limited by an employer's culture of greed? Big supermarket chains could pay an increased minimum wage and remain solvent. or some might think differently.   https://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/market-basket-loyalty.html

This still doesn't solve the problem. A well-meaning employer still faces the choice of whether to raise the wage for all N checkout workers, OR to replace some of them with self-checkout machines and increase wages for the remaining workers even more.  It's the same as the adjunct dilemma; is it better to have part-time jobs for several people, or to consolidate them so you have better, full-time jobs for a much smaller number of people?

The more universal a benefit is, the smaller it will have to be. By targetting it to fewer individuals, it can be bigger.

[mahagonny]

It's better to have something with which to push back against those people who have a cultivated antipathy for the worker at the bottom of the heap, a plan to spread that antipathy around, and time and money to devote to the task.

[polly_mer]

Are you referring to resources that are limited by an employer's ability to pay or resources limited by an employer's culture of greed? Big supermarket chains could pay an increased minimum wage and remain solvent. or some might think differently.   https://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/market-basket-loyalty.html

1) Resources are always limited.  For perspective, the typical profit margin in the grocery business is about 2%.  That's not a lot of wiggle room to make any errors.

Why can Market Basket do things that other grocery stores do not?  https://www.boston.com/news/business/2014/07/28/how-market-basket-keeps-prices-low indicates that Market Basket succeeds in part by taking the actions that worried proponents for the little guy in the early twentieth century:

"They worried that chains would accrue enough market power to force farmers and manufacturers to accept lower prices. They worried about vertical integration—chain stores acquiring factories that would produce the goods that they would then distribute, closing the economic loop and shutting competitors out of the game."

2) Being liked a lot through personal interactions is not the same as being effective at whatever the actual goals of an organization are.  For example, Mahagonny's linked article has zero information regarding why the CEO was being fired.  It turns out that the fired CEO wasn't all that nice a guy in ways that the workers didn't see.  One way that Market Basket was unusual was it had had no debt and then it took on debt to put that fired CEO back in charge as a majority stakeholder. 

I'd never heard of Market Basket until Mahagonny's link; one thing I find fascinating is how little of the coverage actually deals with profit/loss and how much is focused on the public outcry that happened.  Even more recent articles focus on the weeks of boycott 5 years ago and not the actual financial figures related to being a successful business. It seems true that "important lesson: If you can sell goods cheaply enough, you can become politically unassailable—even if your approach to doing business makes society less prosperous overall."

3) Nothing stays static. Reading the historical treatment of the changes in grocery stores in the US through the 20th century is pretty interesting, especially as it illustrates what's now normal and was in fact a huge change that greatly affected the little guy worker.  For example, the chains eliminated home delivery; those are jobs that were just gone and the net effect is much less convenient for the parent wrangling several small children, the elderly who were essentially housebound, and others for whom just getting to the grocery store is a hardship.  In the time before credit cards, having to pay for groceries upfront was a hardship for many, even if the overall monthly bill eventually went down.

The chains started supporting unions because "It was simply cheaper to work with unions who supported the existence of the chains—essentially buying a supportive constituency—than to see their stores taxed out of existence. Unions, for their part, couldn't get very far organizing independent stores three employees at a time. They, too, needed the chains to survive."  For the record, Market Basket is not unionized.

Predictions for grocery stores of the future don't appear to be preserving what we have.  For example, One prediction is grocery stores will be smaller and carry fewer items.  Aldi's is listed as an example.  When I worked at Super Dinky, Aldi's was one of the options for grocery shopping.  Yes, their stuff was cheaper than the Walmart 10 minutes away, but the Aldi store was so depressing and had such limited options that we seldom went there except for the handful of things on which we could get a great deal. 

Our local Smith's Food and Drug Store is as good as the one we frequented when we lived in Albuquerque.  We're also in an affluent enough town that people have indeed gone to online ordering and picking up at curbside to save themselves time. I've been in the store often enough when there are more staff doing the shopping with the big order trolleys than regular customers roaming the aisles to believe that trend will continue, especially with a handful of local individuals already advertising their services to pick up your order at Smith's and deliver it to your house.

In that sense, it's possible that we won't need humans staffing check-out lanes for much of the day because there's almost no customers shopping then.  Friday night and weekend afternoons have a packed store, but even now the 20 self-check lanes usually have lines that are shorter than the only one or two open human staffed lanes.

[nebo113]

My rural off-brand grocery store just installed one lane with a gizmo where you roll the item through/under a frame and apparently it checks the price.  Didn't use it, as people were standing around observing.

[marshwiggle]

It's better to have something with which to push back against those people who have a cultivated antipathy for the worker at the bottom of the heap, a plan to spread that antipathy around, and time and money to devote to the task.

But this gets back to my point: Is concern for the worker at the bottom of the heap better expressed by keeping as many jobs as possible, at whatever level of pay is possible, OR by reorganizing so that there are fewer jobs in total, but with those that are left at higher wages with better benefits? It's not clear to me that there's some sort of objective criteria to identify THE most worker-friendly choice.

[nebo113]

Will 45's demand to Ukraine make any difference...in anything, except my blood pressure?

[writingprof]

Will 45's demand to Ukraine make any difference...in anything, except my blood pressure?

I can't follow the plot.  Is this the same Biden son who came off looking like a crazy degenerate in a recent New Yorker profile? 

[mamselle]

Well, the Atlantic is mincing no words in summing up the significance of an incumbent President's effort to blackmail a foreign government into maligning a viable candidate (whatever one thinks of Biden, and I've never found him capable, he's still the front-runner at present) for his own benefit.

Can't link here, but they're pretty clear on things.

M.

[spork]

Just saw the climate town hall. Watching Biden was incredibly painful. He's beyond doddering.

Details? I missed this event.

[spork]

Well, the Atlantic is mincing no words in summing up the significance of an incumbent President's effort to blackmail a foreign government into maligning a viable candidate (whatever one thinks of Biden, and I've never found him capable, he's still the front-runner at present) for his own benefit.

Can't link here, but they're pretty clear on things.

M.

Is this the Atlantic article you're referencing? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/trumps-ukraine-call-clear-impeachable-offense/598570/

Will 45's demand to Ukraine make any difference...in anything, except my blood pressure?

I can't follow the plot.  Is this the same Biden son who came off looking like a crazy degenerate in a recent New Yorker profile? 

This is a sideshow, not the real plot. Trump held back military aid to the Ukrainian government, aid to be used to fight the Russian military's involvement in the separatist war in eastern Ukraine. Who does that benefit? Putin. Ukraine's current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, the person Trump was trying to extort, is a supporter of the Euromaidan movement that ousted Ukraine's corrupt former president and Russian stooge, Viktor Yanukovych.