It's amazing to me how quickly the narrative on the future of remote work and work generally shifted in the past few years. A year and a few months ago Al Jazeera was running stories on us entering a "golden age of the worker": https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/1/6/are-we-about-to-...
Now, with layoffs, AI, and higher interest rates, you're getting stories like this wondering if all the lost jobs are ever coming back. I'd like to see at least 1 more business cycle end to end - recession and recovery - before jumping to conclusions. As someone who's never been in the job market during a significant downturn like this, though, it is a bit mind-boggling to see how quickly people think this is a permanent state of affairs given how hot the job market was just a year and a half ago.
They aren't discrete unrelated events. The intense thirst owners currently have for layoffs and job elimination is exactly a backlash to the increased power, autonomy and solidarity experienced by office workers during covid.
Whether "all of the jobs" are "ever coming back" is the wrong thing to be thinking about I think. Some of them will come back some of them won't, which ones and when is well into the divination end of economics.
But there is a conspicuous pattern for two generations now of jobs being reduced as much as possible by a combination of automation, outsourcing, algorithmic allocation (eg JIT scheduling), compartmentalization, contract & temp & gig labor. How does this fit into that pattern?
So far the focus has been on jobs that can be straightforwardly automated at least partially, or easily broken into interchangeable tasks and allocated to contractors. A lot of jobs that are precarious and low wage now were middle class in living memory. What's left of the middle class is jobs that were resistant to that undermining due to technological limitations or entrenched union or regulation systems.
What they're betting on now is that these new technologies will allow them to finally do this to the rest of us. They certainly will remove your stable job if they possibly can. The changes now are indications that they think they probably can for a lot more jobs than they could a few years ago.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 21.1 ms ] threadNow, with layoffs, AI, and higher interest rates, you're getting stories like this wondering if all the lost jobs are ever coming back. I'd like to see at least 1 more business cycle end to end - recession and recovery - before jumping to conclusions. As someone who's never been in the job market during a significant downturn like this, though, it is a bit mind-boggling to see how quickly people think this is a permanent state of affairs given how hot the job market was just a year and a half ago.
Whether "all of the jobs" are "ever coming back" is the wrong thing to be thinking about I think. Some of them will come back some of them won't, which ones and when is well into the divination end of economics.
But there is a conspicuous pattern for two generations now of jobs being reduced as much as possible by a combination of automation, outsourcing, algorithmic allocation (eg JIT scheduling), compartmentalization, contract & temp & gig labor. How does this fit into that pattern?
So far the focus has been on jobs that can be straightforwardly automated at least partially, or easily broken into interchangeable tasks and allocated to contractors. A lot of jobs that are precarious and low wage now were middle class in living memory. What's left of the middle class is jobs that were resistant to that undermining due to technological limitations or entrenched union or regulation systems.
What they're betting on now is that these new technologies will allow them to finally do this to the rest of us. They certainly will remove your stable job if they possibly can. The changes now are indications that they think they probably can for a lot more jobs than they could a few years ago.