All these poor giant corporations... if they just didn't have any payroll to make, they'd be doing so much better!

A college education has a value; a degree has a different value, it is a shorthand credential for the value generated by the course of study. Different colleges offer different value in their courses of study.

The best courses of study teach students how to think and give them specialized subject matter knowledge as well.

There is a good phrase used in the John Oliver Automation video linked below on what sort of job skills will best withstand automation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h1ooyyFkF0

The job market is so bad in Vegas that a strip bartender in any instance is among one of the top gigs in town. I still have friends who are bartenders at MGM properties and the floating bartenders cycle shifts in the "service well".

Everyone hates their turn on that shift!

The olds get pressured to make drinks faster or get reprimanded. For the good/fast bartenders you're making 4-5x the amount of drinks that you would serve stationed at your bar, and you're not getting tipped during your hour in the well. People with seniority get to dodge these shifts in most cases. It's not a fun place to be in.

While it may not tank the job market in the meantime, it won't be long before the bean counters in corporate start assessing bottom lines and these become commonplace, wiping out 100+ salaries a year across all properties.



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Years ago, before casinos started charging for the service, valet parker had to be one of the top gigs for someone with little or no education. $70K/year in the 1990s.

A good bartender is an asset to a casino. OTOH, an end to "flair bartending" as a thing wouldn't be all bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4x1eZSUYYk

If you want some Flair, they still do it at Golden Gate on Main Street. But you are so right. The transportation industry probably got hit the hardest. Now can drivers and ridershare driver's barely make $10/hr if they're lucky.

There are no shortages of local bars that people can make a decent living in, but the workers there are mostly lifers.


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I'm not going to do any heavy lifting on this topic because it pisses me off tremendously, but here is the gist of the problem: Some time in the 70's, worker pay stopped growing with productivity and it has never really started up again since then.

Don't know how they came up with 1979 as the dividing line in that graph...the lines clearly started diverging quite a few years earlier.

Yes, around the start of 1970. You can probably trace the origins of corporate lobbying back to then too.

CEO pay has also gone up 1000% over that time, while workers pay has basically not gone up in 40 years. It's disgusting.

Reagan was elected in 1980, ushering in anti-labor "Laffer curve" tax cut policies, characterized even by George H.W.Bush as "voodoo economics".

Robert Reich did the graph. He was Secy of Labor under Clinton.

In September 2015, his book Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few was published. In it, he warned that widening inequality would generate a blue-collar backlash that could take the form of a demagogue who blames immigrants and minorities for the growing economic stresses felt by the working class. Cue the 2016 election cycle ......

the disparity is only going to get worse....especially with AI and bots

and just looking at the graph I wish people would realize this is widening no matter which team has been in office for the past 50 years.....

but by all means keep wasting your energies on voting and bitching about which side is better...

those really in charge will keep laughing all the way to the bank off your backs....

The is a correlation proves causation logical fallacy. Generally speaking, people are paid in the private sector according to the skills they bring to the table. Globalization has had a profound effect on the employment situation in the USA. The pool of labor available has increased a lot. There was a severe recession in 1981 that was brought on by a drastic change in Fed policy ushering in the era of disinflation which continues to this day. Of course Automation has had a great impact on manufacturing in the USA and will continue to do so. Labor costs are by far the biggest challenge to private corporations bottom lines. Basically the point that that automation represents progress is exactly right. You may have noticed the BLS labor report from last Friday that the UE rate is at 3.8%. That’s pretty low. Compare to these numbers from the the 1981 recession

Quote:

Unemployment
Edit
Unemployment had risen from 5.1% in January 1974 to a high of 9.0% in May 1975. Although it had gradually declined to 5.6% by May 1979, unemployment began rising again. It jumped sharply to 6.9% in April 1980 and to 7.5% in May 1980. A mild recession from January to July 1980 kept unemployment high, but despite economic recovery, it remained at historically high levels (about 7.5%) until the end of 1981.[22] In mid-1982, Rockford, Illinois, had the highest unemployment of all metro areas, at 25%.[23] In September 1982, Michigan led the nation with 14.5%, Alabama was second with 14.3%, and West Virginia was third with 14.0%. The Youngstown–Warren Metropolitan Area had an 18.7% rate, the highest of all metro areas, and Stamford, Connecticut, had the lowest unemployment, at 3.5%.[24]

The peak of the recession occurred in November and December 1982, when the nationwide unemployment rate was 10.8%, the highest since the Great Depression. As of 2015, it is still the highest since the 1930s.[25] In November, West Virginia and Michigan had the highest unemployment with 16.4%, Alabama was in third with 15.3%. South Dakota had the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, with 5.6%. Flint, Michigan, had the highest unemployment rate of all metro areas, with 23.4%.[26] In March 1983, West Virginia's unemployment rate hit 20.1%. In spring 1983, thirty states had double-digit unemployment. When Reagan was re-elected in 1984, the latest unemployment numbers (August 1984) showed that West Virginia still had the highest rate in the nation (13.6%) followed by Mississippi (11.1%) and Alabama (10.9%).[27]

The point is that there are a lot of things that had an impact in the late seventies/early eighties. The Republicans never had a majority in the House of Representativex during the Reagan administration so he had to work with Democrats and he did.

you can blame the feminists for this one. 1970s are when women really started to enter the work force.

i'm not saying women entering the work force was bad - it's a simple fact, when you massively increase the labor pool, the price of labor goes down!

the increase in productivity is a consequence of technology. it's not like the fellas down at the rivet factory all of a sudden started working really hard and making 80% more rivets.

i suppose you could make an argument that the owner of the rivet factory should be passing down the increased profits to the workers...then on the flop side, it would really cut into things like R&D, expansion, building a new factory, etc.

The point is that while automation yields great productivity benefits to capital (owners), the reality is that those benefits neither flow to displaced workers or wages paid to existing workers whose employment continues.

My point is that labor and management can contract to mitigate the effects of automation on displaced workers.

As for 3.8% unemployment among the workforce being an answer, it does not address displaced workers, depressed wage rates or the failure to keep pace with the economic benefits of productivity increases.

An economy based on mass purchasing power does better and is more sustainable than one based upon yachts and golf courses.

The Reagan Administration was smart, smart enough to work with Democrats because a bi-partisan approach is simply better for policy creation and governance. This is not the approach or understanding in DC today.

I spent a lot of the early 1980s working in DC to mitigate the effects of deregulation on the trucking industry, both companies and workers, and then the airline industry. The Reagan White House folks were helpful with cutting regulatory roadblocks for those efforts, out of a political calculus involving the Teamsters' support. However, efforts were not very successful longer term for industry companies, for a lot of reasons.

I’m sure that’s something that was perfectly acceptable to say in the 70s. Today, that statement suggests that women and minorities are less skilled than white males. I don’t think that’s what you wanted to say but you have to be careful with that kind of rhetorik. It also suggests that over the last 40 years, the skill gap between C-level executives and their employees has increased dramatically. Do you believe that?

Big misconception about automation is that it’s mostly going to replace low skilled jobs. That’s not true. For one, lots of machines are just way more expensive than a minimum wage job. There’s just no business case right now to replace a couple $8/hour guys at McDonalds with a machine that might cost $100k. OTOH, automation is going to replace a lot of high paid positions in the medical field, law and banking. “Your funds managed by humans, not by robots” is an absurdly stupid slogan anyway.

Actually, Carls Jr. has already gotten rid of a lot of hourly employees and replaced them with automation. The CEO said, roughly, dealing with employees is a painful and costly thing, and he is replacing as many of them as he can.

Today's form of capitalism only cares about human capital to the extent they must have them. Any time a machine can replace a human and be cost affective, humans will get replaced. That is what the future holds, but how we address that will be the key.

AOC had a great statement recently. "We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should be excited by that. But the reason we're not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don't have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at it's core, our problem."

This is one of the best statements I have heard any politician make directly addressing the concerns of the future.

Wait are you saying the people are worthless, or the degrees? Maybe both?

lol...don't get me wrong, there is plenty of both, but I was referring to degrees that are worthless.

See, this here is where the CEO can go **** themselves. 99% of them think this way, but 1% of them prove that ****ing employees at every opportunity(<30 hrs, raise insurance deductibles 400%, 2 full time employees and 40 part-time, etc) doesn't have to happen.

Costco is a great example of the 1%. They move a little profit to the employees, deal with them like they are part of their business family, and in return they get hardworking, loyal employees.

The other 99% want ALL the profits, don't care about their employees, and in return they want nothing more than to replace all the employees because they turn over continually because their employer ****s them at every turn.

I saw some Walmart slappy on TV the other day explaining how she has worked there for 17 years and made like $2.80 more an hour than what she was hired at, which was obviously minimum wage. It's ridiculous at this point and I'm not sure it can be fixed with anything short of a wagecuck revolution. The system is broken big time.

Yeah I'm not buying this chart. What's his methodology for comparing purchasing power across such large timescales? Our dollars buy products that are enormously better than those available in the 70s, and for prices that are much lower in real terms. Surely the average person is not just 7-8% better off now. We are all benefiting from those productivity gains, just not necessarily in our paycheck. And on top of that, instead of complaining about greedy corporations taking all the profits, we can buy shares in hundreds of the best of those companies through low cost index funds. Try doing that with 1970s level commissions, account minimums, and financial product selection.

Edit: also, foreign competition, which really ramped up in the 70s and 80s, is another reason those productivity gains didn't go into paychecks, but instead went into improved purchasing power through lower real prices and superior products.

During my CEO tenure, I found that paying employees well encouraged them to seek advancement in our company, by making an extra contribution/effort of their own accord. Discovered some very talented folks that way who had arrived at entry level.

The business was highly automated already, as an early-on internet poker operator. Nevertheless, dedicated employees, who cared about the performance were definitely worth a 20% bump in wages over what companies like HP, Oracle, etc. tried to pay in the market.

I'm 35 and in my working adult life, I've worked for 4 major companies that have laid off a total of 150,000+ jobs in the past 5 years due to automation, outsourcing telesales/customer service overseas, focusing to online sales vs. brick & mortar, and outsourcing digital media to teams overseas who will do the work for 75% less. You may have heard of some of these companies. Verizon, YellowPages, Nordstrom, T-Mobile.

Most of these positions weren't low skill jobs that any monkey can do. When these companies found out they can outsource these same customer service/call center jobs and save $35,000-45,000 in average salary per worker, it was a no brainer to close 90% of American call centers. Just in Vegas alone, the closing of the Yellow Pages and Verizon call centers cut out about 600-700 jobs out of Henderson alone.

In a terrible job market like Vegas, it's scary what the next 5 years are going to look like if something big doesn't happen to bring jobs in town.

Narrator: Something big wasn't going to happen.

It doesn't really seem fair to compare automation to outsourcing. Outsourcing doesn't actually create wealth, it just transfers the same net wealth from one set of people (mainly US workers) to another set of people (some to workers in other countries, mostly to corporate shareholders).

Automation is actually creating wealth; it allows for greater production with less total labor from all sources. It is true that in a mostly laissez-faire country like the US, that wealth will go mostly to the corporate shareholders. But it is possible to regulate and tax the benefits of automation in a way that everyone benefits. It is only our political institutions stopping us from doing it.

Good point.

I'm looking at buying a new car and it's so easy to order a car online now. It seems like a no brainier to skip one of the most soul crushing experiences in going to a car dealership. This type of automation seems like the next logical step to eliminate a sales force. The ability to "upgrade" a cell phone online, activate, and backup your data yourself eliminated a very lucrative industry if you were in cellular sales between 2000-2010. When I did it between '06-'12, it was extremely easy to make $80-120k because the pay scale was commission based with a premium on new activations. Those same positions are now $35-40k/yr salary retail jobs with the sales force about 50% less than what it was 7 years ago. Profits, Upper executive salaries, and bonuses for directors at these companies are at all time highs though.

UBI sounds like an eventual necessity.