
The coming labour scarcity will shift the balance of power, pushing up wages - andrebalza1
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/11882915/Deflation-supercyle-is-over-as-world-runs-out-of-workers.html
======
mschuster91
This might be true for high-skilled jobs, yes.

But the vast armies of uneducated, second-or-third-generation-jobless people
will have their jobs slaughtered by automation. Truck/cab/freight delivery
will be automated, freight handling and shipping will be automated, cleaning
of public and private areas will be automated.

The only field I can see which will depend on low-skilled worker armies is
construction.

And with the refugee crisis we just magnify the problem because the refugees
will have to be integrated, they have to learn German and still lots of them
will be lower educated than the rest :/

~~~
sageikosa
You are missing service industries in general and elder care (poignantly
relevant with the article's emphasis on demographic shift) specifically. A
large older population with a smaller worker pool to draw on will drive up
demand for caregivers, exhausting the rapidly devaluing savings of the elder
generations.

~~~
kpil
Most people would prefer being wiped in the ass by a robot.

There are _really_ strong incentives for automation in healthcare.

When talking about the immigrants and refugees working with elders;
Unfortunately, even the "human touch" and the social part of the job is
sometimes problematic because of cultural and language barriers... (Also
applies to the opposite situation, elder immigrants receiving care.)

------
kartan
When the article talks about Piketty it says that he makes "sweeping neo-
Marxist claims". While at the same time tries to justify Professor Goodhart
bold statements telling us that he uses "large assumptions".

Awful article that shows from beginning to end its bias with a wishful
thinking justification of letting big-business reign over the rest of society.

------
SixSigma
And the home secretary is going to say today that immigration is bad for the
economy !

In my sector, Supply Chain Management, we are facing a skills shortage.

* Warehouse operatives are moving from many low skilled pickers to a few skilled robot sitters and the latter are in short supply.

* Procurement - moving from the soft skills of buying person to person over the phone to electronic exchange and online bidding - again a skills shortage is looming for the non-managerial staff.

* Driving - HGV is facing a short supply as the retiring workfoce is not being replaced by young people and more demand for last mile drivers for the shift to single package delivery.

* Supply chain managers - a relatively new title and one that few young people consider. The Novus Trust in the UK is promoting the career path in a hope to encourage new entrants.

~~~
VLM
One observation is they're just not paying enough. Oddly enough, if you're
willing to drop $150K there is no shortage of software developers worldwide.
People can dehydrate themselves crying in their beer over there being no truck
drivers at $20K/yr, but once they offer more than $30K/yr, people will start
to line up. For the last couple generations this has been a dog whistle for
immigration or H1B style indentured slavery; "We can't find anyone (for
$7.25/hr) so we'll have to import".

Another observation is some of your jobs are extremely temporary, like
becoming a cable TV installation technician, once the metropolis is wired up
in the mid 80s, 99.999% of them are permanently unemployed. So you're going to
have to offer fat stacks of cash to drive a truck until permanently replaced
by an automated truck in a couple years or have this years flavor of the month
of robot certified system engineer cert holders or whatever, because in five
or ten years they'll be permanently unemployable or at absolute best case be
unemployed and retraining. You can't expect to pay people a low career level
wage for an extremely short term job.

A final observation is for real long term careers you've listed, when business
people say there's a skill shortage, they rarely mean a shortage of people
with skills, because the skills are often pretty widespread and trivial, but a
shortage of business people and HR personnel who can CYA on hiring decisions
via authority like diplomas and govt licenses, or an established hierarchy
like "top 100 biz/med/legal school lists". None of those skills listed are
weird or rare in your average human population; you're not asking for research
grade theoretical physicists; every house that has a roll of toilet paper in
the toilet paper holder has some human who at least vaguely understood
logistics; you only need to hire the top 0.001% of that enormous proven
skilled population. Its just if you make a mistake in the hiring process you
can't act all blameless because he had a MBA from Harvard so I'm not
responsible for hiring the wrong guy, or he had a license from the state
bureau claiming he was qualified, or he held journeyman papers. Or in summary,
its a management CYA behavior problem not a real workforce skill problem.

~~~
SixSigma
You can't just up wage offers and see results. HGV driving already pays good
wages here - upwards of $750 p/w and it costs something like $1500 to get
qualified.

Even if you only work for a year, you will recoup your investment so I don't
think it can possibly be people thinking that "I'm not going to be an HGV
driver because robots will take my job, I shall stay here in McDonald's on
minimum wage"

So it can't be a purely wage issue that keeps millions of people in low pay /
unemployment and not behind an HGV steering wheel.

~~~
redblacktree
Could be that the McDonalds employee doesn't have the $1,500 to get qualified.
For a great many people, that's an amount that seems impossible to save.

~~~
JupiterMoon
If industry was really desperate they would simply offer people training
contracts with a buy out clause. I.e. the company pays for the training and
the driver (assuming they pass) then has to work for the company for a minimum
length of time or buy themselves out. This would surely be a win-win for
everyone.

------
lmm
So what are Japan's special circumstances? The theory makes sense, but when
our one real-world example shows the exact opposite, I'm inclined to be
skeptical.

~~~
dandare
Japan does not exist in a vacuum.

------
mindcrash
As if the labour scarcity will not be dealt with using completely new working
class as a replacement.

[http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-
apply](http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply) is a real eye
opener.

------
redwood
With hardly a mention of automation. ..

~~~
JupiterMoon
Automation (at the moment) requires a skilled workforce to e.g. build or
program the automated system.

~~~
redwood
Orders of magnitude fewer workers though...

~~~
JupiterMoon
But far higher paid. And therefore the few good industrial jobs building and
running the automated systems should be able to support a large number of
service jobs in the wider economy.

~~~
redwood
Except not if the service jobs are all being automated.

------
SideburnsOfDoom
A newspaper which is pro the right-of-center government, pro big business says
that there is no need to reign in big business; because despite their winning
streak over the last few decades and the mounting criticism of mounting
inequality, things are going to turn against them _any day now_ , honest!

Film at 11.

~~~
RobertoG
I think the important message is more general: "don't worry because markets
equilibrium will solve all the problems. Don't look too hard to the last 30
years, it was not a policy problem, it was just a demographic anomaly. Our
theories are good and worked perfectly."

What surprise me is that they use the capital vs. workers narrative.

~~~
gregjwild
The right wing press just loves to fain Marx when it suits their own
narrative.

That said, I often wish the mainstream left would diversify their own font of
knowledge. Especially given most don't read him.

~~~
JupiterMoon
The left don't read Marx because Das Kapital is one of the slowest most boring
reads I've ever encountered...

On the other hand the basic concept of labour and capital as market objects
with values controlled by supply and demand makes a lot of sense.

