We still have a long way to go in order to emerge from the Trump Depression, all while American businesses in the age of COVID are learning exactly how they can automate to replace and remove workers in the years ahead. It should come as no surprise then that it's Black and brown workers who are being left behind as the new jobs of the future are being created today.
The mass disruption of the workplace because of the pandemic is accelerating employers’ move toward job-displacing automation, and neither the government nor the American labor force is prepared for the sweeping fallout.
The hemorrhaging of jobs is refueling a national debate over how to give workers the skills to survive the brutal market and fill the millions of positions that automation will inevitably also create — albeit at a far slower pace than positions are being shed. Lawmakers, labor unions and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are all calling for more spending on workforce training. The employment and training programs now available — there are no fewer than 43 spread across the government — are inadequate, uncoordinated and underfunded, they say.
“We’ve fast-forwarded 10 years of change in the space of less than 10 months,” said Andy Van Kleunen, CEO of the National Skills Coalition, a policy research group that promotes workforce training. “We don’t really do a good job making it easy for someone who has lost their job due to no fault of their own, particularly in an industry that’s downsizing, to get into a new occupation in a new industry," he said. "We just need a whole reboot of that.”
For President Joe Biden, this could be one of the most far-reaching economic issues that he will face, and failing to resolve it would undercut his vow to restore the U.S. labor market. Biden, who has strong support from organized labor, is pledging to expand partnerships between unions, businesses and community colleges, scale up work-based learning programs and build out individual career services.
Yet despite the bipartisan calls for action, it may be a struggle for Biden to convince Republicans to agree to fund a large-scale and expensive overhaul of how the government tackles reskilling workers. Even the $1.9 trillion economic relief package he has proposed contains no new funds specifically for job training. Congress has invested only $345 million in workforce development to address Covid-19, according to the House Education and Labor Committee, compared to the nearly $6 billion it appropriated to respond to the Great Recession.
This “is not just an opportunity lost if we don’t help people get the skills for the jobs that are being created, it’s going to be a real drag on the economy,” said Neil Bradley, executive vice president and chief policy officer at the Chamber of Commerce. “It’s going to mean a lot of suffering for a lot of individuals.”
Forty-three percent of businesses anticipate reducing their workforce because of new technology, according to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs survey. In December, searches for automation engineering equipment on Thomas, a product-sourcing platform, were up more than 300 percent from the previous year. And research firm Gartner found in February that Covid-19 had caused seven out of 10 boards of directors to accelerate their digital business.
The lightning-fast shift has created a more urgent demand for worker training than ever. With an estimated 97 million new job categories that could arise from automation, companies estimate that 40 percent of workers will require reskilling.
Though automation typically affects blue-collar workers most in manufacturing and food service, the rise of other technologies like artificial intelligence is poised to imperil white-collar employees, too.
Still, Black and brown workers are bearing the brunt of the impact: Lower levels of education and other barriers to opportunity mean that minority workers are more likely than whites to be employed as cashiers, cooks, and in other occupations susceptible to automation. Even pre-pandemic, 23 percent of Black workers were in danger of losing their jobs by 2030 due to automation, by one estimate.
Shocker.
It's already bad enough that "essential workers" are going to be replaced by automation in the next decade, but without retraining the workforce, America is going to be a massive wasteland of unemployed. Yes, I expect the Biden administration to eventually raise the minimum wage , but it won't help if the jobs are all automated out.
We're going to have to come to terms with this and quickly, or we're looking at another lost decade, and it's one tens of millions of us will never recover from in our lifetimes.
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