Live data from Hacker News

The coming labour scarcity will shift the balance of power, pushing up wages

telegraph.co.uk

31–40 of 58 posts

Re: The coming labour scarcity will shift the balance of power, pushing up wages

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mounting criticism of mounting inequality is a political position. It's not an objective statement of fact. The mounting inequality itself is however not just an opinion. > They are free to ignore the mounting criticism But they're not ignoring it as such, and IMHO it's gotten to the point where it would be foolish to do so. So now they're supplying an alternative political position on what to do - i.e. don't w…

The mounting inequality itself is however not just an opinion. But how much inequality is a problem is an opinion, I'm afraid.

How much inequality is a problem can be an opinion, but what we have is a trend to growing inequality.

At least that you are OK with total inequality (or with a systemic collapse) we should start to look at this carefully.

And this is what the article deal with, what is saying is: "the trend is going to reverse because it was born from demographics, nothing to do with the Washington Consensus, the dismantling of worker protections and other small details."

Re: The coming labour scarcity will shift the balance of power, pushing up wages

#32
post #2

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 -…

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.

Re: The coming labour scarcity will shift the balance of power, pushing up wages

#33
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mounting criticism of mounting inequality is a political position. It's not an objective statement of fact. The mounting inequality itself is however not just an opinion. > They are free to ignore the mounting criticism But they're not ignoring it as such, and IMHO it's gotten to the point where it would be foolish to do so. So now they're supplying an alternative political position on what to do - i.e. don't w…

For mounting inequality, it depends who you ask and where. It's not increased in the UK for instance: http://blogs.new.spectator.co.uk/2015/09/stiglitz-piketty-je... Of course, this is from a right-wing magazine, so they could just be making it up to appease their owners or something. And it also depends on the definition of poverty. Is it absolute or relative? As soon as you start talking about relative poverty, you…

I don't want to be negative but the article in the spectator dismiss the Gini index (that I'm sure has its problems) using a tweet as its source.

Just to weight in with an alternative view: http://mainlymacro.blogspot.fr/2014/11/redistribution-under-...

Re: The coming labour scarcity will shift the balance of power, pushing up wages

#34
post #14

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…

> 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 :/ The EU already has 23 million unemployed (and a lot more in minimum-wage bullshit jobs nobody wants or needs), a million refugees won't make problems significantly worse than they already are.

[deleted]

Re: The coming labour scarcity will shift the balance of power, pushing up wages

#36
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The coming labour scarcity will shift the balance of power, pushing up wages

#38
post #25
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The only field I can see which will depend on low-skilled worker armies is construction." The trend in construction for the past decade has been towards less labour intensity. So no good news here either.

Construction is already beyond the big wins in labor force though. Construction sites used to have armies of workers. Hundreds. Now they have perhaps a dozen for large skyscrapers, 5 for normal skyscrapers and one or two for houses.

On which construction sites have you been recently?

A year ago when I was working in construction, I remember for a standard home at least:

Planning (architects), demolition workers, excavation, foundation builders, bricklayers/concrete builders, plumbers, electricians, woodworkers, window workers, fireplace/chimney builders, painters, inner decoration guys, telecom/smarthome engineers. On one single home site. Oh, and add for at least the "big and dirty" parts of building a house at least two or three trucks with drivers.

But, of course, the companies did rarely work at the same time.

Re: The coming labour scarcity will shift the balance of power, pushing up wages

#39
post #7

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.

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.

Politics aside, unless you challenge the data it was an demographic anomaly. Do you think it had no effect on the markets?
Post reply on HN