The coming labour scarcity will shift the balance of power, pushing up wages • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by JupiterMoon » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 12:34 PM UTC

iofj wrote: post #25

dazc wrote: 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.

I see you point that the amount of labour involved in building projects has decreased however I disagree that no further labour decreases are possible. A typical house in the UK is currently build from bricks and wood with a tiled/slate roof and a concrete subfloor. The interior is made to look nice by application of plaster. A typical block of flats has a metal frame but the walls are still brick/breeze block (in the US cinder block I think). This requires several skilled workers commanding fairly significant wages (bricklayer, carpenter, roofer, plasterer) in addition to the plumber and electrician.

If houses were to move to a prefab model with e.g. plastic construction and standardised room sizes and plumbing and electrical connections between the rooms most of these skilled workers would find themselves redundant...

Fortunately the UK insurance industry inadvertently protects the building industry by making it difficult to insure so called 'non-traditional' constructions.

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

#42

Post by mschuster91 » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 12:38 PM UTC

JupiterMoon wrote: post #41

iofj wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see you point that the amount of labour involved in building projects has decreased however I disagree that no further labour decreases are possible. A typical house in the UK is currently build from bricks and wood with a tiled/slate roof and a concrete subfloor. The interior is made to look nice by application of plaster. A typical block of flats has a metal frame but the walls are still brick/breeze block (in th…

> If houses were to move to a prefab model with e.g. plastic construction and standardised room sizes and plumbing and electrical connections between the rooms most of these skilled workers would find themselves redundant...

Still, the prefab blocks have to be built by adequately skilled workers - gas, water and electricity at least will always require a certified worker simply due to the inherent risks of fire, explosions, water leaks and electric shocks.

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

#43

Post by SixSigma » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 12:54 PM UTC

iofj wrote: post #24

SixSigma wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truck drivers are in short supply. There is also a trend in mainand Europe to schedule more freight into the hinterland from ports on trains and waterways - so called Synchromodal Transport [1] The new APM automated continer port in Rotterdam [2] is set to handle 4m containers per year using automated vehicles and cranes - with few operators on the dockside (just for the two train cranes and one barge crane) - the ot…

Luckily they're on it : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3258829/Driverless-t... Everybody's missing the really bad thing about these trucks and self-driving cars though. Everything is patent encumbered. So they will transform a bottom up industry (dependant on people to drive the trucks, trucks which can be produced by any of a 1000 companies) into a top-down patent-encumbered capital-intensive industry (beca…

Even in your patent-encumbered worst-case scenario I don't think DHL et al will have much problem paying licensing fees.

Urban transport will not be HGV. City limits trans-shipment points will split packages into inner-city deliverables.

Last mile is an active area of research investment e.g. electric cargo bikes [1]

The buzz phrase in the literature is massification to atomisation [2]

[1] https://k4rgo.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/k4rgo-ups-germany....

[2] https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch1en/conc1en/atomiz...

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

#44

Post by SixSigma » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 12:58 PM UTC

spacecowboy_lon wrote: post #9

SixSigma wrote: 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 -…

Ah the old story Industry doesn't want to pay for training

Industry is willing to pay but individual companies are not, especially in the days of "job for 5 years".

For instance The NOVUS Trust [1] is a Supply Chain / Logistics undergraduate scheme that guarantees a job for those graduating with a 2:1 or over that is sponsored by industry members.

[1] http://www.novus.uk.com/

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

#45

Post by SixSigma » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 1:06 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #32

SixSigma wrote: 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…

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.

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

#46

Post by dazc » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 1:14 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #42

JupiterMoon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you point that the amount of labour involved in building projects has decreased however I disagree that no further labour decreases are possible. A typical house in the UK is currently build from bricks and wood with a tiled/slate roof and a concrete subfloor. The interior is made to look nice by application of plaster. A typical block of flats has a metal frame but the walls are still brick/breeze block (in th…

> If houses were to move to a prefab model with e.g. plastic construction and standardised room sizes and plumbing and electrical connections between the rooms most of these skilled workers would find themselves redundant... Still, the prefab blocks have to be built by adequately skilled workers - gas, water and electricity at least will always require a certified worker simply due to the inherent risks of fire, expl…

This is true but a lot of labour intensive processes can be done off-site in a more controlled environment.

For instance, partial pre-assembly of mechanical/electrical fittings through to modular kitchen/bathrooms with almost everything done before it gets to site.

Of course you'll always need people to put all of these elements together but the numbers needed becomes less and less.

The certified worker who signs everything off used to do almost everything himself, we are now moving to a situation where this is almost all he does.

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

#47

Post by mschuster91 » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 1:17 PM UTC

creshal wrote: post #21

mschuster91 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a million refugees won't make problems significantly worse than they already are. Oh yes, they already do. The housing market in German cities is already fucked up beyond limits because our politicians have slept for years, and 1.5m refugees now needing winter-resistant housing (so, no tents) bring the market to its knees. But I'm thankful for the refugees, because they show our politicians they can't sleep forever…

That's a different problem from employment, though – but yes, it's nice to see that, after 10 years in office, Merkel actually has to do something for a change.

<3

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

#48

Post by spacecowboy_lon » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 1:37 PM UTC

SixSigma wrote: post #44

spacecowboy_lon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah the old story Industry doesn't want to pay for training

Industry is willing to pay but individual companies are not, especially in the days of "job for 5 years". For instance The NOVUS Trust [1] is a Supply Chain / Logistics undergraduate scheme that guarantees a job for those graduating with a 2:1 or over that is sponsored by industry members. [1] http://www.novus.uk.com/

I don't see industry calling for the introduction of training Levys or to stop uskilled Mc Jobs being promoted as apprenticeships to avoid paying the minimum wage.

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

#49

Post by gadders » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 1:39 PM UTC

RobertoG wrote: post #33

gadders wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

To be fair, it was a tweet by Nassim Taleb.

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

#50

Post by redblacktree » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 2:31 PM UTC

SixSigma wrote: post #45

VLM wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 p…

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.