[NJFAC] "fissured workplace" reducing worker power; AI jobs

Ghosts in the Algorithm Michael Toscano

In 2023, the worldwide share of employees who report being stressed at work reached a record high, according to Gallup. One contributing factor is the "fissured workplace," in which corporate managers carve up their traditional workforce and redistribute its functions to subcontractors. Often marketed in futuristic terms as a part of the tech economy, it is, in fact, a well-worn way of reducing worker power.

In response to pressures from capital markets to improve their financial performance in the 1980s and '90s, large corporations whittled down their directly employed staff to those concentrating on "core competencies," freeing them to fire "non-essential" laborers, such as janitors, whom they subsequently brought back as temps at significantly reduced pay—a domestic expression of labor arbitrage. Neoliberals argue that this corporate strategy is a win-win, liberating workers from being tied to one company, which now must compete for their services. But in reality, they are thrust into unregulated forms of employment with irregular hours, low earnings, no route for advancement, muddied relationships with management, and no business enterprise ultimately responsible for their welfare.

One of the primary characteristics of the fissured workplace is its obscured authority structure.

....

Application programming interfaces, or APIs, which hundreds of tech companies use, bring this process to perfection. APIs are used to crowdsource tasks to workers that a full-time engineering staff and its AI algorithms can't cover (or that firms won't pay to have covered by a stable of full-time employees)..... As the journalist David Zweig reports, when Twitter ratcheted up its content moderation to full-blown censorship during the coronavirus debacle, it tasked, "contractors, in places like the Philippines … to adjudicate tweets on complex topics like myocarditis and mask efficacy data." Americans were rigidly censored by on-demand workers around the world toiling for poverty wages.....

As machines are deployed by corporations to monopolize greater shares of the labor process, new forms of work are generated that require human services at the edges of AI's reach. "Thus," they write, "there is an ever-moving frontier between what machines can and can't solve…. As machines solve more and more problems, we continue to identify needs for augmenting rather than replacing human effort."

Automation, then, will create new jobs, not mass unemployment. But it doesn't necessarily follow that we will want the jobs it creates.

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] wage theft: $50+ billion a year stolen from workers

'Wage Theft Is Built Into the Business Models of Many Industries' October 12, 2023

CounterSpin interview with Rodrigo Camarena on wage theft Janine Jackson

News media interested in crime—its impact on human beings, on society, its cost to the economy—would be interested in wage theft, the more than $50 billion a year stolen from workers in this country. But when is the last time your nightly local news talked about that, or encouraged you to be outraged and concerned and moved to action about that? There are efforts to address this ongoing, mundane thievery, but so far it seems to be under the radar of news outlets that, in every other way, suggest they care very much about crime, all the time.

Rodrigo Camarena is director of Justicia Lab, and co-author, with Cristobal Gutierrez, of the article "How to End Wage Theft—and Advance Immigrant Justice" that appeared earlier this month on NonProfitQuarterly.org. He is also co-creator of ¡Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat wage theft.....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] Autoworkers win significant victory

Striking Autoworkers Win Shock Victory

Time for the losers and haters to eat crow Ken Klippenstein Oct 6, 2023

On Thursday, The New York Times declared the United Auto Workers' (UAW) president Shawn Fain "a confrontational figure who vilifies the automakers while alarming Wall Street" amid the UAW's strike.

The article, a profile of the newly-elected Fain, went on to describe him as "caustic," "sharp-edged," a "rebel." You get the idea: the stuff that causes monocles to fall to the ground and shatter. (In fairness, the UAW under Fain has become more assertive, as my colleague Dan Boguslaw has amusingly reported — though I think this is just a union functioning like it's supposed to.)

"Fiery words can inspire, but they can also anger," the Times article cautioned. "Now he must prove that his hard-core tactics pay off."

It is now clear, just one day after the Times article was published, that Fain's tactics have paid off. Today, the UAW stunned onlookers with an announcement that it had won a concession so significant that the union wasn't even technically allowed to strike over it. GM has formally agreed to include battery plants in the master contract, extending the benefits of the union contract to the many non-union workers in facilities manufacturing batteries for electric vehicles.

A concession of this magnitude was almost unimaginable just weeks ago and portends well for the future of the strike.

Fiery words can inspire.

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] Angus Deaton [who wrote on deaths of despair] on our inequality

A Nobel prize-winning immigrant's view on American inequality

September 26, 20237 Greg Rosalsky

....Rare for an economist, Deaton offers a lucid and unsparing critique of America's political system. From healthcare to taxation to poverty to regulations, Deaton sees a system that has increasingly served monopolistic corporations and the rich over ordinary citizens, allowing "a minority to prey on the majority."

....

• Less well-educated Americans have seen little or no improvement in their material circumstances for more than fifty years. For men without a four-year college degree, median real wages have trended downward since 1970."
• "There are several million Americans — Black, white, and Hispanic — who live in households with per capita income of a few dollars a day and whose living standards are arguably as bad as or worse than those that the World Bank demarcates as destitute in India or Ethiopia."
• "The top 10 percent of incomes in the United States account for nearly half of all income, compared with only 14 percent for the bottom half of incomes."
• "Overall death rates in the United States have been rising, and, even before the pandemic, adult life expectancy has fallen for ten years for those without a four-year college degree.".....

Deaton sees economists as largely as complicit in the changes that have made life harder for millions of Americans. He argues that many (but not all) of the people in his profession have provided an intellectual legitimacy for a range of policies that have stripped away support for working-class Americans and forced them into an increasingly cutthroat labor market.

"They are apostles for the globalization and technical change that have enriched an elite and have redistributed income and wealth from labor to capital, all the while destroying millions of jobs, hollowing out communities, and worsening the lives of their occupants," Angus writes. "And when confronted with deaths of despair, they can blame the victims and those who try to help them."

Going forward, Deaton urges the economics profession to think more about "predistribution — the mechanisms that determine the distribution of income in the market itself, before taxes and transfers — and less about a redistribution that is not going to happen and is not what people want in any case." That, he stresses, will force many economists into "uncomfortable territory: promoting unions, place-based policies, immigration control, tariffs, job preservation, industrial policy, and the like. We need to promote a more realistic understanding of how governments and markets work. We need to abandon our sole fixation on money as a measure of human wellbeing."

....

This is wise policy. After income is already paid, many recipients are likely to resist relinquishing some. Predistribution avoids this. Methods include a national job guarantee at decent wages, though we should still consider a return to the higher taxes that predated Reagan.   jz

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] Widening mortality gap adults with and without a BA: note current declining LE for both;see commentary on labor power

Accounting for the widening mortality gap between American adults with and without a BA

Anne Case Professor of Economics and Public Affairs - Princeton University

Angus Deaton September 27, 2023

"GDP may be doing great, but people are dying in increasing numbers, especially less-educated people," Anne Case, one of the authors, said in an interview with The Brookings Institution. "A lot of the increasing prosperity is going to the well-educated elites. It is not going to typical working people."

She and co-author Angus Deaton, the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics, both of Princeton University, analyzed U.S. death certificate information, including the age of death, cause of death, and educational attainment. They found that life expectancy for the college educated in 2021 was eight-and-a-half years longer than for the two-thirds of American adults without a bachelor's degree. That's more than triple the 1992 gap of about two-and-a-half years.

....

Deaths of despair were the leading driver of the widening mortality gap over the past 30 years, but the gap also widened for most other major causes of death, the paper notes. Cancer mortality, for instance, has declined overall but it has declined more for people with college degrees.

....

See discussion about this: https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-life-and-death-stakes-of-labor?

This is not a story about education. This is a story about inequality. .... as Case and Deaton make clear, college degrees here are a proxy for socioeconomic class, and the differing life experiences that America inflicts on different classes.

....For all of the complexity of America's socioeconomic problems, the overriding practical solution to most of them is straightforward: Labor power must increase. Union density must go up. More workers must be able to organize and collectively bargain and strike. Remember a couple months ago when the Teamsters won a healthy six-figure pay package for hundreds of thousands of UPS workers, by exerting unified labor power? Yeah. That's how it's done. Blue collar jobs held by people without college degrees do not automatically carry with them shitty pay and nonexistent benefits leading directly to poor health and despair and death, due to some sort of natural economic law.....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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