[NJFAC] Full Employment Is Good for Society

Full Employment Is Good for Society Paul Krugman, NYT, 1/15/24

....Why did wage inequality fall? A number of states increased their minimum wages. Unions won some victories, and fear of unionization may have pushed some employers to increase pay. The main factor, however, was surely a tight labor market: Full employment greatly increases workers' bargaining power.

Full employment also did wonders for another aspect of racial disparities: high Black unemployment. Last hired, first fired is still a very real fact of race relations in America; one measure of our success in finally achieving something like full employment is that the gap between Black and white unemployment rates is the smallest it has been since the government started collecting data on the subject.

....Full employment is extremely important not just because it leads to a higher gross domestic product but also because it helps create a healthier, fairer society. And we should fight back against political forces standing in the way of job creation. In particular, a gratuitous recession could all too easily undo much of the progress we've made.....

There are many things we still need to do to fulfill [the Rev. Martin Luther] King's vision, and some of them will be hard. But one thing that should be relatively easy is providing an economy in which Americans who are willing to work — which means a great majority of adults — can find jobs."

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

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[NJFAC] The REAL AI automation threat to workers

Pluralistic: The REAL AI automation threat to workers (11 Jan 2024) Cory Doctorow Posted on January 11, 2024

Long before the current wave of AI hype, we were being groomed for automation panics with misleading stories. Remember this one? "'Truck driver' is the most common job in America. Self-driving trucks are just around the corner. How can we prevent America's army of truckers from turning into a howling mob when the robots steal their jobs?

....

More than $100b has been set on fire chasing the robotaxi dream, and the result is most charitably described as a technological curiosity, requiring 1.5 high-waged remote technicians to replace each low-waged driver:

....

Writing in The Guardian, Steven Greenhouse describes the AI-enabled workplace, where precarious, often misclassified workers are monitored, judged, and fined by algorithms:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/07/artificial-intelligence-surveillance-workers

Whether it's the robot that gets you disciplined for sending an email with the word "union" in it or the robot that takes money out of your paycheck if you take a bathroom break, AI has come for the workplace with a vengeance.

Here's a supreme irony: nearly all of the beneficial applications for AI require that AI be used to help workers, not replace them, which is absolutely not how AI is used in the workplace. An AI that helps radiologists by giving them a second opinion might help them find tumors on x-rays, but that's a tool that reduces the number of scans a radiologist processes in a shift, by making them go back and reconsider the scans they've already processed: https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

But AI's sales pitch is not "Buy an AI tool and increase your costs while increasing your accuracy." The pitch for AI is "buy and AI and save money by firing workers." Given how bad AIs are at replacing humans, this is a bad deal all around, both for the worker who loses their job and the customer who gets the substandard product the AI makes.

There is a very limited slice of applications where an AI could make a lot of money for a company that deploys it, without costing that company anything when the AI screws up.....

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

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[NJFAC] Jobs for All Newsletter, December 2023

Jobs for All Newsletter, December 2023, Keeping the Dream Alive; Employment Statistics: Let's Tell the Whole Story; Good Jobs Are A Human Right; Review of The Case for a Job Guarantee by Pavlina R. Tcherneva; Unemployment is Down, and Attitudes Are Too; The Full Count: November 2023 Unemployment Data

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

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