Redundancy, unemployment and unrest.

[Workingman]

The unions are warning of a 'tsunami' of redundancies once furlough ends in a few weeks. They are not the only ones. Some economists, think tanks, business leaders and MPs are saying similar things.

Depending where you look you will see figures for unemployment at 5 million, or 12% and claims for UC / Jobseeker's rising by xyz%, mental health issues, poverty.....

The figures in reality might not be that bleak, but they will not be good - unemployment will rise. What is worrying me are all the suggestions to tackle this known problem. We have everything from 'Kickstart' to retraining to upskilling to find new work - platitudes and soundbites..

A lot of the jobs to be lost will be in front line retail, hospitality, catering, health and beauty, clerical work and so on. What are all these people going to retrain or upskill to, and where are all these jobs? My big fear is that a lot of this retraining and upskilling will in effect be sideways - barista to hotel receptionist, waiter to product delivery consultant (driver). Then there is the BIG elephant in the room and that is that the vast majority - not all - of these people are in those jobs because they do not have the education and skills to fill the few openings in skilled work that, hopefully, will appear.

In the longer term the UK, as well as other countries, looks to be in for a period of fairly high unemployment with all the downsides for society that brings, and it is not a Brexit or Covid thing, either. The world of work is changing. A lot of manual jobs will be robotised or automated and a lot of the mundane clerical work will be done using clever algorithms or proto-AI. In the not too distant future fewer of us will be needed to 'work' in the sense we now know it.

[Suff]

It was always coming. From the moment that the countries started shutting down the economy, companies started working out how to do away with a block of staff until things come back onto an even keel. Furlough schemes just gave a bit of time so that people were not abandoned at the worst possible time. Although I'm not sure how many will thank the government for that when Christmas comes, they have no job and jobs are less than during the financial crisis.

If you follow Tesla, you get an idea of how this can work. Tesla makes cars with robots. More robots than anyone else. They bought a car factory from Toyota which churned out about 450k vehicles per year. Finally Tesla is now churning out over 500k vehicles from the same plant with 10,000 workers. VW Wolfsburg, the largest car factory in the world, is churning out 750k vehicles per year with 63,000 employees.

It is not hard to work out how this is going to go. Tesla Giga Berlin , initially 500k vehicles, 14,000 staff expected. Even at 2m vehicles (expected max capacity), Tesla Berlin will still employ less workers than VW wolfsburg.

Then we have what Tesla is doing with self driving. Tesla decided that they couldn't get enough compute power from Nvidia so they got a team together and made their own computer, 21 times faster than the one they had from Nvidia. Why you might ask? Because Tesla is absolutely determined that they will have a self driving vehicle within the next 5 years.

So what you say? Well so what is that a realistic full self driving will remove just about every single taxi driver off the roads and reduce the cost of a taxi to about £1 per mile. There are around 290,000 licensed drivers in the UK, of which around half are taxi drivers. But FSD vehicles will kill almost all of them. A quarter of a million jobs gone. Then think about self driving busses and if you can do it with cars and busses, how much simpler will trains be?

The future is bright, the future is glorious, just not for the worker.

[cromwell]

What is worrying me are all the suggestions to tackle this known problem. We have everything from 'Kickstart' to retraining to upskilling to find new work - platitudes and soundbites..

Soundbites for sure. That is essentially what a lot of our politics is now - just sloganeering.

It is a worry. I worry for my children first and foremost. I worry for all those people atm who are buying houses inside one week of them going up for sale, taking on mortgages when there is this black cloud of unemployment coming. Covid / Brexit will cause job losses but automation will probably cause a lot more.

Maybe communism will make a come back.

I don't see how we can keep up an NHS / Welfare state if millions more are taking out of the pot in terms of dole money, instead of working and paying taxes to keep the ship afloat.

[medsec222]

I have been at my caravan in Wales for a few days. It has been very quiet on the park and not busy at all. We decided on Monday to go to Rhos on Sea for an hour or so. We thought Monday would be a good day rather than the weekend. We were very surprised when we drove into Rhos. Not a parking space to be had, loads of people walking around, but beaches not too bad. But it was the busiest I have ever seen it.

[Workingman]

And the above from Suff, although a bit esoteric, is but one example out of many hundreds.

Covid / Brexit will cause job losses but automation will probably cause a lot more.

Absobluddylutely! Look at the types of jobs that will be hit hardest - manual, semi-skilled, clerical, retail, labouring - high volume / low skill employment.

We already have robotics making every item under the sun with only a handful of operators. We have virtually unmanned rail and coach stations where tickets are sold and checked and the traveller is told to go this way and that by machine. Airports will go the same way. Engineers are developing crop picking machines for crops that it was once though needed to be harvested by hand, many are driverless and rely on GPS. Where we once had columns and rows of clerical staff their work, now digitised, can be done by a small office crew. And if they think they are safe they had better think again. Perfect OCR, better algorithms and AI will see a lot of their jobs go. Retail in many sectors is rapidly moving online.

It took nearly 200 years to transition from an agrarian to truly industrial society. The move to the next stage will only take a few decades, and we have already started.

Meds, I suspect that many will have been taking one last fling before furlough ends.

[cruiser2]

Some jobs cannot be done by robots

In the small crescent I live in, two houses have had new doors fitted to the garages, one house is having an extension built. A new girder about 15 ft has been
installed to support one of the internal walls and part of te extension.
Another house has had artificial grass laid and another has had a lot of decoration after a large leak when part of the ceiling collapsed.
These are all small firms which don't seem to have been affected by lock down.

[TheOstrich]

These are all small firms which don't seem to have been affected by lock down.

We're looking at having some ancient double-glazed windows replaced. Earliest date to start is February 2021.
Local painter/builder came round earlier this week to replace some rotted trellis and paint the outside shed. He's fully booked up for the rest of the year.

The biggest problem seems to be the supply chain at the moment - getting all the parts at the right time to complete jobs.
So I don't think the small independent / self employed firms are doing too badly, but if automated processes can help getting the current supply difficulties sorted out, and by that I mean producing more goods here and not in China, well fair enough.