Chino, Nagano, Japan, May 3, 2019—Human jobs are eroding and effective wages are decreasing as widening disparities are developing among workers thanks to the encroachment of digitalization and globalization and aging. The OECD, the rich nations’ economic think-tank, said April 29 in its 2019 employment outlook. Those growing threats can be fought with adult education, employment protections and collective bargaining, it theorized. But will it happen? Carpenters, scaffolding assemblers, construction workers, loggers and manual laborers can be coopted to engage in collective bargaining or higher education? Many are in those trades because they do not want to be actively partake in the digital economy and/or prefer hands-on, tangible work.
Over the past 20 years, manufacturing jobs decreased by 20 percent while service jobs rose 27 percent, OECD said. Stefano Scarpetta, OECD’s director for employment, labor and social affairs, told reporters in Tokyo April 29 that Japan, for example, would see 15 percent of jobs could be automated but many more will change. Worldwide, the share of high-skilled jobs has increased by 10 percent over the last two decades but many adults lack the skills needed for the new jobs that require ICT skills, he said. That’s why adult learning skills, a.k.a, ICT skills, are necessary, he said.
And give adult learning policy directions to those workers and employers, such as ‘fostering a mind-set for learning among firms and individuals’ and tackling barriers to training, OECD said.
As jobs are being sucked into so-called platform work, Uber, Ubereats, and so on, albeit a still limited work pattern, OECD says some kind of social protection systems are vital to sustain the growing pace of job hopping and work-style and variety shifts for workers that are growing to be in independent forms of employment, an idea that evolving worker society can welcome.
The report covers other important and interesting subjects, among them labor market regulations, that are worth stock-taking for both workers and employers, and in short, many of the OECD recommendations are commendable.
But one big issue OECD has left out is that jobs related to basic human habitation – building homes,
plumbing and electric wiring for homes and offices, assembling scaffolding for those structures, managing cattle ranches and fish farms, and so on, cannot be replaced with robotics and AI in the foreseeable future, say, the next half a century.
Interestingly, jobs in those areas not covered by OECD are becoming more important than ever as the populations engaged in them are shrinking rapidly yet cannot be replaced. I know a 70-year-old welder who builds structures for high-rise structures, like the new WTC in NYC. He wants to retire but is being asked by companies that he works for as an independent contractor to continue working. He gets paid $2,000 for 5 hours or so of work. Not bad!
Toshio Aritake