Techosta Where Tech Starts From
One million jobs to vanish in 10 years,” shout the Monday morning headlinesjust to get the week off to a good start. But it’s not another scary intervention in the referendum debate by a pro-European or a Brexiter. It’s more serious than that.
The culprit on this occasion is the British Retail Consortium (BRC), the people who speak for shops of many sizes and employ one in six of British workers, about 3 million people. They think that 900,000 of them (not quite the million of the FT’s headline) will disappear in the next decade, more in smaller businesses and poorer areas.
Why so? This is an upgrade of an old story, the impact of disruptive technologies on existing patterns of employment, bigger and smarter computers, more online sales. But since George Osborne decided to become the worker’s friend and raise the minimum wage to a “national living” variety (NLW), albeit slowly, it’s also a political story. Higher wages imposed by government will put low-paid shop workers’ jobs in danger, says the BRC.
Don’t be smug, Mr Lawyer, Ms Doctor, Sir Financial Adviser. Tech is starting to eat good middle-class jobs, much as automated production lines ate so many well-paid working-class jobs a generation ago. We know about this in journalism because our business was one of the first white-collar industries in the queue. Facebook and Google are busy eating our lunch; if we aren’t nimble enough, we’ll be pudding.
Nothing too new there either. It was Keynes who first spoke of “technological unemployment”. But it’s getting faster, as it did for handloom weavers around 1800. The result for all such businesses, so the conventional scenario goes, is the pear-shaped labour market, which sees huge rewards for a tiny elite at the top and a lot (though not enough) insecure ones for millennials working in the gig economy.
The BRC warning (it comes a month before the minimum wage rises to £7.20 for the over-25s, a £9ph NLW by 2020) couples this development – which it supports, in theory – with rising business rates, price deflation (bad for profits, good for customers) and the online shopping effect, to say it’s going to get worse for jobs. The chancellor hasn’t quite realised what he’s done, though there’s an important clue in the fact that he has done something. More on that later.
In the tech jungle, nimble firms will move fast to adapt and survive. Retail banking, as useless at tech as the NHS, is finally moving at your semi-automated local branch. So, more ponderously, is the NHS. Amazon and Morrisons have announced a hook-up, and didn’t Sainsburys eat Argos the other day? The Mirror Group is launching New Day, a mid-market newspaper to challenge the Daily Mail and the Express. Good luck all.
[“Source-theguardian”]