The challenge: creating a better future of work
Originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle (Aug 19, 2019), by
Anmol Chaddha, Ph.D., who leads the Equitable Futures Lab (@IFTF_inequality) at the Institute for the Future.
Many fear that artificial intelligence and robots will take over factory floors, warehouses and even white-collar offices, laying waste to millions of low-skill jobs, herding workers into never-ending “upskilling” courses or gig jobs with no benefits.
But these negative effects of automation are not inevitable. Even low-paid, dull and demanding jobs can become good jobs when we put the right set of policies and rules in place. The failure to ensure that everyone in California benefits from its unprecedented wealth calls for a new agenda to improve jobs and promote economic equity.
While forecasts about automation make the headlines, many working families may be worried less about the future of work than the outright failure of work today — the failure of jobs to provide economic security, to create meaningful opportunities or to offer a fair share of a growing economic pie. When solidly middle-class families struggle with high living costs, California offers little hope to the 35% of its workers who make less than $15 per hour. The workers most vulnerable to automation may be in low-wage service industries — the very same jobs that replaced the higher-paid manufacturing jobs when those jobs disappeared from American cities during the wave of deindustrialization, which particularly hurt black workers and neighborhoods.
Today, even as the loss of manufacturing jobs has hollowed out communities across the country, they remain the gold standard of a good job. But they weren’t always good jobs. Long hours, low wages and unsafe working conditions were the rule. Government stepped in and workers took collective action to enact new rules that ensured reasonable hours, safer working conditions and livable wages that helped build a middle class.
The lesson: With appropriate policies, any job can become a good job. There’s nothing about today’s low-wage service jobs, home-care work and gig jobs that means we can’t make them good jobs, like we have done before.
The jobs of the future are upon us today. We can’t turn the clock back and resurrect all of the manufacturing jobs that have disappeared. But we can create the good jobs of the future. Rather than wondering what kinds of jobs we will be doing for robot bosses, we need to decide what we want work and jobs to be doing for us, our families and our communities in the future. The state can take the lead in charting a new path forward that works for all Californians.
In an executive order creating a Future of Work Commission, Gov. Gavin Newsom emphasized the need to “modernize the social compact between the government, the private sectors and workers.”
We can begin to formulate policies that set guardrails on how robots and artificial intelligence can be used to improve the quality of jobs, not just replace them. We can look beyond upskilling workers to upgrading jobs. We can consider a system of portable employment benefits that stay with people as they go from job to job or gig to gig, instead of only being available to some workers with formal, traditional employers. We can implement a universal family-care policy that provides paid leave for new parents and for relatives to take care of aging family members. And we can build dependability into the gig economy so workers can plan not just for their next vacation but for their futures.
Robots aren’t running the show. We are. California can be the epicenter for reshaping the social contract for a new economy. So, let’s get to work.
Anmol Chaddha, Ph.D., leads the Equitable Futures Lab (@IFTF_inequality) at the Institute for the Future. He has extensive policy and research background in economic inequality, low-wage work and job quality, racial inequality, debt and wealth. Prior to joining the Institute for the Future, he developed policy and research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where he established an initiative to improve the quality of jobs in low-wage industries, led research on racial wealth inequality, and examined the rising debt burdens of low-income families.
