ITEMS FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
The job didn’t pay much: four bucks an hour if you really hustled. But for Catherine Fraser, a recent community college graduate from Mountain View looking to pick up a little extra spending cash, the work was a hoot.
… said analyst Martin Schneider with 451 Research. “Like manufacturing has done forever, crowd-labor lets us break down a job into tiny components, where one bit of fact-checking or writing a few sentences is now the equivalent of gluing that chip onto a computer board.”
… The larger question — and one with huge global implications as crowd-sourcing redefines and in some cases kills traditional jobs and long-established labor-management models — is whether the crowd-labor pool could essentially become one big worldwide digital sweatshop. While industry studies show average hourly earnings across all categories range from about $7 in India to $16 in Western Europe, the fast-growing segment of micro-taskers earn half that on average, and some make only $1.50 an hour.
Patrick May, ‘Crowd labor’ helps spur social networking revolution, San Jose Mercury News, Updated: 05/01/2012.
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Series Index May |
Series Index Apr |
Rate of Change |
|
Employment Index |
50.8 |
54.2 |
Slower |
Business Activity/Production |
55.6 |
54.6 |
Faster |
New Orders |
55.5 |
53.5 |
Faster |
| Source: May 2012 Non-Manufacturing ISM Report On Business, Institute for Supply Management, June 5, 2012 | |||
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For Great Wall, a private sector Chinese car maker that employs 50,000 workers, the Swiss robots and other machinery that line its bright factory floor produce more than cost savings. The company hopes they will help it build cars good enough to compete with the global auto makers.
…
According to Nomura, 28 percent of factory machines in China use numerical controls – one measure of automation. That may be far lower than Japan’s 83 percent, but China is growing far faster than Japan did at a comparable stage of development, says Ge Wenjie, a machinery analyst with Nomura.
…
In other words, China may soon be known less for cheap Christmas toys and more for high-end medical equipment, luxury cars and jet engines.
By Don Durfee, Analysis: Robots lift China’s factories to new heights, Reuters, June 3, 2012.
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Unit labor costs fell in 23 of 47 service-providing industries, the most since 2003 …
Output per hour increased in 32 of the 47 [service-providing industries] industries studied. In most of these industries, productivity rose as output growth was accompanied by declines or more modest increases in hours. Several industries posted double-digit productivity gains as a result: local as well as long-distance general freight trucking; refrigerated warehousing and storage; radio and television broadcasting; wireless telecommunications carriers; and travel agencies.
In a few industries, productivity rose despite falling output. In industries such as postal service; couriers and messengers; video tape and disc rental; photofinishing; and newspaper, book, and directory publishers, rising labor productivity reflected declines in both labor hours and output, with hours falling more rapidly than output.
Productivity and Costs by Industry: Selected Service-Providing and Mining Industries, 2010, Economic News Release, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 31, 2012.
COMMENTS
During the 20th century each new generation of U.S. workers faced declining employment opportunities in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. But those lost employment opportunities were offset by growing employment opportunities in government and private service sector industries.
This is no longer the case. Job growth in government and service sector industries has slowed considerably. Moreover, some government agencies and service sector industries are embracing new production technologies and becoming job shedders themselves.
The hallmark of the first half of the 21st century may well be a decades long global employment crisis. National governments are still trying to apply economic remedies carried over from the 20th century in a world that is vastly different. National economic sovereignty is gone. Rich and poor nations alike are now joined at the economic hip in a single world economy.
Sticking with the “each nation goes it alone” strategy for addressing the global employment crisis isn’t working. Rather than getting increasing prosperity, U.S. working families and local business owners are getting a larger share of the world’s very high level of poverty.
The practical alternative for the U.S. is to join with the world’s other nations to build institutions that coordinate national economic policies and set minimum global standards for corporate behavior, working conditions, wages and benefits.
Globalization cannot be undone, so there is no other choice.
IWE WORK FUTURES 