Robotic Nation Evidence

Other Unemployment Pressures

Business Week: Corporate America's Silent Partner: India

From the article:

The shift of skilled work to India is becoming one of Corporate America's worst-kept secrets. Almost daily, India's newspapers carry items on new plans by U.S. software, finance, or pharmaceutical companies to open or expand call centers and research labs. Officials from Bombay to Bangalore point to splashy new office parks that are soon to house major facilities by companies like Morgan Stanley, General Motors, or Dell. Tour a busy call center run by an Indian outsourcing specialist at midnight, and you'll likely see hundreds of staffers fielding calls for clients like American Express, MetLife, J.P. Morgan Chase, or Citigroup.

And:

Corporate America won't be able to stay silent forever, though. Globalization of white-collar work is an irreversible mega-trend that's only starting to hit full force. The massive facilities being built in India under the radar screen will soon be blindingly obvious. More important, the economic payoff of off-shoring business processes and a portion of R&D can be so enormous that even reluctant corporations will have little choice but to follow suit to stay competitive. If a major info-tech, insurance, telecom, or banking company doesn't disclose any back-office center in India, Wall Street will soon start asking, 'Why not?'

This trend will continue to unemploy millions of white collar workers (software developers, engineers, designers) over the next 5 to 10 years.

There is also this article: CNN - The real boom

From the article:

But it's also worth noting what is not at record levels -- job creation. In the last two years U.S. manufacturers have eliminated about two million jobs. While there were signs in October of a revival in job growth, it was not at a high enough pace to significantly reduce the nation's high unemployment rate.

This is scary, in the face of such robust overall growth, but it's not inconsistent with my interpretation that the boom is driven largely by technological progress. One unfortunate side effect of techno-efficiency is that it reduces the need for people to do things machines can do.

To keep your job in this new world, you'd better be doing something that benefits from a digitized economy. And to compound the problem, as Intel CEO Craig Barrett has lately been pointing out -- we emerge from this recession with several billion more people having entered the global economy. Many of these people are willing to work hard for much less than the typical American. And much of today's work, as we've discussed here repeatedly, can be outsourced abroad over the wire.

There is also this article: Money magazine: Vanishing Jobs:

Another estimate by Forester Research goes into more specifics. Forrester estimates that by 2015, some 3.3 million service-sector jobs will be shipped overseas or rendered obsolete by technology. Forester analyst John McCarthy says jobs that are most at risk require fewer skills, are automated or are highly portable.

Those include computer programming and software engineer jobs, that have long been leaving the country. By 2015, 26 percent of those jobs will be gone, says McCarthy.

Clerical jobs, like accounts receivable and payable, financial research, data-entry and various administrative services also are vulnerable since their tasks are either becoming automated or can be performed by less-expensive workers somewhere else.

What is happening here is a "perfect storm" of unemployment. The loss of manufacturing jobs combines with the loss of white collar jobs and the loss of jobs to robots to create economic stagnation, and then massive unemployment, in the U.S. Meanwhile, corporate executives concentrate massive amounts of wealth.

In Robotic Nation I discuss the fact that robotic replacement of workers will not be the only form of unemployment pressure. It combines with this "irreversible mega-trend" of off-shoring. And it combines, as discussed in Manna, with the Wal-Martization of wages (e.g. - California grocery store strikes), to create a gigantic minimum-wage working class in the United States. This minimum wage class becomes massively unemployed with the arrival of service sector robots starting in 2015.