What Should We Do After Work? Automation and Employment Law

Abstract

Three major threats to American jobs have grabbed headlines in recent years, One is the migration of manufacturing jobs to China, as perhaps best exemplified by Foxconn, the Taiwanese firm that employs over a million Chinese workers in the production of iPhones, iPads, and other consumer electronics, To labor-law cognoscenti, the outsourcing of manufacturing to China, and the feared "race to the bottom" in labor standards, is mostly yesterday's news. Since 2015, they have been more preoccupied with a second development—the rise of platform-based "gig" work in place of real jobs, epitomized by Uber's treatment of its drivers as independent contractors rather than employees. Yet both of these threats to American jobs and workers arguably pale beside the threat of automation. If Uber has its way, its drivers will soon go the way of lamplighters, replaced by self-driving vehicles. And if Foxconn is representative, then Chinese factory jobs are also at risk: by 2016, Foxconn had replaced 60,000 production workers with robots and was planning to replace most of the others within several years. For some observers, Uber's autonomous vehicles and Foxconn's robots are harbingers of a jobless future, as machines and algorithms threaten to put vast swaths of the labor force in the United States and worldwide out of work or into desperate competition for the jobs that remain. These commentators describe an exponential growth of technologies that replicate or surpass humans in an ever-wider range of tasks. Putting aside the more fantastical predictions about artificial intelligence (Al) dominating or even devouring its human creators, the prospects for job destruction are eye-opening. Robotic and digital production of goods and services, coupled with advances in AI and machine learning, is poised to take over both routine or repetitive tasks and some more advanced tasks. In one much-cited reckoning, nearly half of the jobs in the current economy are at risk. Although some new jobs are readily foreseeable- especially skilled jobs working with technology—no large new sectors or industries yet visible on the horizon appear likely to absorb the multitudes of human workers who might be displaced. Within this camp, predictions range from a tsunami of job losses to a more manageable rising tide. For other observers, the real threat from automation is not a net loss of jobs but growing polarization of the labor market. These observers note that automation generates large productivity gains and profits for some, while destroying many decent midlevel jobs. They predict a growing economic chasm between those who create or own the new technology, or whose high-end skills are complemented by that technology, and most workers who are stuck competing for the less-skilled but still human jobs that remain. In this scenario, labor shortages in some skilled-job categories will coexist with labor surpluses and downward wage pressure outside those categories.

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