Is Technology Replacing Mind Workers As Well As Manual Workers

Despite a stream of fake news emerging from government and corporate PR departments about the falling jobless numbers and the numbers of new jobs being created in the economies of the developed world, nobody seems to be getting that feelgood factor we associate with economic growth and prosperity. We have written many times of how the jobs allegedly being created are either in the services sector (waiters, burger flippers, bartenders, office cleaners, amateur cab drivers for Uber, parcel delivery contractors for Amazon and other online retailers and so on. So in reality when we think of not just unemployed, but under employed, the labour market is stagnant.

Think tanks, academics and economists have consistently underestimated the impact that immigration and automation would have on the jobless figures. As data on productivity gains and labor-force participation clearly show, even without taking into account the effects of massaging statistics by, for example, reclassifying those unemployed for over two years as "not economically active," and dumping them off the monthly numbers. The claim that innovation ultimately creates jobs by allowing workers to focus on higher-level problems is a fallacy. Were it to any extent true, we would already be aware of the effect of seeing more of the 2 million plus working age people who have inexplicably dropped out of the labor force making their way back in?

The likely effect of automation on not just low grade, repetitive jobs but skilled workers and the professions has been noted many times, and recently in this BBC report from March 2017. After the Thatcher government waged war on the working class throughout the 1980s and much of the 90s, the Labour government from 1997 to 2010 continued the task, their corporate friendly economic policies making it easy for global businesses to export jobs to low labour cost economies while subsidising high tech solutions in UK factories.

Automation is now coming for service-industry workers like those in the retail and food-service industries where the stronest job growth has been seen in recent years. Earlier this week, we picked up on an analysis that showed new atutomated order and pay kiosks being adopted by McDonald’s will result in the destruction of 2,500 jobs at its US restaurants by the end of 2017. We have heard of no plans to introduce this technology to Europe as yet but you can bet it will not be long in getting here.

Financial news website Bloomberg has published a “quick take” casting doubt on this “official” narrative and highlighting the carnage going on in the service sector right now. It notes how economists have repeatedly misjudged how our capacity to innovate would impact the labor market. For example, 13 years ago, two leading economists published a paper arguing that artificial intelligence would never allow a driverless car to safely execute a right turn because there are too many variables at work. Six years after that, Google and others claimed they had proved it possible to make cars fully autonomous (although the dodgy safety record of these cars in real driving conditions is being whitewashed by government, manufacturers and the media. For reasons that have little to do with sanity and much to do with the control freak nature of the political, business and academic elites, driverless cars are being forced on us, threatening the livelihood of millions of taxi and truck drivers. And now Google, Uber - though their driverless venture like everything else that company does is mired in scandal and controversy, Tesla - where safety issues are rife and the big car manufacturers are all exploring and testing this technology. Ford has said it plans to introduce a fully autonomous car by 2021.

“Throughout much of the developed world, gainful employment is seen as almost a fundamental right. But what if, in the not-too-distant future, there won’t be enough jobs to go around?" one think tank tasked with looking at social consequences of technological advances asked. Some economists think that will happen as robots and artificial intelligence become increasing capable of performing human tasks or human tasks are increasingly dumbed down so insensate machines can perform them?. Past technological upheavals created more jobs than they destroyed because they facilitated rapid economic growth. But some labor experts are concerned it will be different this time: Technology is replacing human brains as well as brawn."

When politicians talk about jobs, they tend to focus on traditional labour intensive industries, such as mining, steel production and auto making, that have always been the hardest hit by low cost imports and technological progress. Lately, though, the loss of manufacturing jobs in developed economies is barely significant (mainly because all the jobs have been automated already) compared to the losses happening and imminent in the services sector.

One of the worst his sectors is retail, consumer spending has shown little sign of recovering since the crash of 2008 while online shopping via internet sites. Retail outlets including Department Stores, supermarkets and small, specialist shops which employ far more people than many of the traditional manufacturing industries, are shedding workers at an accelerating rate. In another mainstay of the job market, agriculture, automation threatens to reduce manual worker numbers by over fifty per cent in the next few decades. Average employment in the first four months of 2017 was down in all advanced economies in the world against the same period a year earlier.

If robots are truly taking over, then why haven’t we seen the anticipated rise in productivity that one would expect from increased in efficiency?

While it's true that previously innovation has led to wealth creation, it would be foolish to believe this trend will continue unabated, infinite economic growth is not possible, at some point - and we may have are ma passed that point - people begin to feel insecure. As reported widely in the past, most of the new jobs that have been created are in low-wage, moderate-skill positions that cannot move the productivity needle much, causing the creation of new full-time jobs to stagnate.


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Uber Suffers Major Setback In Efforts To Conquer European Market

by Arthur Foxake
16 May 2017

Spanish taxi drivers protest against unlicenced Uber cabs undercutting them

For several years the dodgy 'ride sharing' service Uber has been getting away with murder because politicians around the world feared being accused of standing in the way of progress by holding a high - tech startup to the same laws as other companies with a more traditional business model. While undrer the Obama administration, Uber seems to possess a free pass to ignore federal and state laws, in Europe the right of Uber to do what the fuck they liked because science' had a head on with European Union workers rights laws and regulations covering insurance and passenger safety.

Currenty the first globalised taxi service that claims it is not a taxi service but a socil media app for people who want to get into cars with total strangers and play carpool karaoke has been battling with Barcelona taxi drivers who have argued that UberPOP engages in unfair competition by using unlicensed (and therefore uninsured) drivers that are not subject of the same regulatory hurdles as a regular "transport company." And while Uber has historically taken the approach of just entering new markets and leaving drivers who signed up to the ride sharing app to deal with the regulatory hurdles, it looks like the lawmakers are finally catching up with them ...which we suspect will not be good news for Uber's private investors who recently shovelled $68 billion of money into the IPO of a company that had no reliable business model, no track record of profits and dividends and no real product or service to sell but earned revenue by taking a cut of monies illegally obtained by private car owners posing as taxi drivers from people too self interested to pay fares that allow properly registered and monitored drivers to make a decent living.

As Reuters reported earlier this month, the Court of Justice of the European Union's (ECJ) Advocate General Maciej Szpunar issued a preliminary opinion that Uber is actually a "transport service" under the terms of EU law and not just a ride sharing app. And the moment an Uber driver asks a passenger for money, it becomes a regulated transaction rather than a personal favour. The ruling is significant because, if it stands, it would require Uber to operate effectively as a taxi company and thus provide insurance to drivers and guarantee that they are properly licensed and complying with all safety regulations. Per Reuters:
"Although the opinion of the Court of Justice of the European Union's (ECJ) Advocate General Maciej Szpunar is non-binding, its judges usually follow such advice and are likely to reach a final ruling in the landmark case in the coming months."

If the ECJ rules that Uber is a transport service, this will impact on the Silicon Valley firm's operations in Estonia, Poland, Czech Republic, and Finland where it still runs UberPOP, using amateur drivers to pick up riders.

The ECJ's final ruling cannot be appealed by Uber

While Uber has always argued in similar disputes that they are merely a 'market maker' offering an app for matching demand for rides with supply, the ECJ's Szpunar saw it differently finding that moment money changes hands the legal position of all involved in the transaction changes, the passenger is uninsured, the car owner, unless a licenced taxi operator, has invalidated private car insurance and the middle man is seen by law as a taxi service operator and an employer which requires it to comply with local employment laws. "Uber does much more than link supply and demand: it created this demand itself" adding that "Uber can thus be required to obtain the necessary licenses and authorizations under national law," the ECJ judgement stated.

The ECJ's Szpunar said that Uber's argument that it merely matches supply and demand between drivers and passengers was a "simplistic view of its role."

"The Uber electronic platform, whilst innovative, falls within the field of transport: Uber can thus be required to obtain the necessary licenses and authorizations under national law,"

"In effect, Uber does much more than link supply and demand: it created this demand itself," Szpunar wrote.

The service provided by Uber amounts to the "organization and management of a comprehensive system for on-demand urban transport," the ECJ said.

Regulating the software company as a "new economy" information service meant treating Uber as if it was simply an air traffic controller or market maker connecting drivers to passengers.

Instead, by forcing Uber to comply with myriad local transportation regulations – some dating back as long as a century – it must take more responsibility for certifying, insuring and paying its drivers, as taxi firms now do.

Meanwhile, Uber representatives were dismissive of the initial ruling saying that such decisions only serve to "undermine the much needed reform of outdated laws..."

A spokeswoman for Uber said it would await the ECJ's final ruling, but added it "would not change the way we are regulated in most EU countries as that is already the situation today".

And a ruling against it would "undermine the much needed reform of outdated laws which prevent millions of Europeans from accessing a reliable ride at the tap of a button," she added. Well whatever Uber may lack in terms of regulatory compliance, track record, proven business model and so on, they are not short of arrogance.

The real question as far as news reporters are concerned is just how long the negative news can continue to pile up for Uber before all those investors who just added nearly $13 billion to company coffers over and above the $68 billion opening valuation start to get a little nervous that the company is still burning a couple billion dollars a year after while not showing even an operating surplus let alone a balance sheet surplus from which dividends could be paid. Do we smell a repeat of Enron or Worldcom brewing?



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At least 40 injured, many arrests in Paris anti-labor reform protests

At least 40 people, including 29 police officers, were injured when the latest protest against France’s highly unpopular labor law reforms turned violent as demonstrators clashed with police in Paris today. Police arrested many prostors and used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowd.

Paris police chief Michel Cadot said he estimated "maybe more than 50,000 demonstrators" joined the protest in the city.

Clashes took place near the capital’s Port Royal railway station. Dozens of people, mostly wearing hoods, threw stones and firecrackers at the security forces, who responded with force to disperse the demonstration.

The unpopular reform, initiated by Labor Minister Myriam El Khomri, forces employers to pay only 10 percent of overtime bonus, instead of the current 25 percent. The bill technically maintains the 35-hour working week, but says that in case of “exceptional circumstances,” employees can be asked to work up to 60 hours a week.

The seven main French unions were hoping to attract a million workers to the protest against French President Francois Hollande's controversial labor reforms, despite falling support for the mass protests that have disrupted France since early March. A series of strikes and mass demonstrations have brought chaos to the rail network, the Paris Metro, airports, and road transport, because of industrial action and blockades at fuel refineries and depots.

The action is aimed at overturning reforms to the highly codified French workers' rights laws — known as the Code du travail — in order to give employers more flexibility. The labor reforms were largely directed at making companies take on more workers on permanent contracts, rather than temporary ones including zero hours contracts, to bring down the unemployment rate from ten percent. The trend to contract working and part time work was set in train by restrictive rules imposed by the EU which, at the same time as they imposed unacceptable restrictions on European employers, made it easier to 'offshore' jobs or to subcontact work through agencies to foreign firms which under EU law, are answerable to the law of the country in which the form is registered. Hollande's proposals would give employers more scope to lay-off workers and cut costs and allow some employees to work far longer than the current 35-hour week.

The reforms were pushed through by Hollande, who invoking a little used piece of the constitution — Article 49.3 — bypassed the Senate — which is dominated by Republicans, who are against the reforms.

Opinion polls show that, while four out of five, disagree with the labor reforms, there is dwindling support for the industrial action — particularly with the eyes of the world on France, which is hosting the current Euro 2016 football tournament. France 24 reported that only 4.5 percent of employees at state-owned national rail company SNCF were on strike Monday (June 13) — which is significantly smaller than previously.


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Unemployment falling? The Great Statistical Con Trick

by Wild Bill Hiccup

Manipulating statistics is not the same as creating jobs Image source

One of the greatest idiocies uttered by President Barack Hussein Obama in his "State Of The Union" speech earlier this week was the president's claim that his administration had turned the economy around and was creating millions of 'new jobs' every year.

The official narrative from the US Labor Department claims the resurgent economy created 292,000 jobs in December alone. This prompted another round of celebrations from the Obama administration and its supporters and a lot of orgasmic screaming and shouting from people who insist Obama should be judged solely by the colour of his skin, regardless of the 'quality of his character', the paucity of his achievements, the overtly racist tone of his speeches, the numerous foreign policy disasters or the failure to address any of the problems that concern the majority of Americans (clue: gay rights are not a priority for most Americans.

In spite of the US economy having created almost 6 million jobs over the last two years according to official figures, more Americans than ever (93 million according to estimates) are out of work. The unemployment rate has fallen much more rapidly than most economists expected, and at 5 percent, is relatively low by historical standards but the published statistics do not define how many of those jobs are part time, how many are bar staff and waiters and how many are zero hours contracts (casual work with a condition that the contracted person cannot take other casual jobs.

While brainwashed Democrats celebrate Obama's huff and puff about the improving economy, most people in the USA still don't have much reason to be happy (don't worry US readers, things are no better in Europe). Real earning are only slightly above pre-2008 levels, and have only risen by around 7 percent in the past fifteen years, while prices have risen more quickly, even according to official inflation figures . Even small gains in real earning recorded by reliable (i.e. non government economic surveys that workers have seen recently result mainly from the collapse in oil prices on world markets. When prices rise, as geopolitical developments suggest they will, those gains will quickly be reversed

Even if we accept official figures as correct, as unemployment has fallen there has been no rise in the rate of nominal wage growth. In fact data actually indicate the rate of growth slowing slightly. Workers are not getting their share of the new prosperity and are certainly recovering back what they lost in the crash.

Other statistics are consistent with a weak labor market. Turnover rates remain low, close to recession levels, suggesting that few workers are confident enough enough to leave a job without another lined up. Also, the typical length of unemployment periods is similar to what we would expect in a recession, as does the number of people working part-time involuntarily.

The disconnect between the low unemployment rate and other measures of labor market strength is explained by the large number of people who have dropped out of the labor market over the last five years. Workers are only counted in the data as being unemployed if they have looked for work in the last month.

"Workers are only counted in the data as being unemployed if they have looked for work in the last month," says the US Labour Dept. in its T&Cs (nobody reads the small print.) Workers are considered employed if they have one hour of work per month, and conversely if they send out resumes from Monster they are considered unemployed. So, the distortions are large and official numbers mean little. Go with your gut feeling on this one.

Many workers have given up looking for work after being unable to find jobs and are no longer counted as being unemployed, instead they are classified as 'not economically active. This causes the unemployment rate to hugely undercount the number of people who would actually like jobs.

Read articles John Williams at Shadowstats.com or go read Paul Craig Roberts to see informed analysis on how manipulated and massaged these government's numbers are. The numbers we see 'corporate puppet' politicians mouthing on TV screens or read in mainstream media are massaged to the max, and are pure propaganda.

So what are we to make of Barack Obama's claims on unemployment? Some reality needed here. When a full time worker retires of quits, replacing them with two part times is not 'creating two new jobs', nor even one new job in fact. Two half jobs equals one job - i.e. the one formerly done by the guy who quit.
It happens in the UK too, I know a young mother who registered as available for work after maternity leave and was offered a two-hours per day position. It's could not possibly provide a living wage, but as far as government statistics are concerned she is 'in work' and thus off the unemployed statistics.
Anyone who believe government statistics is terminally naive.

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Doctors And Engineers? 65 Per Cent Of Syrian Refugees Can’t Even Read Or Write

Anti - immigration prostests in Germany

Statistics released by a senior German academic confirm previous forecasts suggesting the majority of Syrian (del>illegal immigrants refugees arriving in Europe claiming they are asylum seekers or refugees are functionally illiterate and have no hope of obtaining gainful employment.

That almost two thirds of Syrian refugees are illiterate mean the majority will never enter the labour market, according to the “harsh” claims of professor Ludger Wößmann of the University of Munich. Opponents of unrestricted immigration have warned since the flow began to build in 2013 that mostillegal arrivals were economic migrants and were coming because they had heard in Europe governments pay people a wage for doing nothing.

The idea that most of the people arriving were highly qualified engineers or brain surgeons was propaganda put out by left wing organisations that support mass immigration.

Speaking in an interview with Zeit magazine, the professor admits there are no definite statistics on literacy of migrants arriving yet, but combining knowledge of migrants already arrived and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development surveys of the nations where refugees come from paints a bleak picture.

In a warning to German manual workers, the professor also suggested the only hope to get many migrants working and off welfare programmes is if Angela Merkel's government was to suspend the minimum wage for them. Merkel has done everything she can to shit on germans and spoonfeed immigrants so we can expect that to happen.

The professor also batted off the suggestion doing so would be harmful to the 'dignity' of migrants, as leaving them unemployed would be worse. Supporters of immigrants, it appears, do nor consider the dignity of native workers undercut by imported labour. READ MORE >>>

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In a move that will leave many of its shocked and disoriented, The Sun, the tabloid of tits and trivia today woke up to the immigration crisis that is threatening the social stability of European nations and reported some real news.

Opposition Party to Sue Austrian Government Over Complicity In People Trafficking
We have reported previously that in their eagerness to complete the genocide of Europe's white working classes, the political and business elites are prepared to make a mockery of their own laws. One way in which this has been done is by turning a blind eye to people trafficking so that the entry of illegal immigrants to Europe would not be slowed by national law. We can't claim credit for the action reported here, we have very few Austrian readers, but it's good to see oyhers are starting to think.

Autumn Gets More Interesting As Merkel Admists She May Have Caused balkans War.

The autumn of 2015 has been interesting with the escalation of the war against ISIS by Russian air Force jets and Iranian ground troops in Syria and Iraq, Europe's migrant crisis pushing prosperous north European nations towards civil unrest, and the downing of a Russian airliner over Sinai by as yet unknown causes though western intelligence reports suggest a terrorist bomb was planted on board before take off. And it is set to get more interesting ...

German Opposition Party Warns, Nation Is "At The Edge Of Anarchy, Civil War Is Coming"

As the stituation in German society deteriorates each day due to the vast swarm of lawless, uneducated, infidel hating illegal immigrants that Housfrau Volksfuhrer invited to travel to Germany and replace the established population, social commentators are predicting the country will slide into civil unrest and possibly full scale conflict between supporters of immigration and patriotic Germans

Hausfrau Volksfuhrer Merkel Confronts Facebook's Zuckerberg Over Policing Hate Posts

It has long been recognized that German chancellor Angela Merkel models her leadrship style on those og Hitler and Stalin. What is not so well know is that Facebook CEO Zuckerberg is collaborating with Merkel, Obama, Cameron and other leaders sympathetic to global fascism to introduce censorship of internet content. Avoid Facebook, Zuckerberg is a Jewish Nazi, how sick is that

Syrian Doctor Makes More Trafficking Migrants to Greece Than He Can Doctoring
A former doctor from Syria has described how he now makes £60,000 a month trafficking people from Turkey to Europe. He has warned European Union (EU) member states that the refugees will continue to come even if all the borders are shut, saying “They will dig tunnels if necessary.”

How Neo - Con and Neo - liberal Globalism Freaks Are Destabilizing Europe According To Plan

A study by our owner/ editor of how the USA led global markets project has destsbilised the middle easdt and why that outcome looks as if it was the long term plan all along. Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Europe ... all are strategically important and all were potential obstacles to Washington's world domination ambitions.

Muslim Only No Go Areas For Police And Emergency Services In Our Cities? - It Already Happened In Sweden.

Sweden continues to lead the way in surrendering its nation, culture and self respect to exremist Muslim dickheads, reasoning that the violent rapists and murderers of the relion of peace will thank them rather than kill them all. but the people all over Europe are waking to the betrayal of their elites.

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