As the TPP deal is being fast-tracked through Congress, Zeynep Tufekci writes that even having a college degree will not necessarily protect your job from being outsourced. More and more, jobs which we thought were safe are being taken over by machines. This, Tufekci notes, gives employers even more leverage over employees anytime they try to form a union.
We are being told that TPP includes protections for not just manufacturing workers, but service workers whose jobs are being displaced by TPP.
To further sweeten the deal for Democrats, the package includes expanding trade adjustment assistance — aid to workers whose jobs are displaced by global trade — to service workers, not just manufacturing workers. Mr. Wyden also insisted on a four-year extension of a tax credit to help displaced workers purchase health insurance.
These are concessions that Republicans agreed to in order to win Wyden's support.
However, these protections, based on Tufecki's article, do not go far enough. She writes:
Today, machines can process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations with appropriate emotional tenor.
Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. In applications around the world, software is being used to predict whether people are lying, how they feel and whom they’ll vote for.
To crack these cognitive and emotional puzzles, computers needed not only sophisticated, efficient algorithms, but also vast amounts of human-generated data, which can now be easily harvested from our digitized world. The results are dazzling. Most of what we think of as expertise, knowledge and intuition is being deconstructed and recreated as an algorithmic competency, fueled by big data.
As she notes, one can easily imagine the kind of twisted thinking that will go on in corporate boardrooms. No more employees taking off early because of sick children, aging parents, or other family troubles. She continues:
To those for whom it’s been less of a blessing, we keep doling out the advice to upgrade skills. Unfortunately, for most workers, technology is used to “automate” the job and to take power away.
That is the problem with the safeguards that Wyden agreed to recently. Given what we now know, it is no longer enough to tell people to upgrade their skills and they'll be fine. It will, at best, be a temporary solution. That is why, in the NYT article, the AFL-CIO says that the protections in TPP are not enough:
The A.F.L.-C.I.O. and virtually every major union — convinced that trade promotion authority will ease passage of trade deals that will cost jobs and depress already stagnant wages — have vowed a fierce fight. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. announced a “massive” six-figure advertising campaign to pressure 16 selected senators and 36 House members to oppose fast-track authority.
“We can’t afford to pass fast track, which would lead to more lost jobs and lower wages,” said Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “We want Congress to keep its leverage over trade negotiations — not rubber-stamp a deal that delivers profits for global corporations, but not good jobs for working people.”
Given the exponential rise in technology, which will take more and more jobs previously thought safe, we need to start considering solutions previously thought to be too radical. We need to consider giving every man, women, and child a basic income guarantee. We also need, as a government, to step in where the private sector is backing out and create work for all of us, such as cleaning litter along roads, demolishing abandoned homes that are not livable, planting trees, and other public works projects. There are already millions of people who have dropped out of the work force because corporate American considers them "unemployable." The more people that get pushed out of the workforce, the more it will erode the foundations of our democracy.