#labour markets

[nextwavefutures]

The ‘vast uncertainty’ of AI and jobs

Making sense of the ‘vast uncertainty’ of AI and jobs—understanding models of change is more useful than spraying numbers around. New post at. The Next Wave.

I wrote here, critically, about the recent IMF report on the impact of AI and jobs. I was doing some research for a report I was writing recently which required me to go back into the same area, and found an article by David Autor that has a different view. Not more cheerful, necessarily, but maybe more honest about the radical uncertainty that pervades this whole area. Autor is a credible voice…

[uncanny-tranny]

Good news! You aren't required to make your hobbies and passions "marketable." In fact, your crafts, hobbies, and passions don't even need to be public if you so choose. You don't have to spend all of your energy becoming perfect if you aren't enjoying the process. You are not a product, you are a person, a creative, and your work also does not need to be a product.

[guzhufuren]

never getting over how even Lele and Xiaokai's first meeting was full of huaibao energy. Lele being cold and reserved, while Xiaokai was being a gentleman who carries luggage up the stairs and gets shocked and awestruck in the middle because the sunlight fell on Lele and made him look out of this world

[carrymelikeimcute]

This is something I saw on twitter and IMMEDIATELY thought of you, I know you have done traditional-age-swapped sd/sb type Sprizzy before with the Pretty Woman fic, but here also is this flavor!

OK but now I have NOTIONS.

[radkindoffeminist]

It really annoys me when misogynists bring up the whole ‘why wouldn’t everyone just hire women if they can get away with paying everyone less’ because this is such a simplistic take on a complicated issue and doesn’t factor in the following

1) Places already do this anyway. And then they enforce pay secrecy so women are unable to talk about their wages

2) It’s not always about who is cheapest to hire - it is also about who is going to produce the better quality of work and who is going to fit into the team better. In a team dominated by men, who did they think is going to fit into the team better? Another man. In a team full of misogynists who devalue women’s work, who did they believe will do better quality work? A man. Yesterday, I was watching a video where a woman said that she met another woman who was in charge of a team and openly admitted that she would not hire a woman to be part of this team because it would cause too many issues because of sexual harassment claims. These are things people will consider when hiring.

3) It’s simplifying the issue down to ‘all women are paid less than all men in all fields across all levels’ which isn’t true. Some of the pay differences are as a result of women in the same fields doing the same jobs as men but paid less (point 1), but a lot of it comes down the the following two things:

Women are less likely to be promoted than their male colleagues which is the result of many factors including inherent misogyny (thinking women shouldn’t be in leadership, thinking their work is lower quality, etc), women being ‘less dedicated’ due to family commitments, and taking longer to have similar experience to male colleagues due to time off on maternity/raising children

Fields that are dominated by women are lower paid overall, even when comparing to jobs with a similar educational requirement. Teaching and nursing are both jobs which require degrees yet are some of the lowest paid public sector jobs. Female dominated cleaning jobs (eg: housekeeping) are lower paid than similar male-dominated jobs (eg: janitor). Labour seen as ‘women’s work’ is devalued and therefore paid less

4) Whenever we discuss these other factors, like mat leave and taking care of the children, it’s always seen as an ‘explanation’ for why women are paid less, rather than part of larger socio-economic issues leading to women being paid less. Literally saw so many things when I was younger about how it’s only like 2p/£1 rather than 23p/£1 or whatever because once you factored in all of these things above you’d find men and women in similar roles in similar fields are actually paid pretty evenly, without recognising how those reasons themselves are part of the problem. Women are pushed towards lower paid fields from a young age (teaching, nursing, care work, etc). Women are the ones who take months off on maternity leave while men might take two weeks. Women are the ones taking career breaks to look after the kids. Women are the ones working part time or flexible hours so they can look after their children. All of these things have negative impact on women’s income and they stem from misogyny. They shouldn’t be ignored in gender pay gays discussions or used to explain why the gender pay gays isn’t ‘real’.

[nulab-2024]

I’m obsessed with the little blooper. No, sorry, sorry…

[gravalicious]

Source: Ashley D. Farmer - Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (2017: 24)

“I was a slave. I was part of the “paper bag brigade,” waiting patiently in front of Woolworth’s on 170th St., between Jerome and Walton Aves., for someone to “buy” me for an hour or two, or, if I were lucky, for a day. That is the Bronx Slave Market, where Negro women wait, in rain or shine, in bitter cold or under broiling sun, to be hired by local housewives looking for bargains in human labor. It has its counterparts in Brighton Beach, Brownsville and other areas of the city. Born in the last depression, the Slave Markets are products of poverty and desperation. They grow as employment falls. Today they are growing. They arose after the 1939 [sic] crash when thousands of Negro women, who before then had a “corner” on household jobs because they were discriminated against in other employment, found themselves among the army of the unemployed. Either the employer was forced to do her own household chores or she fired the Negro worker to make way for a white worker who had been let out of less menial employment. The Negro domestic had no place to turn. She took to the streets in search of employment – and the Slave Markets were born.” - Marvel Cooke - “I Was Part of the Bronx Slave Market” [The Daily Compass, January 8th, 1950]

[shadycomputerpolice]

Is Tertiary Education Education a Scam?

While I am very pro knowledge and skill acquisition and would not declare that higher education is a waste of time, I understand where the "tertiary education is a scam" crowd is coming from.

For many people, myself included, we went to university believing the "go to uni, get good grades and a good well paying job is practically guaranteed" promise. We bought into the idea but upon graduation we realised that the promise was exaggerated or some might say outright false. That promise was true when the world's population was lower

Some of us, myself included, fell for the "it is because you have just a bachelors degree, get a masters then the well paying job is guaranteed". We did that and heart break. We got jobs but not as well paying as we expected.

The truth is many people attended university with the intention of getting lucrative jobs so when we don't get those jobs, we feel duped. The people who had to go into debt to acquire their degrees with the hopes of getting a well paying job are understandably very bitter.

The truth no one told us is that there aren't enough lucrative jobs to go around. There are more qualified candidates looking for high paying jobs than there are high paying jobs; supply exceeds demand. This is the case in all industries and sectors as when people notice an industry or sector is lucrative, they switch to that career or put their children in that career and eventually you have a lot of people in that field that causes unemployment and lower wages in that area. A perfect example of this is the tech industry: Many people believed the IT Industry was the path to financial security but alas the mass layoffs. I know unemployed and underpayed Software Engineers/ Programmers.

Is this a "do not go to university" post? No, absolutely not. This is a if you want a well paying job, you might need to consider a career in healthcare although

[samglyph]

I think some of you are getting annoyed at booktok for the wrong reasons

[somecunttookmyurl]

Sorry to just drop into this, but another thing to consider with handmade good and the ‘overpriced’ idea is that you also have to factor in how much stock might sell at any given time.

For example, if you make 100 pairs of earrings in a month but might only sell 30 (because you need to give people options etc.) then the profit from those 30 should reasonably cover the time you spent making all 100.

Also, it should pay for the time you spend at craft fairs, replying to any commissions/ purchase requests, packaging time and going to the post office, any online marketing you might do (tumblr posts etc).

Peolle don’t often factor these in when thinking about the value of crafts they buy, which is a bit unfair.

yes there are other overheads but the thing is. basically all of those to some extent also apply to fibre arts

but sure. to be thorough. i spend 10h a week at my market stall and an hour... let's say 2 be generous with it... updating the shop

if i made 50 pairs of earrings and sold 15, the "materials" cost of 1 pair, to cover their unsold breathren, goes from 42p to £1.40

earrings are far from the only thing though, and account for less than half of the sales. so. we can say that about 5h of stall/shop time is covered by those

(plus the hour it took to make them)

sale price - materials cost but split over 6 hours of labour instead of 1.5 is still £12 an hour

[thoughtlessarse]

A Labour government under Keir Starmer will fail to maximise the UK’s economic growth unless it takes the country back into the European Union’s single market and customs union, leading economists and diplomats have said. The warnings come as an Opinium poll for the Observer finds that 56% of voters now believe Brexit has been bad for the UK economy as a whole, compared with just 12% who believe it has been economically beneficial. Some 62% of people questioned also believe Brexit has contributed to higher prices in shops, against 8% who think that it has had the opposite effect. With less than two weeks to go until polling day Labour has increased its overall lead to 20 points over the Conservatives and is firmly on course for a large Commons majority. But there is increasing pressure on Starmer and the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to spell out how they plan to deliver on their manifesto pledge of securing the highest sustained economic growth of any G7 country while keeping within tight fiscal rules, and while post-Brexit barriers to trade remain in place between the UK and EU. The Office for Budget Responsibility says UK GDP will be around 4% lower every year than it would have been had we remained inside the EU. Starmer insisted while campaigning in south London that On Saturday he would not rejoin the bloc either in the short or longer term. “We are not rejoining the EU, we are not rejoining the single market or the customs union,” the Labour leader said. Asked if he would ever reconsider this, he added: “No. It isn’t our plan, it never has been. I’ve never said that as leader of the Labour party and it is not in our manifesto.”

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Nope, he's never said it, indeed rarely mentions brexit or its effects. Neither do the Tories. None of their budget policies add up, either. There's a huge deficit, but they're talking about tax cuts. Public services are going to shit, but there will be no money to make things better despite the lofty promises. The Tories are so desperate it's only a matter of time before they start offering free second-hand fossil fuelled cars because nobody's horny for their attacks on (U)LEZ zones and traffic-calming measure.

Reform UK would make the UK Airstrip One, more so than it already is. If the two main parties economic policies are shit, Reform's are a complete work of fiction. Tons of tax cuts mainly for big business would actively make public services much, much worse. They would also cancel any attempt to reach net-zero. Needless to say, immigration would be very restricted, probably to WASP countries.

The only UK-wide party that specifically mentions “brentrance,” (my word, not theirs) is the Lib-Dems.

[ripmyfictionalfriends]

when you finally graduate and you want to find a job you studied for that fits your ambitions but the labour market says get wrecked

[iphijaania]

i have like 700 words of my essay on regulatory law and rationales left to write and i have plenty of time (ish. its due tomorrow but i wanna finish it tonight) it's just so fucking boring that i can't work on it for too long or else i begin to feel my brain actively turn into cottage cheese

[patrice-bergerons]

I'm still furious about the mini-budget but it is hilarious that the mini budget by the Tories, Tories the "party of fiscal responsibility", the "party of economy over all else", the "party of sound money" has sent the UK markets into meltdown. The irony is simply delicious.

[rotzaprachim]

the thing about Hawai’i politics is that. You absolutely need to criticize the local government. But you also need to stand the economic and political politics of living in a place where the local government doesn’t have an iota of the power of the mega corporations like Hilton and Sheraton that run mega resorts here, nor the billionaires like mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, or Jeff bezos that run second homes here or have quasi-feudal estates or exert far far more power than the relatively progressive county and state governments

like. You have to clock what it is that a man worth over 100 billion dollars purchased 98% of an island. What that’s like. What power does a city councilman who represents that island in a council have over a man worth over 100 billion who both owns the land people live on AND the hotels they work at