Extinction Of Work

A jobs apocalypse has begun in the West as automation takes over. How long will it be before it arrives in India?

- Rajeev Srinivasan

ON A MAY trip to Paris and the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the things that startled me is the virtual extinction of various categories of jobs. Technology could well be the culprit, although I read somewhere that only a single official job classification has explicitly disappeared in the US in the last 60 years: elevator (lift) operator. But what I observed was that there is an accelerated pace at which some formerly ubiquitous jobs are disappearing. Perhaps the same will happen in India, too.

I discussed this with a banker, chairman of a large private bank, and he was sanguine: he pointed out that in past cycles of job disappearance, other positions opened up to compensate. If bank teller jobs have been decimated by the appearance of ATMs and internet banking, he pointed out that the proliferation of TV channels had created vast numbers of new positions. Implicit in his statement was the assumption that people could be re-trained and re-purposed.

That assumption may not be valid: often, even if the total number of jobs increases, a significant proportion of those who lost their positions are unable to find new jobs that are more or less comparable to their old ones. Skills are often not transferable; or they may be forced to take up jobs that pay significantly less. That was the experience of manufacturing workers in the US when factory jobs disappeared: many ended up being forced to take up much worse service jobs, for instance slinging hamburgers in fast food joints.