A respite from the robots (but a retraining emergency)
Leading economists are increasingly scaling back the most apocalyptic forecasts of job losses resulting from the new age of automation. In a major report, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the research and policy grouping of the world’s richest nations, says 10% of U.S. jobs are at high risk of vanishing to automation — much lower than most prior forecasts.
Why it matters: The benchmark for such scholarship is a landmark 2013 study by two Oxford University economists, who said automation could wipe out 47% of American jobs. So, to the degree the new report is a better reflection of the future, it's good news for American workers.
But there's still trouble ahead: The OECD economists arrive at a relatively high number of overall jobs at risk — about 38% of American jobs. They say that just 10% will be entirely vaporized, while about 28% will be transformed into new positions requiring a clutch of new skills.
- In order for that 28% of workers to keep those jobs, they will need to undergo retraining.
- A paradox: Workers with the least-automatable jobs are far more willing to undergo training and new formal education than those whose jobs are at risk.
- "Workers in fully automatable jobs are more than three times less likely to have participated in on-the-job training, over a 12-months period, than workers in non-automatable jobs," the study says.
https://www.axios.com/automation-jobs-future-retraining-workers-e9fea761-18c3-49bb-834f-6d25819e1a1c.html
An automated car production line at the Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Russia (HMMR) car manufacturing plant in St Petersburg.
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