We can, with minimal effort, mitigate the larger share of the negative effects of the anticipated unemployment of large blocks of our citizenry if we collect better statistics on what jobs exist today, what kinds of jobs are open and what kinds of jobs are trending towards nonexistence. The problem today is that labor statistics are collected using a content strategy that seeks only to identify wage-level, mated with reasonably specific employer-level data. This does not give enough insight into employement trends to guide anticipatory decision-making around training efforts.
The existence and the expiration (permanent termination) of specific and categorizeable unskilled and semi-skilled jobs and skilled trades is a knowable thing at a reasonable scale. This assumption is critical to the formation of a labor market that values the continued employment of its participants. If we cannot know what jobs exist, what jobs are available, and then what jobs have ceased to exist, coordinating labor (the training and deployment of) is going to be what it is today: messy and inefficient.
That labor can be divided into unskilled and semi-skilled jobs and, further, skilled trades is another assumption. Unskilled jobs are those that require no training beyond a single day to perform (e.g., farm labor, janitor, porter, door man, et cetera). Those that perform unskilled jobs are extremely fungible in the labor market; the protections for their jobs are low because of how easily their skills are found – depending mostly on speaking the same language, physical mobility, punctuality, and an ability to add value early on in the employment process.
Semi-skilled jobs are those that require some vocational skills; operating heavy machinery of some kind or a retail sales person, for example. Those that perform semi-skilled jobs are less fungible but may be as susceptible to technological advances as unskilled labor; a technological improvement that obviates the need for those skills could wipe out a whole category of semi-skilled labor nearly at once.
Skilled trades are those that require vocational training, often lasting months or years and frequently having a kind of licensure to perform legally. This is labor that is subject to overarching market forces, but whose participants are less fungible, as the specialized and context-dependent knowledge leads to meaningful impacts to the efficiency with which the jobs is performed.
Further, the data would need to be broken down within those specific categories into the specific types of services the worker was providing. This categorization would be challenging, but nowhere near impossible. Providing a controlled vocabulary to surveyed employers within the BLS survey that enabled them to specific categorize employee-types would give the added dimension that’s necessary to better better decision-making.
According to data from the AFL-CIO, about 40% of the US workforce (and decreasing) are in jobs like these. This trend is likely to continue with further automation and other technological advances. If this matters, it’s because we have the non-specific knowledge that a very large (but decreasing) portion of the labor market will be forced out of employement by predictable economic and technological factors (decreasing faster than workers in this category of work are leaving the labor market by choice – i.e., retirement). Since we are interested in ensuring our citizens remain productive and participate in our economy, by not getting more specific measures of this data, we will be effectively choosing to make inefficient decisions around re-training and, ultimately, leave large sectors of the economy unemployed and without any reliable means to become employed.
Better data collection will go a long way towards understanding job-specific labor trends and direct us towards relocation, retraining, and educational investments that actually yield positive outcomes for the unemployed (or likely-to-become unemployed). Similarly, knowing these trends can also help businesses make planned, humane transitions away from certain types of labor under programs that ensure that both employer and employed aren’t forced into making the Faustian choice where (a) an employer fires or lays-off good workers because greater economic factors drive them to replace them with more cost-effective alternatives (e.g., automation, offshoring) or go out of business (b) current employees engage in malicious compliance or strike outright to (understandably) protest the anticipated loss of their employment by factors out of their control.
With this information available, employers and employees will have a clearer sense of industry-wide trends that they will have to adapt to and, then, to develop anticipatory solutions to those issues.
