Slashdot Mirror
E-commerce Is Concentrating Jobs, Not Killing Them (axios.com)
A reader shares a report: The growing popularity of online shopping has hit traditional retailers hard, culminating in a spate of retail bankruptcies and store closures in recent years. But according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the retail apocalypse has actually created nearly as many jobs as it has killed. Though e-commerce and other non-store retailers have hired nearly as many workers as traditional retailers have cut, these new jobs are much more geographically concentrated.
Not only that, but the article (the original one, not the summary slashdot copied almost word-per-word) says:
If wages are a rough proxy of employers’ demand for certain skillsets, then these two categories of jobs would seem to have different skill requirements: in 2012, the average online retail job paid slightly over $50,000, while the average department store job paid just $20,500. By 2016, the average wage for nonstore workers exceeded $59,000, while the average wage for department store workers remained roughly the same. Part of this pay gap reflects the fact that department store jobs are more likely to be part-time. Nevertheless, the difference is staggering, suggesting that nonstore retailers demand a different type of worker than department stores do. So, even if laid-off department store workers were willing and able to move to, say, King County, they might lack the skillsets sought by e-tailers.
The amount of jobs stayed the same, but the people who got axed from brick-and -mortar stores are the ones that would never be able to "switch jobs" and become e-market employees. Higher-skilled workers got more jobs, while lower-skilled workers got the shaft.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Easy answer: make-work. You even said it yourself.
There's a lot of liberal hand-wringing about setting up UBI (universal basic income, a.k.a. welfare on steroids) and how difficult it is to get conservatives to agree to it.
Instead, look to a different liberal concept: UBE: Universal Basic Employment. It's been done before. These were so successful that many of the things they built are still in use today. Everything from Hoover Dam, down to those bridges that are now crumbling and old, 80+ years later, to those fancier-than-they-should-be stone signs and artfully overbuilt pit toilets in the national parks: those were all PWA, WPA, and CCC projects.
The government needs to spend its money doing things that they should be doing: protecting the country (military) and building and maintaining infrastructure (roads, communications, etc.). That's literally why money exists. The government "produces" these services (protection and infrastructure), and pays for it with fancy-looking IOU's printed on weird cloth-paper. If they need a bigger workforce to get their job done, then they should hire some employees to do it for them.
Now, it'd be mighty nice of them if they'd just guarantee that if you couldn't get a job anywhere else, you could always get a job with the government doing public works and/or public defense. The public defense part already works this way. So set up a non-military civilian service organization that is run like the military to do the public works side of the government's product line. Now you have UBE, and with it, UBI-but-only-if-you-work-for-it. As a bonus, the bill setting this whole process up could probably dangle a conditional carrot in front of private industry: no more minimum wage. Because who's going to work for private industry for lower wages than UBE pays? It'll only be by choice, not through necessity. And you can get Republicans on-board by shouting from the rooftops how it reduces regulation on private industry, even though it applies much more stick than carrot.