This Was the Year the Robot Takeover of Service Jobs Began (gizmodo.com)

merbs writes: Out of the three major sectors of the economy -- agriculture, manufacturing, and service -- two are already largely automated. Farm labor, which about half the American workforce used to do, now comprises around 2 percent of American jobs. And we all know the rust belt song and dance, beat out to outsourcing and mechanization. Which is largely why some 80 percent of all American jobs are service jobs. And this year, quietly but in the open, the robots and their investors came for them, too.

There's a case to be made that 2018 is the year automation took its biggest lunge forward toward our largest pool of human labor: Amazon opened five cashier-less stores; three in Seattle, one in Chicago, and one in San Francisco. Self-ordering kiosks invaded fast food and franchise restaurants in a big way. Smaller robot-centric outfits like the long-awaited auto-burger joint Creator opened, too, and so did a number of others.

In Las Vegas, our service job mecca, hotels' and casinos' widespread plans for automation in everything from bartending to waitstaff to hotel work led one of the city's most powerful hospitality unions to the brink of a 50,000-person strike last summer before a successful negotiation was reached... Combined, they act as a set of markers on a trendline we can no longer ignore. We face the prospect of major upheaval in the last dependable pool of jobs we've got.

Comments

Re:Unemployment rate at 50 year low

[LostMyBeaver]

This is because the government is employing an insane amount of people now.
- The DOD now has over 2.8 million active or reserve on payroll
- The DHS has 229k they also use a massive number of full time contractors (let's assume 100k)
- The TSA has 60k (they also use up to 1 million additional contractors)
- The DoE is 13k employed another 120k consultants/contractors
- Police departments employ over a million people
- Fire has over 1.1 million
- Half a million prison guards, but it looks like there's 3 times as many workers at prisons as guards... so let's say 1.5 million prison workers
- Can't find the count, but adding heads at defense contractors (Lockheed, Honeywell, etc...) I come up with about 10 million people
- There are at least 2.2 million people removed from the count because of incarceration
- There are 10-20 million people working jobs not directly for the military but that wouldn't exist if not for the military. This includes things like gas stations near base.
- There where about 1.2 million federally funded road construction jobs in 2018
- There were probably about another 1.2 million jobs producing road construction equipment and supplies.

There are a total of 180 million working age (not working eligible) people in the U.S. meaning 20-64 years old. It took me 5 minutes of using Google to get this far.

I didn't even get creative, but I'd imagine that the U.S. government now employs at least one of 3 eligible Americans or simply removes them from the job market.

Let's also consider that the labor force participation rate was 62.9% last year. That means of the 180 million, only about a 100 million are actually trying to work.
Remove another 4 percent or so from the count as they are unemployed. And about 28 million are part time workers (working less than 35 hours a week). So, we're now down to about 68 million full time employed workers.

I also see that on average 1 in 3 workers are part of the gig economy which I have no idea what that really equates so. Someone says it's 16 million another one says it's more like 60 million.

No... the unemployment rate is absolutely horrible.

Re:Totally unrelated to the "Drive for $15"

[Dunbal]

Wages rose almost across the board after the French Revolution.

And yet poverty still existed in post revolutionary France. The glorious Soviet revolution also failed to cure poverty in the USSR worker's paradise. Discuss.