Created on Thursday, 24 January 2013 09:58 Last Updated on Thursday, 24 January 2013 10:04 Published on Thursday, 24 January 2013 09:58 Written by Associated Press Hits: 290
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SELF-SERVICE?Passengers use the self service check-in at the U.S. Airways gate at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, in Grapevine, Texas. According to a three-month AP investigation released in January 2013, five years after the start of the Great Recession, instead of relying on someone else in the workplace or their personal lives, people are using technology to do tasks independently. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)
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by Bernard Condon
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AP Business Writer
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NEW YORK (AP) ? Five years after the start of the Great Recession, the toll is terrifyingly clear: Millions of middle-class jobs have been lost in developed countries the world over.
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And the situation is even worse than it appears.
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Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market. What's more, these jobs aren't just being lost to China and other developing countries, and they aren't just factory work. Increasingly, jobs are disappearing in the service sector, home to two-thirds of all workers.
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They're being obliterated by technology.
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Year after year, the software that runs computers and an array of other machines and devices becomes more sophisticated and powerful and capable of doing more efficiently tasks that humans have always done. For decades, science fiction warned of a future when we would be architects of our own obsolescence, replaced by our machines; an Associated Press analysis finds that the future has arrived.
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"The jobs that are going away aren't coming back," says Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of "Race Against the Machine." ''I have never seen a period where computers demonstrated as many skills and abilities as they have over the past seven years."
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The global economy is being reshaped by machines that generate and analyze vast amounts of data; by devices such as smartphones and tablet computers that let people work just about anywhere, even when they're on the move; by smarter, nimbler robots; and by services that let businesses rent computing power when they need it, instead of installing expensive equipment and hiring IT staffs to run it. Whole employment categories, from secretaries to travel agents, are disappearing.
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"There's no sector of the economy that's going to get a pass," says Martin Ford, who runs a software company and wrote "The Lights in the Tunnel," a book predicting widespread job losses. "It's everywhere."
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The numbers startle even labor economists. In the United States, half of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession paid middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. But only 2 percent of the 3.5 million jobs gained since the recession ended in June 2009 are midpay. Nearly 70 percent are low-paying jobs; 29 percent pay well.
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In the 17 European countries that use the euro as their currency, the numbers are even worse. Almost 4.3 million low-pay jobs have been gained since mid-2009, but the loss of midpay jobs has never stopped. A total of 7.6 million disappeared from January 2008 through last June.
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Some occupations are beneficiaries of the march of technology, such as software engineers and app designers for smartphones and tablet computers. But, overall, technology is eliminating far more jobs than it is creating.
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To better understand the impact of technology on jobs, The Associated Press analyzed employment data from 20 countries; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, CEOs, and workers who are competing with smarter machines.
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The AP's key findings:
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?Over the past 50 years, technology has drastically reduced the number of jobs in manufacturing. Robots and other machines controlled by computer programs work faster and make fewer mistakes than humans. Now, that same efficiency is being unleashed in the service economy.
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?Technology is being adopted by every kind of organization that employs people. It's replacing workers in large corporations and small businesses, established companies and startups, schools, hospitals, nonprofits and the military.
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?The most vulnerable workers are doing repetitive tasks that programmers can write software for ? an accountant checking a list of numbers, an office manager filing forms, a paralegal reviewing documents for key words to help in a case.
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?Startups account for most of the job growth in developed economies. Thanks to software, entrepreneurs are launching businesses with a third fewer employees than in the 1990s.
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?It's becoming a self-serve world. Instead of relying on someone else in the workplace or our personal lives, we use technology to do tasks ourselves. This trend will grow as software permeates our lives.
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?Technology is replacing workers in developed countries regardless of their politics, policies and laws. .
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The lingering pain of the Great Recession is not entirely a result of technology's advances. Other factors are keeping companies from hiring ? partisan gridlock in the U.S., for instance, and the debt crisis in Europe, which has led to deep government spending cuts.
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But to the extent technology has played a role, it raises the specter of high unemployment even after political troubles lift and economic growth accelerates.
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