Celebrate Labor Day by waiting in line is the advice that Professor Todd Pittinsky gives in his New York Daily News op-ed about the effects of increasing automaton on US labor. Pittinsky, from the Department of Technology and Society in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook, warns that we should not repeat the mistakes made in the 1980s when workers were displaced as a result of globalization. Not that we should or could stop automation, but rather slow it down and take the time to minimize the negative impacts on the human workforce.
“There are ways to use a big shopping holiday to address a real labor issue: not the fact that jobs are being automated away, but the fact that nothing is being done to make sure that people who are going to lose the jobs they have now aren’t left underemployed or permanently unemployable,” he states in the piece.
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