Post has attachment
Post has attachment
Add a comment...
Post has attachment
Public
Add a comment...
Post has attachment
Public
#Automation #Sweden #Unemployment: "In much of the world, people whose livelihoods depend on paychecks are increasingly anxious about a potential wave of unemployment threatened by automation. As the frightening tale goes, globalization forced people in wealthier lands like North America and Europe to compete directly with cheaper laborers in Asia and Latin America, sowing joblessness. Now, the robots are coming to finish off the humans.
But such talk has little currency in Sweden or its Scandinavian neighbors, where unions are powerful, government support is abundant, and trust between employers and employees runs deep. Here, robots are just another way to make companies more efficient. As employers prosper, workers have consistently gained a proportionate slice of the spoils — a stark contrast to the United States and Britain, where wages have stagnated even while corporate profits have soared.
“In Sweden, if you ask a union leader, ‘Are you afraid of new technology?’ they will answer, ‘No, I’m afraid of old technology,’” says the Swedish minister for employment and integration, Ylva Johansson. “The jobs disappear, and then we train people for new jobs. We won’t protect jobs. But we will protect workers.”
Americans tend to dismiss Nordic countries as a realm of nanny-state-worshiping socialists in contrast to the swashbuckling capitalists who rule in places like Silicon Valley. But Sweden presents the possibility that, in an age of automation, innovation may be best advanced by maintaining ample cushions against failure.
“A good safety net is good for entrepreneurship,” says Carl Melin, policy director at Futurion, a research institution in Stockholm. “If a project doesn’t succeed, you don’t have to go broke.”
Eighty percent of Swedes express positive views about robots and artificial intelligence, according to a survey this year by the European Commission. By contrast, a survey by the Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of Americans were “worried” about a future in which robots and computers substitute for humans.
In the United States, where most people depend on employers for health insurance, losing a job can trigger a descent to catastrophic depths. It makes workers reluctant to leave jobs to forge potentially more lucrative careers. It makes unions inclined to protect jobs above all else.
Yet in Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia, governments provide health care along with free education. They pay generous unemployment benefits, while employers finance extensive job training programs. Unions generally embrace automation as a competitive advantage that makes jobs more secure.
Making the United States more like Scandinavia would entail costs that collide with the tax-cutting fervor that has dominated American politics in recent decades.
Sweden, Denmark and Finland all spend more than 27 percent of their annual economic output on government services to help jobless people and other vulnerable groups, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The United States devotes less than 20 percent of its economy to such programs.
Scandinavian countries are among the biggest spenders on unemployment benefits, health care and parental leave, whereas the United States spends less than the average on its social safety nets.
For Swedish businesses, these outlays yield a key dividend: Employees have proved receptive to absorbing new technology.
This is especially crucial in mining, a major industry in Sweden. Wages are high, with pay and working conditions set through national contracts negotiated by unions and employers’ associations. Boliden’s mines have some of the world’s lowest-grade ore, meaning it contains minute quantities of valuable minerals. The prices are set by global markets.
“We have every reason not to be competitive,” says Boliden’s chief executive, Lennart Evrell.
The only way for the company to ensure profit is to continually increase efficiency. This is why Mr. Persson and his co-workers in the control room will soon be operating as many as four loaders at once via joysticks."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/business/the-robots-are-coming-and-sweden-is-fine.html
But such talk has little currency in Sweden or its Scandinavian neighbors, where unions are powerful, government support is abundant, and trust between employers and employees runs deep. Here, robots are just another way to make companies more efficient. As employers prosper, workers have consistently gained a proportionate slice of the spoils — a stark contrast to the United States and Britain, where wages have stagnated even while corporate profits have soared.
“In Sweden, if you ask a union leader, ‘Are you afraid of new technology?’ they will answer, ‘No, I’m afraid of old technology,’” says the Swedish minister for employment and integration, Ylva Johansson. “The jobs disappear, and then we train people for new jobs. We won’t protect jobs. But we will protect workers.”
Americans tend to dismiss Nordic countries as a realm of nanny-state-worshiping socialists in contrast to the swashbuckling capitalists who rule in places like Silicon Valley. But Sweden presents the possibility that, in an age of automation, innovation may be best advanced by maintaining ample cushions against failure.
“A good safety net is good for entrepreneurship,” says Carl Melin, policy director at Futurion, a research institution in Stockholm. “If a project doesn’t succeed, you don’t have to go broke.”
Eighty percent of Swedes express positive views about robots and artificial intelligence, according to a survey this year by the European Commission. By contrast, a survey by the Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of Americans were “worried” about a future in which robots and computers substitute for humans.
In the United States, where most people depend on employers for health insurance, losing a job can trigger a descent to catastrophic depths. It makes workers reluctant to leave jobs to forge potentially more lucrative careers. It makes unions inclined to protect jobs above all else.
Yet in Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia, governments provide health care along with free education. They pay generous unemployment benefits, while employers finance extensive job training programs. Unions generally embrace automation as a competitive advantage that makes jobs more secure.
Making the United States more like Scandinavia would entail costs that collide with the tax-cutting fervor that has dominated American politics in recent decades.
Sweden, Denmark and Finland all spend more than 27 percent of their annual economic output on government services to help jobless people and other vulnerable groups, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The United States devotes less than 20 percent of its economy to such programs.
Scandinavian countries are among the biggest spenders on unemployment benefits, health care and parental leave, whereas the United States spends less than the average on its social safety nets.
For Swedish businesses, these outlays yield a key dividend: Employees have proved receptive to absorbing new technology.
This is especially crucial in mining, a major industry in Sweden. Wages are high, with pay and working conditions set through national contracts negotiated by unions and employers’ associations. Boliden’s mines have some of the world’s lowest-grade ore, meaning it contains minute quantities of valuable minerals. The prices are set by global markets.
“We have every reason not to be competitive,” says Boliden’s chief executive, Lennart Evrell.
The only way for the company to ensure profit is to continually increase efficiency. This is why Mr. Persson and his co-workers in the control room will soon be operating as many as four loaders at once via joysticks."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/business/the-robots-are-coming-and-sweden-is-fine.html
Add a comment...
Post has attachment
Public
Add a comment...
Post has attachment
Add a comment...
Post has attachment
Add a comment...
Post has attachment
Public
Add a comment...
Post has attachment
Public
Add a comment...
Wait while more posts are being loaded