Guest MINDSETTER™ Dan Lawlor: The War on Employment
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
To paraphrase George HW Bush, "The liberation of retail shopping has begun!"
For too long, consumers have had the woeful pain of interacting with actual people. Soon consumers will only have to interact with electronic check out counters - soon we will eliminate the last echoes of the American worker. The war on entry level employment seems to be going well.
Silently, over the last year or two, as the Great Recession came and officially ended, more entry level positions at supermarkets and retail stores throughout the region have become automated. In addition to leaving the US with structural unemployment around 9% (echoing the early 1980s), the end of the Recession has left us with fewer entry level jobs. More supermarkets have self check out lanes, more big box retailers have big box check out lanes, Hollywood Video and the like have closed, to be replaced by Redbox Rental Outlets (essentially a soda can machine for DVDs).
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At a time when many cities have low-skill workforces, the elimination of entry level jobs seems ridiculous. Entry level jobs provide work experience, stable paychecks, and pathways to future success. As is well known, from Gorham Manufacturing on down, the major manufacturers in this area were closed and decimated in the last thirty years. In some ways, factories, university and finance were swapped for retail, university, hospital and finance employment as major employers.
According to this report from RIEDC, major employers in the state now include state and federal government, the Catholic Church, several hospital systems, major universities, and retailers like CVS (based in Woonsocket) and Stop and Shop.
Even as RI unemployment settles around 10%, retailers are looking to eliminate more jobs. The goal is not quality for the customer, but quantity for the shareholder. What good does it do to our community to eliminate even more jobs through electronic check-outs? What good does it do to the store managers to further reduce the amount of workers on hand? In some ways, I recognize the foolishness of resisting "innovation" - yet I simply point out - how many dozens of people do not have income from work because of these cut backs? How many ripple investments (via rent, purchases, tuition payments) are lost?
Yet, even as I denounce mechanization, I realize unemployment has many causes. Massachusetts' unemployment rate, according to the Census, as of late last fall, was 7%, Connecticut's unemployment rate was 8.4%, and Rhode Island's was 10.5%. Given that, clearly mechanization alone has not caused Rhode Island's problems. Decades of political corruption, poor fiscal management, the costs of creating suburban infrastructure, the rise of part-time-ism, environmental health problems due to toxicity levels in neighborhoods after the factories closed, drug addiction, incarceration, and lack of re-training programs, and the results of poor education and declining investment in the state's college system create a brew of problems.
I've known many people who've benefited from the opportunity and stability of entry level jobs (including me)! From restaurants, to supermarkets, to cafeterias, an extra pay check (or the only pay check) can be a boost up and a place to gain experience. The more we eliminate entry level positions, the more we eliminate opportunities for advancement and growth. We need more jobs, not less. Innovation that increases shareholder bottom lines while limiting the amount of people with disposable income in the community is not a net plus. It is poor stewardship.
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