Who’s stealing our jobs? Computers
MARGARET WENTE
I actually feel a little sorry for the Royal Bank of Canada. The villain of the week has been portrayed as a callous rule-bender throwing hard-working Canadians out of work to maximize its obscene profits. The online outrage boiled over. The CEO grovelled. The government pledged to look into the whole thing and clamp down on companies abusing the temporary foreign worker program. (…)
But don’t blame greedy capitalists for your distress. Blame technology. We’re going through a technological revolution so disruptive that we’re only beginning to feel its impact. Advances in technology are the reason why RBC can outsource work to Indian software engineers who are paid 10 cents on the dollar. In the next stage of the revolution – coming very soon – the bank won’t need people to do this work at all.
The revolution started lower down the value chain, wiping out millions of middle-class jobs that real people used to do. Bank tellers, data-entry clerks, airline ticketing processors, travel agents, office assistants and meter readers bit the dust. Entire occupations were virtually obliterated. Not all of these people were laid off; they simply weren’t replaced. Today, retail workers are being let go by the thousands because more and more of us are shopping on the Internet. They won’t be replaced, either.