Category: Labor Economics

Robots May Be a Threat After They Learn How to Open a Door

(p. A1) Robots may enslave us all someday. In the meantime, if one of them goes berserk, here’s a useful tactic: Shut the door behind you.
One after another, robots in a government-sponsored contest were stumped by an unlocked door that blocked their path at an outdoor obstacle course. One bipedal machine managed to wrap a claw around the door handle and open it but was flummoxed by a breeze that kept blowing the door shut before it could pass through.
Robots excel at many tasks, as long as they don’t involve too much hand-eye coordination or common sense. Like some gifted children, they can perform impressive feats of mental arithmetic but are profoundly klutzy on the playground.
The machines stumble over tasks requiring even toddler-level balance, like kicking a ball, getting out of a car or (p. A9) climbing stairs. Grasping objects of varying size and weight is also perplexing.

For the full story, see:
Daniela Hernandez. “If the Robot Apocalypse Comes, Try Closing the Door.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Nov. 11, 2017): A1 & A9.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 10, 2017, and has the title “How to Survive a Robot Apocalypse: Just Close the Door.”)

Union Blocks Firing of Teachers Who Do Not Teach

(p. A1) Francis Blake has not held a permanent position in a New York City public school in at least five years. At his last job, in a Bronx elementary school, records show he was disciplined for incompetence, insubordination and neglect of duties — he had been caught sleeping in a classroom when he was supposed to be helping with dismissal.
Felicia Alterescu, a special-education teacher, has been without a permanent post since 2010, despite high demand for special education teachers. According to records, in addition to getting a string of unsatisfactory ratings, she was disciplined for calling in sick when she actually went to a family reunion. She also did not tell the Education Department that she had been arrested on harassment charges.
This month, Mr. Blake, Ms. Alterescu and hundreds of other teachers who are part of a pool known as the Absent Teacher Reserve could be permanently back in classrooms, as the city’s Education Department places them in jobs at city schools.
The reserve is essentially a parking lot for staff members who have lost their positions, some because of school closings and budget cuts, others because of disciplinary problems, but cannot be fired. It grew significantly as a result of a 2005 deal between the Bloomberg administration, which wanted to give principals control over hiring, and the teachers’ un-(p. A17)ion. Since then, the union has fiercely protected the jobs of teachers in the reserve, resisting attempts to put a time limit on how long a teacher can remain there.

For the full story, see:
KATE TAYLOR. “Caught Sleeping or Worse, Idled Teachers Head Back to Class.” The New York Times (Sat., OCT. 23, 2017): A1 & A17.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 22, 2017, and has the title “Caught Sleeping or Worse, Troubled Teachers Will Return to New York Classrooms.”)

High Demand for STEM Workers Is Mainly High for Workers in Info Tech

(p. 10) A working grasp of the principles of science and math should be essential knowledge for all Americans, said Michael S. Teitelbaum, an expert on science education and policy. But he believes that STEM advocates, often executives and lobbyists for technology companies, do a disservice when they raise the alarm that America is facing a worrying shortfall of STEM workers, based on shortages in a relative handful of fast-growing fields like data analytics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and computer security.
“When it gets generalized to all of STEM, it’s misleading,” said Mr. Teitelbaum, a senior research associate in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “We’re misleading a lot of young people.”
Unemployment rates for STEM majors may be low, but not all of those with undergraduate degrees end up in their field of study — only 13 percent in life sciences and 17 percent in physical sciences, according to a 2013 National Science Foundation survey. Computer science is the only STEM field where more than half of graduates are employed in their field.

For the full story, see:
STEVE LOHR. “Where the STEM Jobs Are/Aren’t.” The New York Times, Education Life Section (Sun., NOV. 5, 2017): 10.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 1, 2017, and has the title “Where the STEM Jobs Are (and Where They Aren’t).”)

Steel Mills Repurposed as Online Warehouses

(p. A1) BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Ellen Gaugler remembers driving her father to the Bethlehem Steel mill, where he spent his working years hauling beams off the assembly line and onto rail cars.
When the Pennsylvania plant shut down about two decades ago, Ms. Gaugler thought it was the last time she or anyone in Bethlehem would come to its gates to find a job that paid a decent wage for a physical day of work.
But she saw an ad in the paper last year for a position at a local warehouse that changed her mind. She’d never heard of Zulily, the online retailer doing the hiring, but she knew the address: It was on the old mill site, steps from where her father worked.
“When I came for the interviews I looked up and said, ‘Oh, my God, I feel like I am at home,'” Ms. Gaugler said. She got the job.
As shopping has shifted from conventional stores to online marketplaces, many retail workers have been left in the cold, but Ms. Gaugler is coming out ahead. Sellers like Zulily, Amazon and Walmart are competing to get goods to the buyer’s doorstep as quickly as possible, giving rise to a constellation of vast warehouses that have fueled a boom for workers without college degrees and breathed new life into pockets of the country that had fallen economically behind.

For the full story, see:
NATALIE KITROEFF. ” Idle Steel Mills Rumble to Life As Online Sellers’ Warehouses.” The New York Times (Mon., OCT. 23, 2017): A1 & A13.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 22, 2017, and has the title “Where Internet Orders Mean Real Jobs, and New Life for Communities.”)

Lobstermen Retooling as Oyster Farmers

(p. A10) COREA, Me. — The boats start up around 3:30 in the morning, stirring the village with the babble of engines before they motor out to sea. They will return hours later, loaded with lobster.
Joe Young’s boat has not gone out lately. Instead, he puts on waders and sloshes into the salt pond behind his house, an inlet where water rushes in and out with the tides. After a lifetime with most of his income tied to what he finds in the sea, this lobsterman — and sixth-generation fisherman — is trying his hand at something new. He is farming oysters.
“Said I would never have a garden,” Mr. Young, 64, says, as he tends to his briny nursery. Tens of thousands of oysters the size of peanuts are growing inside porous boxes, stacked up like underwater file drawers, in a contraption called an “oyster condo.” He gives one of the boxes a shake, hoping to dislodge a slimy orange growth that has taken up residence, and flings away a green crab. Nearby, kelp he is growing sways lazily from a long underwater rope.
Reaching into the glassy water, Mr. Young plucks larger oysters from among the smooth stones, popping the mottled mollusks into a big white bucket.
“It’s different from lobstering,” Mr. Young said, “because I’m in the whole process.”
. . .
“Lobstermen are saying, ‘Boy, not (p. A11) only personally, but community level, we’re all invested in lobsters,’ ” Jon Lewis, the director of the state’s aquaculture division, said. ” ‘Natural resources tend to come and go. If this happens, what do I do?’ ”
. . .
To Mr. Young, aquaculture does not look so different from catching lobsters. “Fishermen are farmers,” he said. “There’s one crop, and it’s lobster.”

For the full story, see:
JESS BIDGOOD. “A Lobsterman Tries a New Line: Oyster Farmer.” The New York Times (Mon., OCT. 23, 2017): A10-A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 10, 2017, and has the title “A FISHERMAN TRIES FARMING.”)

Google Did Evil in Firing Damore

(p. C2) I was fired by Google this past Monday [Aug. 7, 2017] for a document that I wrote and circulated internally raising questions about cultural taboos and how they cloud our thinking about gender diversity at the company and in the wider tech sector. I suggested that at least some of the male-female disparity in tech could be attributed to biological differences (and, yes, I said that bias against women was a factor too). Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai declared that portions of my statement violated the company’s code of conduct and “cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”
My 10-page document set out what I considered a reasoned, well-researched, good-faith argument, but as I wrote, the viewpoint I was putting forward is generally suppressed at Google because of the company’s “ideological echo chamber.” My firing neatly confirms that point. How did Google, the company that hires the smartest people in the world, become so ideologically driven and intolerant of scientific debate and reasoned argument?
. . .
For many, including myself, working at Google is a major part of their identity, almost like a cult with its own leaders and saints, all believed to righteously uphold the sacred motto of “Don’t be evil.”

For the full story, see:

James Damore. “Why I Was Fired by Google.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Aug. 12, 2017): C2.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 11, 2017.)

Musk Fires Under-Performing Workers to Speed Output of Mass-Market Electric Sedans

(p. B4) DETROIT — The electric-car maker Tesla fired hundreds of workers this week after a series of performance reviews conducted during the biggest expansion in the company’s history.
Tesla said Friday [Oct. 13, 2017] that the dismissals were not out of the ordinary, even though they came as the automaker tries to increase the production of its first mass-market vehicle, the Model 3 sedan.
The company has been criticized for the slow pace of its early production of the new model, which has generated hundreds of thousands of deposits from prospective buyers.
Tesla built about 25,000 vehicles in the three months that ended Sept. 30, but only 260 of those were Model 3s — considerably fewer than the 1,500 it had projected. The automaker has attributed the low production rate of the new car to unexpected bottlenecks in its manufacturing system.

For the full story, see:
BILL VLASIC. “Tesla Fires Hundreds of Workers.” The New York Times (Sat., OCT. 14, 2017): B4.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 13, 2017, and has the title “Tesla Fires Hundreds as It Tries to Speed Production of an Electric Sedan.”)

“The Tabula Rasa of the American Dream”

(p. 22) The four Keats siblings, John and George, sister Fanny, and a third brother, “star crossed” Tom, dead of tuberculosis at 19, were all well schooled in the World of Pains. The orphaned children of a shiftless stable hand, they survived on the miserly dole of a tea merchant appointed their guardian. “The lives of these orphans,” Gigante remarks, “do have the makings of fairy tale.” John trained in medicine before taking up the far riskier profession of poetry; reviews of his ambitious long poem “Endymion” were so harsh that Byron cruelly joked he was “snuffed out by an article.” George limped along as a clerk in various mercantile firms, dreaming of something more ­adventurous.
Gigante has had the clever idea of telling the stories of John and George as parallel lives, a dual biography of brothers.
. . .
In her view, George’s departure to America with his young wife, Georgiana, was “an imaginative leap across 4,000 miles onto the tabula rasa of the American dream.” And yet, nothing — nothing, that is, beyond his famous brother — distinguishes George from thousands of other immigrants who joined in the Western migration during the tough years following the French Revolution, when it became painfully clear that possibilities for advancement in class-stratified Great Britain were severely curtailed.
. . .
The land of opportunity was also the land of crushing disappointment. On his second trip to America, after blowing his inheritance on a dubious investment with his elegant friend and neighbor Audubon, and retreating from the bleak prairies to more civilized Louisville, George finally completed his sawmill. (He would have been wiser to invest in Audubon’s pictures of otters and buzzards than a crackpot steamboat scheme.) After a few years of profit, when he built a columned mansion equipped with slaves near the center of town, George lost it all again in the Panic of 1837.

For the full review, see:
CHRISTOPHER BENFEY. “Ode to Siblings.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, October 16, 2011): 22.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date OCT. 14, 2011, and has the title “A Keats Brother on the American Frontier.”)

The book under review, is:
Gigante, Denise. The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

Nursing Unions “Keep Aides from Encroaching on Their Turf”

(p. B2) There are a few reasons long-term care is such a bad job. “Most people see it as glorified babysitting,” said Robert Espinoza, vice president for policy at PHI, an advocacy group for personal care workers that also develops advanced training curriculums to improve the quality of the work force.
The fact that most workers are immigrant women does not help the occupation’s status. Occupational rules that reserve even simple tasks for nurses, like delivering an insulin shot or even putting drops into a patient’s eye, also act as a barrier against providing care workers with better training.
. . .
. . . there are the powerful nursing unions, ready to fight tooth and nail to keep aides from encroaching on their turf. Carol Raphael, former chief executive of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, the largest home health agency in the United States, told Professor Osterman that when the association tried to expand the role of home-care aides, the “nurses went bonkers.”

For the full commentary, see:
Porter, Eduardo. “ECONOMIC SCENE; Rethinking Home Health Care as a Path to the Middle Class.” The New York Times (Weds., AUG. 30, 2017): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date AUG. 29, 2017, and has the title “ECONOMIC SCENE; Home Health Care: Shouldn’t It Be Work Worth Doing?”)

“The Regulations Are Absurd”

(p. A6) CIUDAD del ESTE, Paraguay–This remote South American country, long known for contraband traffickers and a 35-year dictatorship, is now becoming something else: a manufacturing hub.
Paraguay has attracted scores of foreign factories since 2013, as predominantly Brazilian companies respond to new incentives by flocking to this gritty border city to make everything from toys to motor scooters for export.
Koumei SA, a family-run Brazilian light-fixtures company, is typical. Its owners moved the plant and about 150 jobs here last year, saying they were fed up with Brazil’s high taxes and complicated labor rules.
“It’s just easier here,” said Seijii Abe, who directs the company with his father.
. . .
Brazil ranked 123rd out of 190 in the World Bank’s 2017 survey on ease of doing business, right behind Uganda and Egypt. Companies there say they are bedeviled by rules that smother entrepreneurial impetus. They point to labor regulations that make hiring and firing difficult, high energy bills, a legal system that encourages employee lawsuits and taxes of up to 35% on imported goods.
“The regulations are absurd,” said João Carlos Komuchena, owner of Kompar SA, a company which makes small plastic bottles used for packing soy sauce and other products that moved to Paraguay from Brazil last year. “We need to wake up in Brazil; there is a lot of prejudice against business.”

For the full story, see:
Jeffrey T. Lewis. “Businesses Flee Brazil Rules for Paraguay.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Aug. 28, 2017): A6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 26, 2017, and has the title “Brazil’s Woes Multiply as Manufacturers Move to Paraguay.”)

Can “Radical Transparency” Work “in Today’s Polarized and Litigious World”?

(p. B1) In 1993, Ray Dalio, the chairman of what is today the largest hedge fund in the world, Bridgewater Associates, received a memo signed by his top three lieutenants that was startlingly honest in its assessment of him.
It was a performance review of sorts, and not in a good way. After mentioning his positive attributes, they spelled out the negatives. “Ray sometimes says or does things to employees which makes them feel incompetent, unnecessary, humiliated, overwhelmed, belittled, pressed or otherwise bad,” the memo read. “If he doesn’t manage people well, growth will be stunted and we will all be affected.”
To Mr. Dalio, the message was both devastating and a wake-up call. His reaction: “Ugh. That hurt and surprised me.”
That moment helped push Mr. Dalio to rethink how he approached people and to begin developing a unique — and sometimes controversial — culture inside his firm, one based on a series of “principles” that place the idea of “radical transparency” above virtually all else.
. . .
(p. B5) Of course, the larger question is whether Mr. Dalio’s version of utopia — a place where employees feel comfortable offering blunt and in some cases brutal feedback — can exist outside Bridgewater’s controlled environment of mostly self-selecting individuals who either embrace the philosophy or quickly exit. Given the intense environment, as you might expect, there are horror stories of employees who have left in tears. Turnover among new employees is high.
Mr. Dalio’s critics — and there are many — say his principles offer permission to be verbally barbaric, and they question whether the $160 billion firm’s success is a product of such “radical transparency” or whether he can afford such a wide-ranging social experiment simply because the firm is so financially successful.
In truth, it is hard to imagine how harsh individual critiques in the workplace can work at many other organizations in today’s polarized and litigious world, where people are increasingly looking for “safe spaces” and those who say they are offended by a particular argument are derided as “fragile snowflakes.”

For the full commentary, see:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross. “DEALBOOK; Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio Dives Deeper Into the ‘Principles’ of Tough Love.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Sept. 5, 2017): B1 & B5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 4, 2017, and has the title, “DEALBOOK; Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio Dives Deeper Into the ‘Principles’ of Tough Love.” )

The Dalio book, discussed above, is:
Dalio, Ray. Principles: Life and Work. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.