Category: Labor Economics

Strong Job Market Increases Opportunities for the Uncredentialed

(p. A1) Americans looking to land a first job or break into a dream career face their best odds of success in years.
Employers say they are abandoning preferences for college degrees and specific skill sets to speed up hiring and broaden the pool of job candidates. Many companies added requirements to job postings after the recession, when millions were out of work and human-resources departments were stacked with résumés.
Across incomes and industries, the lower bar to getting hired is helping self-taught programmers attain software engineering roles at Intel Corp. and GitHub Inc., the coding platform, and improving the odds for high-school graduates who aspire to be branch managers at Bank of America Corp. and Terminix pest control.

For the full story, see:

Kelsey Gee. “Help Wanted, Degree Not Needed.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, July 30, 2018): A1 & A6.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 29, 2018, and has the title “Employers Eager to Hire Try a New Policy: ‘No Experience Necessary’.”)

Youths Reject Construction Jobs

(p. A3) The construction business is having trouble attracting young job seekers.
The share of workers in the sector who are 24 years old or younger has declined in 48 states since the last housing boom in 2005, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by Issi Romem, chief economist at construction data firm BuildZoom. Nationally, the share of young construction workers declined nearly 30% from 2005 through 2016, according to Mr. Romem.
While there’s no single reason why younger folks are losing interest in a job that is generally well-paid and doesn’t require a college education, their indifference is exacerbating a labor shortage that has meant fewer homes being built and rising prices, possibly for years to come.

For the full story, see:
Laura Kusisto. “Youths Shrug at Construction Jobs.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2018): A3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 31, 2018, and has the title “Young People Don’t Want Construction Jobs. That’s a Problem for the Housing Market.”)

Robot Comedian Is an Inconsistent Communist

(p. C4) LONDON — One recent evening at a London pub, Piotr Mirowski, 39, stood in front of several dozen comedy fans to prove that an artificially intelligent computer program could perform improvised comedy.
. . .
Despite all the improvements, Mr. Mirowski said working with an A.I. was still like having a “completely drunk comedian” on stage, who was only “accidentally funny,” by saying things that were totally inappropriate, overly emotional or plain odd.
“Robots are in a way the antithesis of theater and comedy,” he said. “Theatre is about the human expression on stage, and it’s about the communication and empathy between the actors and the audience. Robots do not have the sensors to perceive any of that.”
. . .
During the show on Wednesday, Mr. Mirowski performed several different scenes using the A.I. None were anywhere near as successful as the one involving the couple going for a drive. The climax of the show involved four members of Mr. Mirowski’s improv troupe, Improbotics Ltd., performing a scene involving a fictional president, his chief of staff and an office cleaner.
The audience had to guess which actor was controlled by the A.I. The answer became clear soon after the cleaner took to the stage. “I’m a communist!” she said, completely out of the blue. Later, she performed a U-turn. “I’m not a communist!” she said. Then, out of nowhere she asked another member of the troupe, “Look, do you wanna buy a knife?”

For the full story, see:
Alex Marshall. “Hey, That Robot Seems to Think It’s a Comedian.” The New York Times (Saturday, Aug. 11, 2018): C4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 8, 2018, and has the title “A Robot Walks Into a Bar. But Can It Do Comedy?”)

Union Slows UPS Automation

(p. B1) As UPS tries to satisfy America’s 21st-century shopping-and-shipping mania, parts of its network are stuck in the 20th century. The company still relies on some outdated equipment and manual processes of the type rival FedEx Corp. discarded or that newer entrants, including Amazon.com Inc., never had.
UPS says about half its packages are processed through automated facilities today. At FedEx, 96% of ground packages move through automated sites. UPS workers are unionized; FedEx’s ground-operations workers aren’t.
. . .
(p. B2) UPS is negotiating with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to renew a five-year contract, which expires July 31. Representing 260,000 UPS drivers, sorters and other workers, the union wants UPS to hire more full-time workers to help handle the surge in packages. It has opposed technology such as autonomous vehicles and drones and is wary of projects that do work with fewer employees.
“The problem with technology is that it does ultimately streamline jobs,” says Sean O’Brien, a Teamsters leader in Boston. “It does eliminate jobs. And once they’re replaced, it’s pretty tough to get them back.”
FedEx, with no unionized workforce in its ground network, doesn’t have to worry as much about labor strife. And because it built its ground network more recently, it hasn’t had to retrofit older facilities with automation. “For an older hub, automating is like heart surgery,” says Ted Dengel, FedEx Ground’s managing director of operations technology. “We can drop automation in before a package hits a facility.”

For the full story, see:
Paul Ziobro. “UPS is Running Late.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, June 16, 2018): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 15, 2018, and has the title “UPS’s $20 Billion Problem: Operations Stuck in the 20th Century.”)

Zuckerberg Calls Musk “Pretty Irresponsible” on A.I. “Doomsday” Fears

(p. 1) SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg thought his fellow Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk was behaving like an alarmist.
Mr. Musk, the entrepreneur behind SpaceX and the electric-car maker Tesla, had taken it upon himself to warn the world that artificial intelligence was “potentially more dangerous than nukes” in television interviews and on social media.
So, on Nov. 19, 2014, Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, invited Mr. Musk to dinner at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. Two top researchers from Facebook’s new artificial intelligence lab and two other Facebook executives joined them.
As they ate, the Facebook contingent tried to convince Mr. Musk that he was wrong. But he wasn’t budging. “I genuinely believe this is dangerous,” Mr. Musk told the table, according to one of the dinner’s attendees, Yann LeCun, the researcher who led Facebook’s A.I. lab.
Mr. Musk’s fears of A.I., distilled to their essence, were simple: If we create machines that are smarter than humans, they could turn against us. (See: “The Terminator,” “The Matrix,” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”) Let’s for once, he was saying to the rest of the tech industry, consider the unintended consequences of what we are creating before we unleash it on the world.
. . .
(p. 6) Since their dinner three years ago, the debate between Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Musk has turned sour. Last summer, in a live Facebook video streamed from his backyard as he and his wife barbecued, Mr. Zuckerberg called Mr. Musk’s views on A.I. “pretty irresponsible.”
Panicking about A.I. now, so early in its development, could threaten the many benefits that come from things like self-driving cars and A.I. health care, he said.
“With A.I. especially, I’m really optimistic,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “People who are naysayers and kind of try to drum up these doomsday scenarios — I just, I don’t understand it.”

For the full story, see:
Cade Metz. “Moguls and Killer Robots.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, June 10, 2018): 1 & 6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 9, 2018, and has the title “Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the Feud Over Killer Robots.”)

Widely-Used HireVue Algorithm Can Lock-In Hiring Biases

(p. A23) The products of a company called HireVue, which are used by over 600 companies including Nike, Unilever and even Atlanta Public Schools, allow employers to interview job applicants on camera, using A.I. to rate videos of each candidate according to verbal and nonverbal cues. The company’s aim is to reduce bias in hiring.
But there’s a catch: The system’s ratings, according to a Business Insider reporter who tested the software and discussed the results with HireVue’s chief technology officer, reflect the previous preferences of hiring managers. So if more white males with generally homogeneous mannerisms have been hired in the past, it’s possible that algorithms will be trained to favorably rate predominantly fair-skinned, male candidates while penalizing women and people of color who do not exhibit the same verbal and nonverbal cues.

For the full story, see:

Joy Buolamwini. “The Hidden Dangers Of Facial Analysis.” The New York Times (Friday, June 22, 2018): A23.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 21, 2018, and has the title “When the Robot Doesn’t See Dark Skin.”)

Obits for Gig Economy Are Premature

(p. A21) Data confirm the “gig economy” is taking off–or do they? A 2017 Upwork study found that 36% of the labor force engaged in some form of contract or freelance work in 2017. In 2015 the Mercatus Center counted 1099-MISC and W-2 tax forms, which report contractor and employee income, respectively. The number of W-2s declined 3.5% between 2000 and 2014, while the 1099-MISC count grew 22% (albeit from a much smaller base).
But then the Bureau of Labor Statistics weighed in. Its Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements survey, released last week, caused a flurry of clickbait headlines like “Everything we thought we knew about the gig economy is wrong” and “Gig economy jobs aren’t really taking over America’s workforce.”
. . .
A notable study by economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger used the same questions as the BLS survey, but worked with a different sample population (the RAND American Life Panel) and used an internet survey. It found that alternative employment arrangements as a worker’s primary form of employment grew more than 50% between 2005 to 2015, when they collected their data.
It would at least be hasty to conclude that alternative employment arrangements declined between 2005 to 2017. And more important, the BLS data are not an accurate description or measure of gig-economy work, since they exclude most workers engaged in this type of work through supplementary income.

For the full commentary, see:
Liya Palagashvili. “Don’t Be So Sure the Gig Is Up; Contract work has fallen as a share of employment, a BLS study finds. But there are reasons to doubt it..” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, June 13, 2018): A21.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 12, 2018.)

They study by Katz and Krueger, mentioned above, is:
Katz, Lawrence F., and Alan B. Krueger. “The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995-2015.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, NBER Working Papers: 22667, 2016.
Also relevant is their:
Katz, Lawrence F., and Alan B. Krueger. “The Role of Unemployment in the Rise in Alternative Work Arrangements.” American Economic Review 107, no. 5 (May 2017): 388-92.

In a Robustly Redundant Labor Market Most “Will Find New Jobs Quickly”

(p. A1) Tesla Inc. on Tuesday [June 12, 2018] said it will cut about 9% of its workforce in an effort to deliver its first profit during a make-or-break period of building a mass-market electric car.
The layoffs of about 3,500 employees come as Chief Executive Elon Musk reorganizes Tesla’s management structure to make it flatter, and as the company tries to ramp up production of the all-electric Model 3 compact sedan.
In a memo to employees, Mr. Musk said the job cuts are mostly aimed at salaried staff and won’t affect production workers assembling the company’s vehicles. “This will not affect our ability to reach Model 3 production targets in the coming months,” he wrote.
. . .
(p. A8) “What drives us is our mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable, clean energy, but we will never achieve that mission unless we eventually demonstrate that we can be sustainably profitable,” Mr. Musk wrote in the email to employees Tuesday. “That is a valid and fair criticism of Tesla’s history to date.”
. . .
On Twitter, Mr. Musk acknowledged that he was losing good people. “I think they will find new jobs quickly,” he said.

For the full story, see:
Higgins, Tim. “Tesla to Cut Workforce by 9%, In Bid for Sustainable Profit.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, June 13, 2018): A1 & A8.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 12, 2018, and has the title “Tesla Cutting About 9% of Global Workforce.”)

A.I. Assists, but Does Not Replace, Humans

(p. B4) Some Phoenix-area residents have been hailing rides in minivans with no drivers and no human safety operators inside. But that doesn’t mean they’re on their own if trouble arises.
From a command center, employees at Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo driverless-car unit monitor the test vehicles on computer screens, able to wirelessly peer in through the minivan’s cameras. If the robot brain maneuvering the vehicle gets confused by a situation–say, a car unexpectedly stalled in front of it or closed lanes of traffic–it will stop the vehicle and ask the command center to verify what it is seeing. If the human confirms the situation, the robot will calculate how it should navigate around the hazard.

For the full story, see:
Tim Higgins. “Driverless Autos Get Help From Humans Watching Remotely.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, June 7, 2018): B4.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 5, 2018, and has the title “Driverless Cars Still Handled by Humans–From Afar.”)

Human Intelligence Helps A.I. Work Better

(p. B3) A recent study at the M.I.T. Media Lab showed how biases in the real world could seep into artificial intelligence. Commercial software is nearly flawless at telling the gender of white men, researchers found, but not so for darker-skinned women.
And Google had to apologize in 2015 after its image-recognition photo app mistakenly labeled photos of black people as “gorillas.”
Professor Nourbakhsh said that A.I.-enhanced security systems could struggle to determine whether a nonwhite person was arriving as a guest, a worker or an intruder.
One way to parse the system’s bias is to make sure humans are still verifying the images before responding.
“When you take the human out of the loop, you lose the empathetic component,” Professor Nourbakhsh said. “If you keep humans in the loop and use these systems, you get the best of all worlds.”

For the full story, see:
Paul Sullivan. “WEALTH MATTERS; Can Artificial Intelligence Keep Your Home Secure?” The New York Times (Saturday, June 30, 2018): B3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 29, 2018.)

The “recent study” mentioned above, is:
Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81 (2018): 1-15.