That seems like the fair and humane thing to do for workers, while at the same time not screwing over capital owners or stifling automation.
Germany is becoming a low income country for a lot of jobs and the unions are doing nothing against it.
Year after year all German workers have collective bargaining agreements close to inflation, while the economy booms.
The union-reps are in bed with the companys and workers eat it up.
Schröder paved the way for the Arbeitnehmerüberlassung, which causes a massive rise in time restricted contracts and external workforce. Unions are very happy to keep this going, as this keeps salaries for proper employees higher than ever (a 20000 EUR difference is not uncommon for the same job), and bonus payments that amount to 10000 EUR for Porsche and 6000 EUR for Daimler. For the growing number of employees working under these contracts, it amounts to having a 30 to 40 per cent lower salary to your colleague who works beside you, doing the same job. (Add to that the constant yapping of the SPD regarding a perceived gender based wage gap and you know why they are so detested in large parts of the population.)
This results in a complicated role for both sides that isn't just adversarial as it is in most other countries. Labor shares the responsibility for the company's future and gets to be part of every step of the process when it comes to making hard decisions. But it also requires management to strive to improve their employees' well-being, since they will often require their cooperation.
If these specific solutions are anything but band-aids/wishful thinking/PR remains to be seen. Germany has, just like all other countries, seen an increased use of time-limited contracts and temp agencies, leaving many employees in perpetual danger of immediate social decline if the economy hits a road bump. And it isn't quite clear if the rise of machine learning + robotics isn't the one innovation and bucks the trend, and actually does create a class of people that is essentially shut out of the jobs market by machines that are strictly more productive at any job they can realistically perform: there's only so much programming you can teach a bricklayer in his 50s.
This kind of fight may be good on the short term, but it legitimates the fact than man are inferior to machine. For example, it may soon legitimates that, contrary to man, the machine works non stop, doesn't go on strike, doesn't want a raise, doesn't go to the toilet, whatever...
If machines are to rule, then we have to change the way we redistribute the worth they produce.
What would the alternative be? Force businesses to hire me to "do my best" to fly people around?
Will this create social problems if / when machines are better than humans at everything? Sure, just like it happened in each field once machines were better at something - starting with the sewing machines and the luddites, if I'm not mistaken.
I do believe that the final result will be a Star-Trek-ish society where everybody has access to most things for free, and where everyone works only if they want to; however, I don't believe it will be easy to get there.
There are probably things you don't even immagine to pay for, that are now done by machines, and that used to be performed by humans.
Think of circuit-switching telphony, when you used to say "operator, connect me with number xyz-xxx" and someone on the other side would phisically create a connection between you and someone else to talk.
Consider mail delivery. There used to be a milkman. Mail was only paper.
A lot of stuff.
On the same planet, self driving cars are about to be easily available, no more drivers or cab drivers, amazon has robots doing most of the heavy lifting (quite literally) but we enjoy these other things, and do not complain about anything because they're cool, i guess.
I cannot wait for this thread to be featured on n-gate.
>If machines are to rule, then we have to change the way we redistribute the worth they produce.
In theory if there is enough competition the price of the good decreases through automation.
Imagine you're a business selling clothing where 50% of the cost is labor and the rest are materials. You now buy a machine that replaces the labor cost with a 10% robot cost. You make 40% profit on everything you sell. Someone else builds a factory and sells the same good for 70% of the price. Consumers now have more money available to spend on other goods that are more "labor" intensive.
Unfortunately in practice we have monopolies/oligopolies everywhere.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/498424/number-advertisin...
However, it's the newspaper jobs that have gone:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/jun/06/alm...
The next thing to look at would be the change in IT jobs.
See "The Rise of the Machines – Why Automation is Different this Time" video by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSKi8HfcxEk
Germany is not really a separate country. It is a state in a union called the Eurozone, and controlled by a constitution called the Treaty of the European Union.
You cannot compare a currency zone such as the USA to Germany - a state in a currency zone.
Germany drains demand from the rest of the Eurozone to maintain its employment level. The unemployment arises in Greece, Spain, et al instead.
If you look at the near fully employed state areas in the USA and draw a line around them, then compare those with Germany you'll get a better idea.
Within the US there is an 'export boom' from California and New York to the rest of the union. Similarly in the UK from London to the rest of the country.
It's time for economic analysis to catch up with monetary theory. Floating rate currency zones matter.
Few people thought in 1980 that there would be more computers than people in their lifetime.
Of course what happened is the jobs went to China.
where they are in the process of being taken over by robots.
perhaps more interesting is the background info about the global focus of industrial robotics: it's in Japan (and to a much lesser extent, Germany) -- but not the US.
this reinforces my current belief that robotics startups in the US face a pretty serious uphill battle from day one.
