“It’s a jobs drought – more of a desert actually,” James Reed CBE, CEO and chairman of recruitment firm Reed Employment, declared in an interview late last week. He has “never seen anything like it” in almost four decades in the trade, he added – unemployment stands at a four-year high, particularly among young people, tens of thousands of them students graduating straight into the abyss. Why? Well, because the machines are coming.
GYATTDAMN TICKLE-ME-ELMOS ARE STEALING OUR JERBS
Artificial intelligence is rapidly barrelling its way into boardrooms, its wild capabilities becoming harder and harder to ignore – to employers, especially as they face tightening hiring policy from Angela Rayner’s pending Employment Rights Bill, it’s near impossible. Under the weight of progress, there’s no doubt that the desk economy is teetering. Last week, Amazon announced it was laying off 14,000 corporate jobs – the largest round of redundancies in the company’s history – citing AI and starting a plan that will reportedly affect up to 30,000 jobs in all.
Always blame the workers, shed tears for the poor bosses bottom line.
If the apocalyptic predictions are correct, as many as 300 million full-time jobs will be lost of degraded by artificial intelligence in the coming years; 10-30 per cent of jobs in the UK are highly automatable. Reed’s solution? “Do a job that involves working with your hands”.
Workers stay winning
Some argue it could signal the beginning of a different kind of revolution altogether. It’s nothing new – since the early 19th century, when the Luddites made their name raging against the machine during the industrial revolution, fear has closely followed technological progress. But this time, another kind of work is standing firm against the tide.
A proletarian revolution I hope
White, middle-class professionals have usually presumed themselves safe in the face of technological advances that, in the past, have largely appeared to threaten those in skilled labour. Over the years, traditionally working-class roles in production lines and clerical work have been steadily taken over by machines; think self-service tills or AI-powered robots running factories. But now, as AI takes hold this time, it’s the middle classes who are facing the threat – or actually losing jobs to technology.
Back to the warehouses and factories, crackers
“The thing is, I can’t see AI learning how to rewire a plug any time soon,” Tadhg O’Mahony, a 30-year-old electrician from West Cork, says. You can’t train an algorithm to install solar panels; ChatGPT can’t care for your mum. A chatbot can’t fix a boiler, and there is no app for plumbing. As the rest of the economy speeds up, there’s a quiet and important recognition lingering: someone still needs to lay the bricks.
MATERIAL CONDITIONS MATERIAL CONDITIONS MATERIAL CONDITIONS
Could the age of artificial intelligence also spark a new era for the working classes? Perhaps – it’s about time. “I think trades are probably going to be affected much less than other kind of white collar jobs,” continues O’Mahony. He had the foresight to learn a trade from an early age, and has relied on the stable work alongside completing a degree in chemistry and forensic science and, most recently, studying for a Master’s degree in sustainability and energy provision. “I know a lot of solicitors and people within the creative arts, like graphic designers, who have already become obsolete to some degree.
They’re only obsolete if you’re a fucking scab for big tech
“So relatively, being an electrician – or tradesman of any sort – quite a safe place to be in. Even the servers that need to be built to run AI is, I guess, going to be gainful employment for electricians, because AI takes a huge amounts of energy and software to actually run. It’s not going to be good for the environment, but it will be good in the short term, at least for the electrical industry.”
But fuck the earth am I right
The UK has long had a complicated relationship with the labouring class who, all too often, are romanticised in “gritty” films, while being used as bait in Westminster. For a long time, the traditional industries inhabited by the working classes were dismantled in the name of progress – mines shuttered, factories sold off, entire communities told to retrain, aspire to be middle class, move on.
BUT GUESS WHO’S SPECTRE IS STILL HAUNTING EUROPE, LIMEYS
Arguably, the Covid pandemic began to reframe some of that. When everything was boiled down to basics – shelter, food, survival – “essential” workers, like caregivers, delivery drivers, shelf stackers and the like, were seen in an altogether different light. Lockdown disrupted our definitions of value, not just economically but culturally. Similarly, now, as more digital roles become vulnerable to automation, the jobs long dismissed as low-status – physical, manual, skilled trades – suddenly seem less replaceable, and more essential. Socially, they gained value.
COME ALL YOU WORKERS WHO TOIL NIGHT AND DAY! BY HAND AND BY BRAIN TO EARN YER PAY!
Somewhere along the line, being necessary and useful became less valuable than simply having a degree, no matter what the subject or grade. Might that all be about to change? Maybe, but that might be only part of the point, says Guy Standing, a British economist and author of several books, including The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty.
EXPLOITATION OF THE MASSES
“A lot of the commentary on AI at the moment is simplistic in the sense that it talks about replacing humans with robots, things like that,” he explains. “Whereas, personally, I think that, as with all technological changes throughout history, it will create as many jobs as it destroys, if not more. More importantly, what it will be doing is changing the nature of our labour process. What we need to do is have a complete reimagining of what being in the ‘precariat’ means.”
precariat? 
Proletariat 
Over a decade ago, Standing coined the term “precariat” to describe a new social class characterised by both job and social insecurity after decades of economic crisis and austerity. And, right now, this social class is a hot topic around the globe.
THATS CALLED BEING A WORKER YOU FUCKING DINGUS
So far, the precariat have often (but by no means exclusively) been the people who, disenfranchised and ignored by mainstream politics – particularly the left – are driving populism; voting for Trump, cheering Farage. AI and the new industrial revolution, Standing says, will drive inequality, which is why “this must be seen in a broader political and economic context”. By now, we’re all too aware of how populist movements valorise the working classes over cosmopolitan elites – but (Elon Musk aside, of course) they also generally put an emphasis on anti-technology, home-grown-industry policies that prioritise traditional work.
REINVENT THE FUCK WHEEL WHY DONT YOU DONT READ CAPITAL.
“Right now you’ve got a combination of a plutocracy, globalisation and AI technology, which is making labour relations far more insecure and unstable,” Standing explains. “And that produces a phenomenon which is that people are facing chronic uncertainty. The welfare state was built on insecurity that was predictable – becoming unemployed or ill or pregnant or having an accident … But you can’t design an insurance system for uncertainty.”
MAYBE TRY HAVING A DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT TO MAKE THE UNCERTAIN CERTAIN
Basically, we might be at a bit of a crossroads. Handled badly by the government – a lack of investment in skills training, lack of apprenticeships, inadequate education on technology and work – that directionless uncertainty could entrench a new form of digital classism, even fuel the kind of hazardous politics already wreaking havoc on both sides of the Atlantic. However, if we listen, AI won’t just change how we work, but how we see valuable work.
FUCKING TORY LOGIC BLAME THE STATE FOR THE FAILURES OF CAPITALISM
O’Mahony says that change is already in action. Promises of “traditional” social mobility – essentially that, if you go to university, you naturally climb the class system – have proven to be pretty empty to many in the last few decades; the impact of AI on those generations following this path is only going to further solidify that. “I’ve always thought it was ridiculous, the push for everyone to go to third level education, even if it’s not useful,” says O’Mahony, who believes everyone should learn a trade while they’re deciding what to do with their life and career.
Yeah go figure that brainwashing the masses into thinking they can be petty bourgeois treatlers and then having the entire bullshit Multi-level-marketing scam that is “upwards mobility” blow up in everyone’s faces is gonna lead to a pretty big fucking crisis. Again.
“And it led to this massive dearth of tradesmen. What’s interesting now is that the guy I work can charge anything, because there are no electricians around. And he’s earning a lot more money than a lot of people working traditionally middle class jobs. His standing in society has morphed over the last 15 years, from being a builder to someone who, now drives an Audi – it’s not, it’s not just the increase in money … that’s where there is social mobility … I think AI will will feed into that as well.”
You get to be a professional artesian instead of a small business tyrant now.
Whatever does happen is likely to happen quickly – it seems almost unfathomable that ChatGPT was only released to the public in November 2022, considering how integrated it now is with many of our lives. So now is the time to look not only at what jobs have value but why we’re doing them, says Standing – in the dogged pursuit of economic growth, he says we’ve lost a sense of what that means in community. “I’m a professor of economics and I think the idea of ‘growth’ is madness and something we should mock,” he says. For almost a century, since the GDP was started in the 1930s, it has set a precedent for what we value in work. “It was a measure of resources mobilised for war. So, for example, women doing care work were not mobilisable for war, so their work was given a value of zero.
GDP is a dogwater measurement system Good on the economist for having the self-awareness to know its a dogwater measuring system
“It was sexist and stupid, but it was a key presumption they made when they were designing the concept. And we should be demanding it should be changed, we really should,” he adds.
He’s right. But the capitalist system won’t. There’s no profits to be made.
Much of what used to be community work is now paid, low-value working-class labour – jobs that are underpaid and under-regarded. The AI revolution will undoubtedly disrupt our ways of working. It will also raise big questions about what kind of work our society values. Now is a precedent time.
DEATH TO THE PETITE BOURGEOISE! REPROLETARIANIZATION IS A GO!