Job quality and fiscal policy Martin Baily: I was struck recently by learning that in one of our largest banks, the turnover rate for bank tellers is 50 percent a year. So, being a bank teller now is no longer a sort of skilled job; it’s no longer really a well-paid job. We’ve had this change in technology, obviously. We’ve put a lot of the intelligence into the IT systems, so we don’t need such skilled bank tellers. But if you ever go inside a bank, you sort of long for the days when the bank teller was more skilled. The banks obviously have decided, as have Walmart and many, many other companies, that it’s more cost effective to use workers that don’t have much training, that probably don’t have a lot of education—although I think training is more important—but instead to build productivity into the production system. They’re very good at that. But it does create a huge number of not-very-good jobs, together with a set of jobs for the conceptualizers, the people that can take advantage of the technology, that have high incomes. So this has obviously created a problem of inequality in our society. Read on: mckinsey/Insights/Economic_Studies/Automation_jobs_and_the_future_of_work?cid=other-eml-alt-mgi-mck-oth-1412
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 06:15:27 +0000
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