Letter for Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Education, training key to future employment

I recently read “Amazon holiday hiring may foreshadow future.” The article talks about automation in the workplace and how companies are hiring less workers and this is simply not true. According to Trade Economics employment statistics, The United States employment rate has grown from 59 percent in 2014 to about 60.5 percent in 2018. Although the percentage seems small, 4,885,500 more Americans have jobs now compared to 2014. The fact is that overall employment is going up, however unskilled labor rates are declining. Today’s workforce demands an education and skills because unskilled tasks are becoming automated.

According to the United States Department of Labor, “over 90 percent of the workforce have attended college and over 50 percent have BA degrees.” This is leading to less competition in the unskilled labor workforce but also resulting in fewer job opportunities. Skilled labor is near impossible to emulate using machines especially if the tasks vary day to day. This not the case for low to unskilled labor, programmers can easily assign machines to complete the simple tasks that these people do. Although the entire low skilled workforce is not compromised yet it is certainly on its way to be. Companies will inevitably move to machines as they are cheaper and more efficient than humans.

At this point in time it is important for us to teach the next generation about the importance of an education and direction in life. Without any qualifications for a job that requires a certain skill set people will inevitably have to compete with the robot saturated market. As Elon Musk said, “Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.”

Ethan Yamamoto, Kekaha