GLOBALIZATION

Jobs dry up for travel 

agents and IT workers

By Peter Blakeborough

“If you’re a travel agent or an accountant, you could be facing extinction by 2017,” wrote Alanah Eriksen in the New Zealand Herald business pages on August 13, 2012.

She predicted also, just as many others often do, that car manufacturers, retail and IT workers would also need to look for new career paths. Eriksen pointed to Balance Recruitment as an agency that had compiled a list of top jobs that would disappear within five years. But two years after the jobs should have disappeared, it is mostly the job seekers that are disappearing as the world economy and employment continue to boom.

When the NZ Herald article predicted that travel agents and accountants would disappear by 2017, they were clearly wrong. The Herald article was one of the most masterly written pieces of doom and gloom ever published. 

It is true that over time some occupations do disappear, but the evolution of business and employment is, in some ways, just like the evolution of nature; as one species becomes extinct many new species take its place. There is a popular saying that as one door closes another opens, but in reality it is often a case of many new doors opening.

Many people like to blame the internet for the so-called hard times that exist today. Let’s examine that.

At the start of the twentieth century, www could have meant wooden wagon wheel because the whole world was busy bemoaning the expected demise of the wooden wagon wheel maker. But the wooden wagon was inefficient, few individuals owned one and, often as not, the wheels fell off between one town and the next. To add to the woes of wooden wagon owners, they needed to own a horse and have somewhere to graze it. If the wagon was needed to transport produce to a market, they needed a team of horses.

Nowadays people will tell you that motor vehicles, and their exhaust fumes, are destroying the world, but think where the world would be without motor vehicles. With today’s population the world would be literally knee-deep in horse manure.  

The evolution of business and employment has been going on for thousands of years and the invention of the wheel and the wagon has been a vital part of that evolution, but the development of motor vehicles has been crucial. Before the Industrial Revolution few people lived beyond the age of 40 and the main causes of death were starvation (chiefly from unemployment) war, plague, murder and suicide. 

Industries and occupations are lost when more efficient industries and occupations take their place and efficiency ultimately puts more spending power into more pockets. Granted, there can be pain during transition but in the end commercial and industrial progress means wealth for more people and that can be seen in the growing range of occupations, products and services available that are available and affordable today.

YOU MAY ALSO WANT TO READ:
The Robots are Coming
Princess Diana and Globalization
The World and Free Trade
Enduring Economic Catchphrases
Conspiracy Theory Facts

When the wooden wagon wheel disappeared cars, aircraft and telephones were rare. Only the exceptionally wealthy owned them. Radio, television, computers and music tapes and discs, play station and thousands of other products and services now available were yet to be launched. Launching those products and services was not just a simple matter of inventing them and selling millions. They would have been next to useless until the masses of people had the money to buy them.

Outsourcing is a dirty word to many but it has positive benefits. It helps reduce the cost of goods and services and bring them within the reach of more people.

India, with more poverty and unemployment than any other country in the world, benefits enormously from outsourcing and that is just part of the evolving economic globalization in which ultimately everyone wins. As India becomes more wealthy, there are spin-offs for the rest of the world. Indians are now travelling more than previously thereby creating jobs in travel and tourism. They are also able to import more products from the rest of the world. 

Everyone ultimately wins from globalization.

FACTS ABOUT WORK HOURS

Second richest man has a radical opinion on work hours

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 2014, THIS ARTICLE IS STILL RELEVANT IN 2019

Carlos Slim, the world’s second richest man wants you to work just three days a week. But don’t get carried away just yet. The 74 year-old, who is chairman of Telmax, didn’t say that he wants to hire you. Telmax is the dominant telecommunications provider in Latin America.

Carlos Slim

According to an article by Jenna Kagel in the Financial Times, Slim wants to slim down the working week to just three days to improve productivity by allowing people more rest and recreation. He says the downside would be that workers may have to work until they are 70 or even 75 years old. Carlos Slim is believed to have a net worth of about $80 billion USD and it can probably be safely assumed that he didn’t acquire his wealth without lots of radical ideas.

But is his suggestion really all that radical, or is he suggesting that progressive trends in working conditions over the centuries are simply due for the next step forward?

We’ve come a long way since the earliest agricultural workers worked in the fields until they fell asleep, where they worked, and when they awoke again they immediately started work again, seven days a week. We hear terrible things about working conditions during the industrial revolution when an 18 hour day was normal, six days a week, and the workers went home after work. That was a miserable existence, but it was an improvement on the earlier work conditions.

A chart from the Economist showing the relationship between work hours and productivity

During the 20^th Century the 40 hour/five day working week became normal for many workers, and nearing the end of the century some workers were allowed to go home for the weekend after only 35 hours. Annual leave not only became normal during the 20^th Century, but the amount of leave increased from two weeks to four weeks a year. Other entitlements that became acceptable during the 20^th Century included sick leave, bereavement leave, maternity leave and long service leave.

Shorter working hours can have many benefits for society other than increased productivity. Not the least of these is work place safety. Take the case of long distance truck drivers in places like the USA, Russia and Australia with vast distances to drive with primitive conditions and laws, compared with Europe. These drivers sleep in their trucks and drive each day until they are ready to fall asleep and there is always pressure to deliver on time. The most common cause of single vehicle truck accidents is drivers falling asleep at the wheel. These drivers are stuck in a time warp somewhere between the first agricultural workers and the factory workers of the industrial revolution.

Another Economist chart showing average working hours for OECD countries

But there are other important benefits to be gained by society from shorter working weeks and work days. Family life is one of the first things to spring to mind. The children of long hours workers often grow up poorly adjusted for life and may embark on a life of crime or anti-social behavior. Long hours workers are more likely to divorce than shorter hours workers, and they are also more likely to have health issues. It is common to hear from people who live to an exceptionally old age, that they achieved their old age with hard work. But the reality is that people who work hard and long generally have shorter lives.

Life expectancy has improved with better working conditions, shorter hours and better wages.

There is one more important benefit of shorter working hours that is often overlooked. In the days when workers slogged from daylight to dark every day for poor wages (or in slavery), they had no discretionary spending power to buy the products that they produced, or any non-essential items.

Starting in the 20^th Century and continuing into the 21^st Century, workers have had discretionary spending power, and the reduced working hours give them the time to spend their surplus wages. This is good for the well-being of the individual and it is good for the national economy.

As workers spend their wages they help keep others in work, and the more a particular product is purchased the cheaper it can be produced and sold. As they used to say about money: It’s made round to go round.

YOU MAY ALSO WANT TO READ:
The Cost of Living
Government Blamed for Housing Woes
Voters Hold the Key to Housing Problems
The Rich Are Getting Richer and the Poor are Getting Poorer

However, the suggestion by Carlos Slim that the retirement age may have to go up to 70 or 75 must be challenged. To prove his assumption wrong, we must go back again to the slaves and workers in primitive agriculture. For them there was no retirement. They worked until they died. It was the same during the industrial revolution and it wasn’t until the 20^th Century that workers started receiving a meagre retirement pension. As the century progressed more people qualified for the pension and the qualifying age moved steadily downward.

Retirement itself became an industry, taking from and giving to the national economy. Without pensioners the economy would revert back to the hard times prior to the introduction of pensions. Baby boomers joining the ranks of the retired is no reason to raise the retirement age. In fact most WWII baby boomers are now receiving a pension and the economic effect has been zero.

In summary, shorter working hours leads to improved safety and productivity, better home life, increased industrial creativity or a wider range of products for workers to buy and enjoy. It is better for everyone including governments, businesses and workers. Bring it on!

DR TIM BALL ON CLIMATE

𝐀 𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐑𝐓 𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓 𝐎𝐅 𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐈𝐏𝐂𝐂
(𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐃𝐫 𝐓𝐢𝐦 𝐁𝐚𝐥𝐥 - 𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟏𝟓, 𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟖)

Dr Tim Ball, aged 80, is a renowned environmentalist and retired professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg. His awards include Clarence Atchison Award for excellence in Community Service and the Clifford J. Robson Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence. He has published several peer-reviewed papers in the field of historical climatology and is the author or co-author of several books.

Dr Tim Ball

1) Why was the definition of climate change used as the basis for the IPCC research limited to only human causes?
2) How did this allow them to ignore water vapor, by far the most important and abundant greenhouse gas?
3) Why were they allowed to build computer climates models when they knew the data was inadequate?
4) Why was the IPCC membership and participation in Reports limited to only those chosen by bureaucratic members of the WMO?
5) Why are almost all the people involved in the IPCC unqualified in climatology?
6) Why did the IPCC only examine temperature and warming?
7) Why didn’t the IPCC report on the positive effects of warming?
8) Why don’t they release the Working Group I (WGI) Physical Science Report first?
9) Why did they set up a separate group of politicians and bureaucrats with a few selected scientists to produce the Summary for Policymakers?
10) Why was it released before the scientific evidence of WGI?
11) Why were the forecasts made in the first IPCC Report in 1990 so wrong?
12) Why did the second Report in 1995 stop providing forecasts?
13) Why did they switch to providing scenarios or projections after 1990?
14) Why did they ignore all the legitimate critiques of the early Reports?
15) Why did they finally establish a method of feedbacks and critiques?
16) Why did most of these never make it into the Reports?
17) Why did approximately 30,000 attend the recent climate conference in Poland?
18) Why were a majority of them environmental activists with no qualifications in climatology?
19) Why were industry and business so poorly represented from the start?
20) Why does that continue at the recent climate conference?
21) Why is the IPCC the source of e annual production of human CO2 for their computer models?
22) Why does a CO2 increase cause a temperature increase in their computer models when it doesn’t exist in the empirical data?
23) Why are similar computer models unable to forecast weather much beyond 72 hours?
24) Why were all the IPCC projections from 1995 to the present incorrect?
25) Why has most of the global temperature record been altered?
26) Why did all these alterations only change the record in one direction?
27) Why did those adjustments only lower early temperatures?
28) Why do major agencies that calculate the annual average global temperature get different results?
29) Why did skeptics become deniers?
30) Where is the evidence that climate change deniers deny climate change?
31) Why, in fact, do all the deniers claim that climate change occurs?
32) Why do the media never ask Al Gore about his climatology qualifications?
33) Why in IPCC AR4 did they provide a completely different definition of climate change that they claimed, falsely, they used in their Reports? They didn’t even use it in the one in which they claimed it.
34) Why, if the science is so clear, do most nations act hesitatingly or fail to act?
35) Why did the Kyoto Protocol fail?
36) What replaced the Kyoto Protocol?
37) Why is China entitled to and now demanding $2 billion from the IPCC through the Paris Climate Agreement?

YOU MAY ALSO WANT TO READ:
Overpopulation and Deadly Myths
Failed Climate Predictions
Global Cooling Could Be Devastating
Peer Review Not the Holy Grail
Warmer Could Be Better