Talk:Structural unemployment

Excellent structural improvements by --Vuo raised standards for syntactic consistency and factual accuracy of this article. metavalent (talk) 14:53, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Undid the last reversion that deleted 2/3 of the article.I could not find a serious reason to such a delete so i undid to version before.--J. Milch (talk) 07:20, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Strange quote

This was restored to the page:

One of the explanations behind structural unemployment came from economist and Communist philosopher André Gorz. He argues that it could be permanent in modern society.

He therefore argues that a basic income could be a solution, and as he explain:

"The connection between more and better has been broken; our needs for many products and services are already more than adequately met, and many of our as-yet- unsatisfied needs will be met not by producing more, but by producing differently, producing other things, or even producing less. This is especially true as regards our needs for air, water, space, silence, beauty, time and human contact...

"From the point where it takes only 1,000 hours per year or 20,000 to 30,000 hours per lifetime to create an amount of wealth equal to or greater than the amount we create at the present time in 1,600 hours per year or 40,000 to 50,000 hours in a working life, we must all be able to obtain a real income equal to or higher than our current salaries in exchange for a greatly reduced quantity of work...

"Neither is it true any longer that the more each individual works, the better off everyone will be. The present crisis has stimulated technological change of an unprecedented scale and speed: `the micro chip revolution'. The object and indeed the effect of this revolution has been to make rapidly increasing savings in labour, in the industrial, administrative and service sectors. Increasing production is secured in these sectors by decreasing amounts of labour. As a result, the social process of production no longer needs everyone to work in it on a full-time basis. The work ethic ceases to be viable in such a situation and workbased society is thrown into crisis" André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, Gallilé,1989

If you read it, you can see the author is quoted directly, without analysis, and the author doesn't actually talk about structural employment, but about the distinct issue of mismatch between demands to the worker by employers vs. productivity of the worker. That is, it laments that instead of reducing time spent at work, increased productivity has resulted in unemployment, a favorite hypothesis of the Marxists. (Although I don't want to start a fight over this, the reason why I consider this merely as a false hypothesis is that economic development occurs when productivity is increased, according to standard economics taught at schools, in contrary to the simplified Marxist worldview. Marxism claims to be scientific but aptly ignores realities that are contrary to its dogma, like increased proportion of services in the economy after production has "maxed out".) There should be no need to preserve un-analysed Marxist propaganda like this when it is only tangentially related to the article. --Vuo (talk) 18:17, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

I don´t agree.I am not qualified to judge about if André Gorz have a plausibel explanation to structural unemployement. As far as i know there is a lot og explanations and theories about it and as i see it Economics is not a value free Science. As i see it the best way i to show the different explanations. If there are a lot of explanations from all sorts values the best way in my opinion is to present the different views and explanations according to the different Economics schools,and theres a lot such schools as far as i know.Your self gave some explanations on this Talking page.I suggest you present your contributition with your alternative explanation on the main page and show in what way Gorz fails to give and plausible analyze.I think it´s better then just simply write that Gorz is a Communist.I don´t either want to argue with you or claim that your wrong,but i think it´s best way to present the explainations to a such complex issue as Structural Unemploment.I hope give some contributes to the page,Friendly. --J. Milch (talk) 01:52, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Summarizing the problem with respect to Wikipedia:

• Un-analyzed, not in context
• Quotes lengths of texts directly
• Tangentially related
• Should be in another article/own article

--Vuo (talk) 11:41, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Bad Formatting

Someone needs to fix the hierarchy of the headings. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Syr0 (talk • contribs) 03:07, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

The introduction to this article is largely uncited and makes some very questionable assumptions. When automotive workers were replaced by robots the total number of auto worker jobs per car manufactured decreased, and never recovered.

This is all complete baloney:

"Structural unemployment is often brought about by technological changes that make the job skills of many of today's workers obsolete, and can be addressed by either providing better information to workers who are structurally unemployed or by retraining these workers to fill new jobs that are in higher demand in the economy.[1] Another way of addressing structural unemployment would be retraining workers with obsolete job skills to work in fields that need workers with a different set of skills. When welders on automobile assembly lines were replaced by robots, the demand for welders went down, but the demand for people to maintain and program automobile assembly line robots went up. Workers who lost their jobs as welders on assembly lines when robots were introduced could be retrained to maintain and program those same robots. Those workers who were able to successfully retrain to maintain and program assembly line robots would no longer be unemployed, and less structural unemployment would exist in the economy."

When automobiles were introduced in the early 1900s the employment of horses reached its peak, declined, and never recovered. To assume structural unemployment caused by automation can be meaningfully addressed in the way suggested above is inane.

Although a few workers could be retrained to repair the automotive robots in the example above, the vast majority of the displaced assembly line workers were unemployable, and would not find replacement jobs in the automotive industry. This is borne out by the history of automation in US car manufacturing from the 1980s through today.

If the author is going to make such sweeping statements, they're going to need a lot of citations. I can't provide them, but here are citations proving their example and assumptions are deeply flawed:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/27/business/economy/the-mirage-of-a-return-to-manufacturing-greatness.html?_r=0

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/manufacturing-jobs-are-never-coming-back/

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/

http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/views-from-those-who-expect-ai-and-robotics-to-displace-more-jobs-than-they-create-by-2025/

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-blue-collar-jobs-are-dissapearing-2012-1

Nicole Sherburne nicolesherburne@gmail.com 96.27.104.7 (talk) 02:26, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

I'm going to go ahead and remove the opinionating that is not backed by citations. It's awful.

If a real Wiki editor wants to restore anything I'm removing that's fine, but please make sure there are new citations to back up anything restored. Let's not have a bunch of misinformation in Wikipedia. It should be neutral as to a person's faith in capitalism, socialism, economic growth, or retraining programs. This is a fact zone, not a place for opinions. Nicole Sherburne nicolesherburne@gmail.com 96.27.104.7 (talk) 02:35, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

This is what was there before I deleted things.

Structural unemployment is a form of unemployment caused by a mismatch between the skills that workers in the economy can offer, and the skills demanded of workers by employers (also known as the skills gap). Structural unemployment is often brought about by technological changes that make the job skills of many of today's workers obsolete, and can be addressed by either providing better information to workers who are structurally unemployed or by retraining these workers to fill new jobs that are in higher demand in the economy.

Another way of addressing structural unemployment would be retraining workers with obsolete job skills to work in fields that need workers with a different set of skills. When welders on automobile assembly lines were replaced by robots, the demand for welders went down, but the demand for people to maintain and program automobile assembly line robots went up. Workers who lost their jobs as welders on assembly lines when robots were introduced could be retrained to maintain and program those same robots. Those workers who were able to successfully retrain to maintain and program assembly line robots would no longer be unemployed, and less structural unemployment would exist in the economy.

Structural unemployment is one of several major categories of unemployment distinguished by economists, including frictional unemployment, cyclical unemployment, and classical unemployment.

Because it requires either migration or re-training, structural unemployment can be long-term and slow to fix.

96.27.104.7 (talk) 02:37, 22 August 2016 (UTC)