future of work | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Breaking the ennui – thoughts on new projects

Five projects to get minds working again.

To snap myself out of the current ennui that has swamped me, I’ve a few ideas for a crowdfunded project. I’m interested in what people think of them, the first two are Australian focused while the others are more international.

All five of them revolve around the changing global economy and its effects upon societies, communities and individuals.

These are the ideas and I’d be delighted to hear some thoughts on them.

True Australian stories

Australia is in a time of transition. The upcoming Federal election may well determine the nation’s development over the next half century.

The idea of this project is to get out into the regions and suburbs which aren’t being covered – if not outright ignored – by the mainstream media and talk to the communities, people and businesses about how their worlds are changing and what they are doing to deal with it.

Re-inventing Australia

After a quarter century of continuous growth Australia has to make decisions on where its economy goes next. Successive governments have identified resources, agriculture, tourism, finance and education as the ‘five pillars’ of the economy.

This project talks to the people trying to make Australia’s five pillars work along with looking at those trying to build alternatives.

The future workforce

How does the global future workforce look? Will we be all contractors for Uber or Upwork or are there other models developing around the world.

What does the next phase of the industrial revolution look like for workers in both the developed and emerging economies? This idea is inspired Sebastião Salgado’s work.

The Second City project

Every major city has a less prosperous neighbour – Sydney and Newcastle, Melbourne and Geelong, London and Birmingham, Beijing and Qingdao, San Francisco and Oakland are examples.

How are those second cities faring in a global economy that’s increasing the wealth of the rich? What are the leaders of those communities doing to reposition themselves.

The next Silicon Valleys

While we’re focused on today’s global centres like California’s Bay Area, London and Shanghai there are other emerging industrial centres that will be the next generation’s Silicon Valleys. Who are they and what do they look like?

I’d be delighted to hear readers’ thoughts on these projects and any other ideas for similar ventures.

Small business in the future workforce

An evolving workforce means changing markets, something that businesses have to pay attention to

While the discussion of the workforce of the future focuses, quite rightly, on the role of workers how employers and businesses fit into a changed economy is important as well.

For businesses, the future of work affects not just the staff they employ but also the markets they cater for as those workers are also their customers. This is even truer for small businesses catering for local markets.

The Committee for Economic Development Australia (CEDA) report issued last week describes some of those shifts in the economy and they are as important to businesses as workers.

Where the money is

The key thing from the report is that some communities are going to be more seriously affected by automation than others. The map of Australia that accompanied the CEDA report showing the likelihood of jobs being lost in across the nation underscores that imbalance.

In those areas expecting large disclocation, business is about to get tougher as workers find their skills are no longer valuable in the face of automation.

Similarly, if local industries are becoming more automated then businesses servicing those industries are also going to need the skills to meet their customers’ more advanced needs.

Consumer facing risks

So small businesses in those districts of great disruption have to consider their markets; if they are consumer facing then their customer base could be shrinking while if they cater to other businesses then capital investment and finding skills in the new technologies are going to be required.

Even there, the picture is cloudy as upstream industries will be affected. A town that serves as an agricultural centre, for example, will see smarter farms using less labor.

In that town, those businesses servicing other businesses that serve local consumers will see their market getting thinner while those servicing the smarter farms and processors will need to buy new equipment and find workers with the skills to operate it.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, it describes what’s happened to rural communities around the developed world as farming became industrialised through the Twentieth Century and the process is continuing as combines become self driving and automation replaces a lot of tasks currently done by labourers or manually operated machines.

Challenging the commuter belt

The question though is not just for rural enterprises, it applies for businesses everywhere as the workforce changes. It may well be the areas affected the most are commuter belt suburbs where white collar workers are displaced by artificial intelligence and algorithms creating problems for the local economy that’s based on services the needs of those middle class households.

It’s difficult to say for sure and that’s why the CEDA measures are based upon probability. For business owners and managers though, they’ll need to watch shifts in their marketplaces closely and watch for the opportunities that will undoubtedly arise from a changing economy.

Creating a new class of worker

The future of work is going to need new classifications of workers

With the ‘sharing economy’ becoming more widespread and freelance workers possibly being the norm in the future, the question of how are they defined arises.

The simple answer is they become contractors after the California Labor Commission ruled for an Uber driver in a dispute over expenses incurred on the job. However it’s still possible that the level of control many of these services exert over workers may see many defined as employees.

For the ‘sharing economy’, the definition is important as the business model depends on shifting all the costs onto the contractors and customers. The service, like Uber and AirBnB, is only there ostensibly as a platform to match buyers and sellers.

Buzzfeed’s Caroline O’Connor suggests a third definition of worker, a ‘dependent contractor’. Under this category contractors would receive social security benefits, insurance and other features of permanent employment with the flexibility of being on call.

In many ways O’Connor’s suggestion is similar to the national insurance schemes of many European countries where workers contribute towards their eventual retirement or for the benefits they may receive should they be unfortunate to become sick or unemployed.

While the suggestion is worthwhile, it’s still not hard to see how the ‘sharing economy’ companies would want to put their contractors in whatever category reduces their costs and risks.

The discussion about workers’ protection and social security benefits needs to be had as we enter a period of economic change not dissimilar to the 1920s or late nineteenth Century where work patterns changed and there was substantial dislocation.

As the 1920s saw the start of concepts like unemployment and sickness benefits, we will need new employment and social security concepts develop to cater for the new economy and modern workforce.

A generation free of poverty and labor

Technology promises to free the next generation of poverty and labor but a new social compact will be needed.

How will the future workforce look? A report by Australia’s Committee for Economic Development seeks to give a picture of how employment might look at the end of next decade.

Australia’s Future Workforce is a weighty tome covering the current structure of the nation’s economy, its trends and the factors affecting employment over the next two decades.

The report makes it clear the economy will be very different observing 40 per cent of Australia’s workforce, more than five million people, is likely be replaced by automation over the next twenty years.

In the opening chapter, Reshaping Work for the Future, Professor Lynda Gratton of the London Business School describes the share of the future workforce where roles are more specialised and automation increasingly takes over less complex jobs.

An important aspect Professor Gratton also flags is the aging population which in a rapidly changing economy will require frequent retraining.

From a technology perspective Professor Hugh Bradlow, the Chief Scientist of Telstra, suggests the workforce will be more mobile and employed in fields less amenable to computerisation involving skills like social intelligence, creative talents and social intelligence.

Those without those skills are deeply at risk with Bradlow being the first in the report to cite the likelihood that two fifths of the workforce are at risk of losing their jobs.

Bradlow concludes his analysis with the observation that if we work to satisfy our basic needs then machines looking after these requirements free up the workforce to address higher intellectual pursuits.

Rethinking management

Belinda Tee and Jessica Xu, both of IBM, agree with Bradlow that technologies like IBM Watson will help skilled workers like doctors and teachers deliver their services more efficiently.

Xu and Tee suggest change in the workforce will need to start at the top with managers needing to enhance collaboration within the organisations and build diverse teams working on open data.

A two speed economy

How the effects are distributed across the workforce is probably one of the most important aspects of this report with a team from the soon to be abolished National ICT Australia mapping the regions that will be most affected by automation.

The news for many of the country’s regions is not good with the survey finding workers in most areas have more than a fifty percent chance of losing their jobs to automation.

NICTA’s bad news for the regions ties into a recent PwC report that found Australia’s economic power has been increasingly concentrated in the nation’s capital cities.

A mixed future

In many respects the CEDA report is disappointing, while it flags many of the issues facing today’s workforce and the forces shaping it, the survey doesn’t identify the industries and occupations likely to benefit.

Despite not stating the growth sectors, the report’s overall view of the future workplace is optimistic as Telstra’s Hugh Bradlow says: “The change could result in a new generation free of poverty and the burden of labor, thereby unleashing the next wave of human innovation and creativity in directions we can never imagine.”

This may be the case but the to achieve that will require, as the report later suggests, a new social compact.

It’s building that new social compact which could be the greatest task ahead of us.

Let the algorithm do the investing

Could robots be our financial advisers in the near future?

Investment advisers could be the next occupation to face automation reports Bloomberg Business with the prediction two trillion dollars worth of investment funds could be managed by computers by the end of the decade.

An important aspect of the change to computerised investment advice is the reduced fees that makes professional knowledge far cheaper and more accessible.

The downside, as Bloomberg points out, is that there may be fewer investment advisers enjoying corporate hospitality and conventions in future so there may be other industries feeling the job losses too.

The sharing economy’s wobbling wheels

A Californian labor ruling may curb investor enthusiasm for the sharing economy

Ride service Uber had a setback last month when the California Labor Commission ordered the company pay one of its drivers, Barbara Ann Berwick, over four thousand dollars for expenses.

For sharing economy services like Uber this is a problem as their business model depends upon shifting all the costs and as much of the risks as possible onto contractors.

Should the ruling set a precedent the economics of these services start to look shaky and could even challenge the shifting of risks to users and contractors.

Take away the new age romanticism spouted by some over services like Uber, Freelancer and 99 Designs and there’s a ruthless business model that minimises costs and risks, that low level of overheads is why these companies have been so successful in attracting investors.

For the workers, carrying the costs and the risks isn’t such a good deal. “If you work it out,”Barbara Berwick said, “if I didn’t get compensated for expenses, I’d be working for less than minimum wage.”

While the ruling makes life less precarious for drivers like Berwick, it may curb the enthusiasm of the investor community for the sharing economy.

The rise and fall of America’s truck drivers

The changing economy of the United States is illustrated in one series of charts

1986 was Peak Secretary according to an NPR article examining America’s changing workforce.

Published last February, The Most Common Job in Every State used US Census data to examine which were the most common jobs in each state. The change with each census starkly illustrates the changing workforce and, worryingly, a declining diversity.

In 1978 US states boasted a mix of occupations ranging from farm hands and farmers through to machine operators and secretaries. By 1986 secretaries dominated.

Then came the personal computer and the role of the secretary declined to be replaced by truck drivers, although the NPR article notes the definition of a truck driver by the US Census office is very broad.

Interestingly truck drivers themselves seem to have peaked in the 2006 Census with software developers and primary school teachers overtaking them.

For those truck drivers – and forklift operators, couriers and delivery staff who also seem to come under the definition – the future probably doesn’t bode well as automation is increasingly going to take their roles.

The NPR article is an interesting series of snapshots of how an economy is a dynamic beast, assuming industries and the roles in them are static is misguided if not downright dangerous.

Indeed we may well find in twenty years time we’re commenting on the rise and decline of software developers.

What’s an interesting footnote, and worth considering, is what happened to all of the secretaries displaced by personal computers during the 1990s? That’s probably worth considering in another post.

Your TV is watching you. ABC Nightlife February 2015

For the February 2015 Nightlife we look at spying TVs, the internet of rubbish bins and robot hotels

Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightlife nationally from 10pm Australian Eastern time on Thursday, February 19 to discuss how technology affects your business and life.

If you missed the show, the program is available for download from the ABC site.

For the February 2015 program Tony and Paul look at robot driven hotels, the internet of rubbish bins and how your TV could be listening to you.

Last year a lawyer read the terms and conditions of his new Samsung TV and discovered that the company recommended people don’t discuss sensitive information around it. This has lead to widespread, and justified, concerns that all our smart devices – not just TVs but smartphones and connected homes – could be listening to us. What happens to this data and can we trust the people collecting it?

The internet of rubbish bins

It’s not only your TV or smartphone that could be watching you, in Western Australia Broome Shire Council is looking at tracking rubbish bins to make sure only council issued ones are emptied.

Shire of Broome waste coordinator Jeremy Hall told WA Today the council’s garbage truck drivers had noticed more bins than usual were getting emptied and a system needed to be put in place to identify “legitimate” bins.

While Australian councils are struggling with rubbish bins a hotel in Japan is looking to replace its staff with robots and room keys with face recognition software. The Hen-na Hotel is due to open later this year in Nagasaki Prefecture, the Japan Times reports.

Join us

Tune in on your local ABC radio station from 10pm Australian Eastern Summer time or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

Amazon solves its labour problems with robots

It looks like Amazon has found a solution to their distribution centre labour problems — replace the staff with robots.

A wired magazine article features the e-commerce giant’s new distribution centre east of San Francisco that is run largely by robots.

With its employment practice being an ongoing PR sore for Amazon, it looks like Jeff Bezos has found the solution to that problem.

For the moment the warehouse in Tracy, California still employs 4,000 workers during peak periods but it’s not hard to see how Amazon is working towards dramatically reducing that head count.

Blurring the boundaries between home and office

The workplace is changing as mobile internet becomes an expected part of society.

“My ambition is to only spend four or five hours in the office,” said Vodafone Australia CEO Iñaki Berroeta when asked at a lunch in Sydney today about how he would like to structure his working day.

For many Australians, this is becoming the reality of work as increasingly their job is following them home and into their social lives according to Microsoft’s Life On Demand white paper released this week.

The blurring of the lines between home and work is no surprise to small business owners, senior executives or those establishing a startup, however according to Microsoft this is becoming normal for the majority of workers.

In their paper, Microsoft found 30% of Australian workers are checking work emails on devices at home before they leave for work and 23% are doing work activities while they are socialising with their friends.

Overall, more than a quarter of Australians work from anywhere which has more than doubled in the last five years.

This is largely due to the rise of tablet computers and accessible wireless broadband. A direct consequence of this is nearly half of commuters work or study while on public transport.

Being able to work on the train, bus or tram is changing the usage of public transport with many commuters preferring to use the usually slower option (at least in Australia) over driving as it’s seen as more productive time. This is a cultural change that governments have been slow to understand.

Equally slow have been many businesses in understanding they have to deploy the tools that allow workers to be efficient while out of the office, this is the whole point of cloud services.

The workplace is changing as mobile internet becomes an expected part of society. How is your businesses catering to both your staff and customers’ needs in the age of the smartphone and tablet computer?

Debunking the myth of the digital nomad

The myth of the noble nomad developed during the mid Twentieth Century, today it’s being modernised with the rise of the digital nomad.

Last century’s myth of the proud nomad is being modernised with the dream of the digital nomad. Unlike the Twentieth Century legends, today’s tales are far more mercenary.

“Quit your cubicle” is one of the war cries of the current cult of entrepreneurs. It’s a nice thought that overlooks the real risks of striking out on your own and usually pushed by those selling self help books or related services.

A related concept to quitting your cubicle is the ‘digital nomad’, a quaint idea pushed by the same people.

The theory of the digital nomad

In theory, the digital nomad is a knowledge worker who travels the world tethered only to an internet connection and a power socket. It’s best illustrated by this tweet.

Trend: Digital Nomad. Quite your cubicle job, travel world, couch surfing/airbnb work on oDesk, Taskrabbit, Cloudpeeps, Zirtual and more

— Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) May 29, 2014

This is a wonderfully privileged western middle class view of the world – backpack around the world in cheap, or free, accommodation while earning a good middle class income through oDesk or Taskrabbit.

Conveniently this view overlooks that making a western middle class income through oDesk or Taskrabbit is pretty difficult. For most, the digital nomad lifestyle is a myth and seated more in long standing romanticism.

Building the nomad myth

The noble nomad myth has a proud history that gained currency in modern times thanks to the mid-Twentieth century stories of Lawrence of Arabia and Sir Wilfred Thesiger.

While the romantic myths about Arab nomads developed, Thesiger and TE Lawrence pulled no punches about the difficulties of nomadic life – it was a tough, hard and precarious existence that suited a spartan minimalist like Thesiger.

For the modern digital nomad life is tough and precarious as well unless you have a trust fund or tolerant, affluent employer.

Western privilege

The idea of sitting on a Boracay beach sipping a cold cocktail while working a four hour work week is lovely, but for clients there’s little reason to hire a privileged westerner at New York rates when they can employ a better qualified Filipino for a fraction of the price.

Most wannabe Digital Nomads will find picking fruit in Australia or teaching English in Bangkok is easier and better paid before returning to their community manager jobs in San Francisco, Melbourne or Manchester.

Thesiger himself would have been appalled at the whole idea of ‘digital nomads’ – entitled middle class people tied down by credit cards, encumbered with expensive laptops and obsessed with Wi-Fi access.

We should remember the romance of the nomad was built around retreating to a simpler lifestyle, the digital equivalent is actually far more complex – and precarious – than its advocates will admit.

The digital nomad lifestyle is a nice marketing line for self help books but for most it’s a cruel myth.