COPING WITH FIRe INTROSPECTIVE

Ihad the privilege to listen to Dr. Aniceto Orbeta of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), the government think tank, when he made a presentation on Labor and Global Development before the People Management Association of the Philippines.

Now, the FIRe in the title of this column doesn’t refer to firing laborers but rather the shorthand for what Dr. Orbeta in his presentation calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIRe). According to Dr. Orbeta, the First Revolution was about steam, water, and mechanical production equipment, starting about 1784. The Second Revolution was about division of labor, electricity, mass production, and the assembly line, which started about 1870. The Third Revolution happened around 1969 with electronics, computers, Internet, and automated production.

On the other hand, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is ongoing, characterized by cyberphysical systems. Quoting Dr. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterized by the “fusion of technologies that’s blurring the lines between physical, digital, and biological spheres.” Some examples of this are 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligent assistants, etc.

What’s significant about the FIRe is that it will have a huge impact on labor, employment, and even the nature of work. So, why should we care?

Because many jobs will be affected. According to the International Labor Organization report on the Philippines cited by Dr. Orbeta, about half of all wage workers will be affected to some degree by automation. Carpenters, office cleaners, and fishery laborers face the risk of automation. However, the greatest risk is faced by workers in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector, when chatbots and the like displace call center agents.

Dr. Orbeta listed the top ten jobs that will be replaced by Artificial Intelligence: telemarketers, bookkeeping clerks, compensation and benefits managers, receptionists, couriers, retail salespeople, proofreaders, computer support specialists, market research analysts, and advertising salespeople.

Actually, AI will affect even high end jobs. Radiologists will someday be replaced by AI as AI has become so good at reading xrays, CTscans, and MRIs. I have read that even hotel workers are very leery of the onslaught of AI in the hotel and travel industry. There will soon come a day when a concierge will be replaced by Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Assistant (voice-enabled Intelligent Assistants).

As the Jewish historian Yuval Noah Harari said, with AI, the majority will no longer be the “working class,” but the “useless class.”

I can’t help but think that our labor groups and many of our political leaders are like ostriches, burying their heads in the sand, while a technological typhoon of Yolanda proportions is threatening to sweep away entire categories of jobs. The only policy prescriptions you can get out of these politicians are increasing minimum wages and ending “ENDO” or contractual work, when the entire world is moving in the opposite direction.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. There are opportunities too in the new jobs that will be created. After all, there are some jobs that didn’t even exist ten years ago, according to Dr. Orbeta, such as Uber driver, social media specialist, cloud engineer, Youtube content creator, and drone operator. I’ve also read that the Internet of Things (IoT) will create a huge demand for IoT technicians and programmers, replacing the “blue collar” workers characteristic of the industrial age.

However, how do we adjust to the destructive power of FIRe on jobs and take advantage of opportunities? Well, one way not to adjust to it is to reduce labor flexibility, exactly the kind of thing that our politicians are trying to do, with their fixation on “ending ENDO” and increasing minimum wages. In fact, labor flexibility will become the norm with the onset of the “gig economy.” We are already seeing this in the rise of independent Uber and Grab drivers, who enjoy no security of tenure but who work only when they want to work. Many also get part-time jobs with platforms like Craigslist or Outsourcely.

The key to the adjustment is education. First, there should be emphasis on basic education — reading, writing, math, science, and learning how to learn — rather than specialized competencies. Specialized skills can get obsolete pretty fast. As an employer, I remember interviewing candidates for programming who studied Cobol or Microsoft Basic in school, rather than the newer languages, such as Java or Ruby on Rails, which are requisites today. Also, computer schools don’t teach cloud engineering despite the fact that most computing will go “cloud” (Internet-based services) in the coming years.

The graduates of the future, therefore, must be skilled in “learning how to learn,” or rather, unlearning what has become obsolete and learning the new, new thing — continuously and persistently.

In this regard, cheap and accessible broadband is necessary because one can self-learn what’s new and relevant in the Internet. It’s therefore a shame. and one sign that our people will be unprepared for FIRe, that we have among the slowest and most expensive broadband in the world. However, bills such as the Public Service Act Amendment and the Open Data Transmission Act which will partially fix this problem are still stagnating in the Senate.

Second, education must be relevant to the needs of industry. Academic institutions too often are divorced from industry’s needs. Many schools are just diploma mills, turning out unemployable graduates.

Moreover, we are ignoring an important kind of learning — learning on the job or “learning by doing.” This is why it’s important that the Senate pass the Labor Apprenticeship bill, which seeks changes in the Labor Code. The present Labor Code limits apprenticeship to only six months and for technical industries alone, thereby discouraging labor apprenticeship.

Aside from education, we also need to re-imagine social protection. As Dr. Orbeta notes, social protection presently is tied to the job, rather than to the worker. Furthermore, social protection should involve the need for workers’ lifelong learning and education, and for safety nets when they get laid off from jobs through job displacing technology.

However, is anybody listening? I doubt it. Nobody speaks for the unemployed or the future unemployed. Labor unions and the Communist Left — neo-Luddites all — just air populist, but irrelevant, demands for higher minimum wages, labor security, and nationalist protection. These policies aren’t going to protect jobs from being shredded.

Indeed, nobody is seriously looking at the economic and social problems that FIRe will spawn, except for a few like Dr. Orbeta. It’s totally absent from the national discourse.

Unfortunately, all our leaders do in the face of FIRe is to keep posturing about being champions of labor, but like King Canute, they cannot turn back the tide. As US President Donald Trump would say, sad, sad.

Dr. Orbeta’s presentation can be downloaded here: https:// bit. ly/2rhYHAB.n

How do we adjust to the destructive power of FIRe on jobs and take advantage of opportunities? One way not to adjust to it is to reduce labor flexibility, exactly the kind of thing that our politicians are trying to do, with their fixation on ‘ending ENDO’ and increasing minimum wages.