Why do we work? Our relationship to labor is explored
What is the value of work — and what is the value of eliminating workers?
The former is an issue that Diana Strassmann, an economist and professor of humanities at Rice University, has struggled with for a generation. The latter is something technologists are struggling with now.
First to Strassmann, a co-founder of the International Association for Feminist Economics and its journal Feminist Economics.
In conversation with our Erin Douglas, Strassmann discusses the disparities between women and men in the workforce, from pay to opportunities for advancement to how they are treated in the course of the workday.
“There was no analysis about if there were broader economic forces influencing the ways in which women’s choices are constrained,” she says of the maledominated approach to the discipline when she was starting out in the 1980s.
Societal structures that kept women home and men at work, she says, are the “Pandora’s box of economics.”
“Jobs that require people to work from dawn to late at night are parasitic on their family members. Typically, a spouse is enabling them to do this work. Often, the way this is understood is by saying, ‘He’s bringing in the money, so it’s okay to have this division of labor.’ But that tends to value monetary contributions in a way that’s different from nonmonetary contributions,” she says.
When women give up careers — or never start them — to maintain a household and allow a man to work, she argues, “It means that in the house, every time they’re deciding on a making a financial decision, she doesn’t have bargaining power to rock the boat. She otherwise would be left out in the cold with a small income and a dependent child, for example. It’s a failure to acknowledge the power differential.”
Another type of differential is at play in this week’s innovation column.
This one looks at Houston’s role in the nascent autonomous vehicle delivery business being developed by Mountain View, Calif.based Nuro, a business that will in time replace human delivery drivers with, well, no one.
“The faster Nuro’s vehicles map Houston’s notoriously chaotic roadways, the faster the company can refine its software and export its business model elsewhere. But time is in short supply,” the story says.
“Like Nuro, companies such as Amazon, Alphabet-owned Waymo, Robomart, General Motors’ Cruise division, Ford-affiliated Argo AI, Starship Technologies and many others are also rushing to deploy high-functioning autonomous vehicles for delivery and passenger transport, with some companies attracting major deals and billions of dollars in funding. Their goal is to earn public trust and offer real-life convenience, experts said, heightening their chances of securing a valuable foothold in a new era defined by autonomous transportation.”
This and other technologies are changing how — or in the case of delivery drivers, whether — we work, as well as our relationship to work. There are benefits, to be sure, but as columnist Chris Tomlinson points out, added vulnerabilities, as well.
Only 14 percent of businesses, he tells us, are adequately prepared for some kind of cyberattack.
“Reducing the financial risk of cyberattacks is the same as dealing with any other type of criminal activity,” he writes. “Businesses must invest in security to deter crime, buy insurance to cover losses or keep cash on hand just in case. Finding the right coverage is critical.”
Finding the right coverage, whether it’s for cyberinsurance, delivery routes or child care to allow parents to work, is critical.
Welcome to Texas Inc.