Economic benefits of tech should be shared
Though tech hubs such as San Francisco, Boston and Seattle routinely grab the limelight, Houston too is on the forefront of an innovation that could drastically change the lives of some workers. Starting last year, a robotics company based in Silicon Valley, Nuro, has been using the suburbs of Houston to test its autonomous grocery delivery service.
In this age of driverless cars, we’re spending less time celebrating the freedom technology brings and more time worried about what it means for those such as the gig economy workers who deliver groceries who will eventually be replaced by autonomous vehicles.
These concerns are legitimate. Just as urgent is the need to grapple with how we can deploy this new technology to benefit workers. In short, the economic benefits of technology should be broadly shared among all of us.
How technological change is implemented, who benefits and who pays a price, will be based on choices that we make as a society. What scholars are learning, unfortunately, is that high economic inequality is confining the benefits of technological progress and accompanying economic growth primarily to the very rich.
Economic inequality — the differences between the top 1 percent and the rest of us — has been growing in the United States since the 1980s and stands at its highest point in a century. Houston is not immune: In 2015, the Houston metropolitan area ranked seventh among nearly one thousand metropolitan areas in its share of people who reside in the top 1 percent of incomes nationwide, according to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute.
Technological progress, while making many workers more productive and adding high-skill jobs to the economy, also reinforces economic and other kinds of inequality, such as by race and gender. Technology has contributed to the rise of independent contractors, franchises and the gig economy. These trends have undermined their bargaining power to obtain wage increases and improved conditions.
Though it might be difficult to predict where technology will take jobs and employment in the decades ahead, we can make policy changes today that address inequality and ensure that workers are treated fairly and can earn their share of the productivity benefits technological advancement provides.
A fundamental step to reducing inequality is to ensure that our economy remains competitive and that the “first mover” advantage to create new platforms doesn’t calcify into monopolies that stifle future innovation and entrepreneurship. Our 21st-century policies must be up to the task of ensuring market competition in the face of new technologies.
We also need to ensure that the gains of growth are shared. We have an easy way to do this: put in place a tax code that does not fossilize wealth into the hands of few. Changes in recent years have mostly benefited the wealthy and corporate interests, not the many. We need a tax code that gives us the capacity to make much-needed investments in our communities and our people that will ensure our economy can be competitive for generations to come. A number of proposals for taxing wealth have been offered; though some go farther than others, any step is a step in the right direction.
And, to directly support the workers who must contend with changing technologies, we need to modernize labor laws and other policies affecting workers to account for the changes taking place in the economy and to reverse actions that have weakened labor unions and worker power. The federal labor standards enacted in the 20th century essentially do not exist for millions of gig workers and others. Those standards — for safety, for wages, for working conditions — should be updated to meet the needs of today’s families by including things like paid leave and extended to all.
In addition, workers’ voices need to be heard in the workplace. Worker input can lead to greater equity and more efficient production processes. See Harvard University’s Labor and Worklife Program, which recently issued the Clean Slate for Worker Power, an agenda of policy recommendations that would strengthen the ability of organized labor to rebalance the power between workers and employers.
Luckily Houston has already begun to take action. In 2017, the Mayoral Task Force on Equity produced an in-depth report with a series of recommendations for addressing inequality in Houston. The policies included in Rising Together: A Roadmap to Confront Inequality in Houston ranged from a new jobs program and early childhood education reforms to greater investment in low-income neighborhoods and a more progressive tax system.
Too many conversations about technology and the future of work start from the premise that technology controls us, and not the other way around. If we want to ensure that technology serves all of us — and that its benefits are broadly shared — then we need to address inequality so that workers are better positioned to weather any challenges the robots might bring.