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Safe professions
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Everyone thinks their own line of work is safe because everyone knows the nuances of their own job. But the thing that gets you is that the easier a job gets the fewer people are needed and the more replaceable they are. You might not be able to make a robot cashier, but with the scan and go mobile app you only need an employee to wave a scanner (to check that some random items in your cart are included in the barcode on your receipt) and the time per customer to do that is fast enough that you only need one person, and since anyone can wave a scanner you don’t have much leverage to negotiate a raise.
This is the lump of labor fallacy. The error you are making is assuming that there is a fixed quantity of work that needs to be performed. When you multiply the productivity of every practitioner of a trade, they can lower their prices. This enables more people to afford those services. There's a reason people don't own just 2 or 3 sets of clothes anymore.
I'm sorry, but that's some hilarious Ayn Rand thinking. Prices didn't go down in grocery stores that added self-checkout, they just made more profit. Companies these days are perfectly comfortable keeping the price the same (or raising them) and just cutting their overhead.
Don't get me wrong, if there are things they could get more profit by selling more, then they likely would. But I think those items are few and far between. Everything else they just make more money with less workers.
And that's a good thing, if and only if you provide pathways to other jobs or phase workers out slowly i.e. by retirement.
Or provide UBI to share the wealth generated by increased societal productivity