Robert Kuttner Quotes

Job displacement is so huge, I'm tempted to not talk about anything other than that.

The Negro is trying to enter a social community and a tradition of work-and-income which are in the process of vanishing even for the hitherto privileged white worker Jobs are disappearing under the impact of highly efficient, progressively less costly machines.

The introduction of machinery is turning into idleness thousands, faster than new industries are founded

I worry that if you see a row of self-checkouts, you think, 'That all used to be jobs and real people.'

The last 200 years, we've had an incredible amount of automation. We have tractors that do the work that horses and people used to do on farms. We don't dig ditches by hand anymore. We don't pound tools out of wrought iron. We don't do bookkeeping with books! But this has not, in net, reduced the amount of employment.

There might be new technology, but technological progress itself was nothing new - and over the years it had not destroyed jobs, but created them.

Technology magnifies differences, and it's been replacing or obviating jobs for a long time. But what happens as that case accelerates? I'm not one of these doomsayers who says, 'There will be no jobs.'

Are those 'terrible' machines really putting those people out of work? Or are they getting rid of a really dull job that we shouldn't be torturing people with?

Accountants, machinists, medical technicians, even software writers that write the software for 'machines' are being displaced without upscaled replacement jobs. Retrain, rehire into higher paying and value-added jobs? That may be the political myth of the modern era. There aren't enough of those jobs.

People are worried about what’s going to happen to their jobs. There’s a lot of off-shoring and out-sourcing taking place. There’s a lot more mobility of labor and of people. Unless we explain what’s happening, people will resort to protectionism and xenophobia.

There is a large change coming in the jobs of America and competition from abroad. We should prepare for it rather than let history overwhelm us.

The root of the worker’s resistance to technological change is the conflict between labor as a commodity and labor as a resource. Increased productivity imposes upon the worker a risk of obsolescence.

Only in a minority of cases will workmen be able to recognize the technological change responsible for their dismissal. For this it would be necessary that machines be introduced in an existent plant under the eyes of the workmen and that dismissal be effected immediately after.

Every great invention takes a livelihood away from 50,000 men--& within ten years creates a livelihood for half a million.

Think back to the time when Agriculture was not labor efficient. We have lost all these jobs. But I don't think anyone is too sad about it.

Our globalized, automated economy is full of magic - Everyday Low Prices and next-day delivery on that single Gatorade you one-clicked. But it is also full of loss - of jobs, of the dignity of steady work, of chances to rise.

Look at trade and automation: two competing but slightly overlapping forces in the shrinking of the duration of jobs right now. We have to be able to talk honestly about how disrupted this world is going to be, and it is crazy to mislead people and say we're going to bring back all of the big factory jobs by creating a protectionist regime.

My biggest worry is that no one seems to notice that we are not going to stop the technical progress that is going to continue to displace people through automation.

Employees have been worrying about the rising tide of automation for 200 years now, and for 200 years employers have been assuring them that new jobs will naturally materialize to take their place.

What is happening with automation and globalization, that's not going away.

What people are now realizing is that this formula that technology destroys jobs and creates jobs, even if it's basically true, it's too simplistic.

The bottom line is that while automation is eliminating many jobs in the economy that were once done by people, there is no sign that the introduction of technologies in recent years is creating an equal number of well-paying jobs to compensate for those losses.

Automation is driving the decline of banal and repetitive tasks.

In the long term, artificial intelligence and automation are going to be taking over so much of what gives humans a feeling of purpose.

With any previous transition we made with technology, it hasn't been the case that we need less people.