Jobless and no money who is to blame

Chances are that at some point in your life in work, you will find that you are made redundant due to some reorganisation, downsizing or some other factor. If that happens and you join the many thousands who are already on the jobless heap, you will quite quickly realise the difficulties people without a job face in this modern technology dependent society we now live in.

Increasingly the society is adopting more and more technology, automated machines, computer systems – usually in the name of efficiency and cost savings, but in reality no one ever considers the impact of all this modernisation on human resource in our society. As individuals we spend many hours of our productive life learning and acquiring knowledge and skills that allow each of us to become useful in some shape or form to our organisations that employ us. These organisations in the past used to consider employees as part of a family and a job was considered to be ‘life-long’. No longer is this the case, people now find themselves working for many employers in their working life time, they may even find that job downsizing, career changes, job sharing and zero hour contracts all form part of an individual’s working life.

No longer is there any job security, a person working in any organisations is nothing more than a ‘Cost’ that needs to be utilised to its full potential so that the employer can redeem its value against its investment in you the employee.

Should we therefore allow these large organisations to roll out automation, robotics and replacement of human labour with machines and software that certainly result in cost reduction for that organisation but at what cost?

The impact is usually negative and only observable and felt by those that are losing jobs as a result of mechanisation of those activities that was once handled by humans.

So can an individual stop this mass mechanisation of our jobs, leading to only zero hour contract jobs for people in our society, reduced income, stress, family insecurity and many other social distresses?

The answers is yes. You can and you must. One may ask, how can I? do something that would help. Try the following, the changes may not be quick but once we the public (99%) wake up and decide to make a change in society we just need to unite and help each other.

When you walk into your supermarket for shopping do not use an automated till, instead wait at a counter that has a human operator. Make complaints to the management to increase more till operators when the queue is long. They will try to cajole you into using the automated till, guess what, you taking the easy route out of that queue, only benefits that supermarket, but the result is a human operator may lose their job, that till operator maybe the only bread winner in that family and because people like you and me decide to use automated machines that person has to lose their as what he or she was doing has now been effectively handled by a cost effective automated till.

Similar kind of scenario applies to many other organisations, banks for example once used to employ many cashiers, only now to be replaced with automated machines. With many banks on the high streets across the world run by one or two humans and the rest of it is all automated. Where 6-10 people worked in a branch now only has 1 or 2 people. Who benefits from this automation, certainly not you, not me nor the society as whole, but only the 1% of the rich who either own or have large stakes in those organisations which are too happy to rollout mass cost reductions.

We are told cost reductions are in the name of being more competitive – do you really think that is the real reason, if so then get a life.

Do your bit, where you can do not use automated tills, always use a human operator at shops, banks and any other place.

Be a part of saving a job for those that need a job to pay for their living not for saving cost for some filthy rich millionaire who does not feel or know what life is like for those that do not have any money to feed themselves or their loved ones.