Holiday Sales Did This

Covid Pushes Us Towards Automation

Despite Omicron’s higher transmissibility, people aren’t terribly interested in staying home any longer.

After two years, we’re simply worn down.

Even reports of overflowing hospitals didn’t prompt executives at the state or national level into much action.

Heck, Spiderman brought in a massive haul in its opening weekend.

Yet, airlines canceled record holiday flights over the weekend as staffing shortages plagued the industry.

And therein lies the real impact – labor.

We can ignore the virus as much as we please. Yet, like any other disease, it has the capacity to knock you out for a few days.

That means employers have to rethink their operations specifically around employee availability.

In the short-term, that means carrying more inventory where we can.

In the medium to long term, it requires a significant investment in automation and technology to replace human workers.

Famed economist John Maynard Keynes predicted work weeks would shorten to 15 hours as productivity improved.

Back in 1967, the Wall Street Journal predicted that robots would enable us to spend more time relaxing.

Funny how most of us work more than 40 hours a week.

But don’t poo poo these ideas quite yet.

We do continue to drive low-skilled jobs out of the market through automation.

However, it’s shifted our focus to high-skilled work including entrepreneurship.

This isn’t a new trend. But it’s been accelerated because of the pandemic.

The ‘skills gap’ is one of the biggest impediments we face to transition from one economy to the next. It explains why unemployment data looks so good yet nothing feels good.

This is the single greatest challenge facing labor over the next decade. One that many workers half-way through their careers need to understand and address.