With the economy subsiding in a heap within days of Scott Morrison winning re-election thanks to the Coalition’s superior economic management skills, he and his ministers are being swamped with helpful hints about how they can get things moving again.
The business lobby groups are proffering some novel solutions: what would do the trick is to cut the rate of company tax and reform industrial relations so the unions are no longer running the country and extracting exorbitant pay rises from employers.
But, in doing what they always do, the lobby groups are selling business short. The conclusion I suspect our smarter business people are drawing is that the surprise re-election of a government that isn’t able to agree on many policies means that if they’re waiting for these guys to fix their problems, they’ll be waiting a long time.
We’ve entered the DIY economy: if you’ve got a problem, fix it yourself. Since the government can’t agree that climate change is more than a lip-service problem, the electricity industry will have to find its own solution.
Same goes for our low rate of productivity improvement. The nation’s productivity improves when the nation’s businesses work smarter, not from government planes dropping policy cargo from the sky.
That’s what I like about a new report from Deloitte Access Economics, The Path to Prosperity: Why the future of work is human.
According to its lead author, David Rumbens, “we don’t face a dystopian future of rising unemployment, aimless career paths and empty offices. Yes, technology is driving change in the way we work, and the work we do, but it’s ultimately not a substitute for people.
“Technology is much more about augmentation than automation, and many jobs will change in nature because of automation, rather than disappear altogether. We can use technology to our advantage to create more meaningful and productive jobs, involving more meaningful and well-paid work.”
Rumbens’ boss, Richard Deutsch, says that “for every problem there’s a job, and the world isn’t running out of problems”.
Just so. The report disputes the popular notion that robots will take our jobs. “Technology-driven change is accelerating around the world, yet unemployment is close to record lows, including in Australia,” it says.
“New technologies will have the capacity to automate many tasks, but also create as many jobs as they kill, and employment is growing in roles that are hardest to automate.”
Another mistaken notion is that people will have lots of different jobs over their careers. Despite all the things people who wouldn’t know try to tell you, overall, work is becoming more secure, not less. Australians are staying in their jobs longer than ever.
The gig economy is not taking over, and the proportion of casual jobs isn’t changing, despite what the unions claim. This is not opinion, it’s statistical fact.
Why are jobs becoming more secure rather than less? Because, with more tasks being done by machines, the kinds of skills employers need their workers to possess are changing. And the skills employers increasingly need are in short supply.
When you find people who possess the skills you’re looking for, you don’t make them casuals, you try to keep them. If they left, they’d be hard to replace. That’s particularly true if they’ve acquired those skills on the job – at the boss’s expense.
It shouldn’t surprise you that employers’ demand is shifting from manual skills to cognitive skills – from the hands to the head – and from routine to non-routine jobs. Manual and routine white-collar jobs are most easily done by machines.
What may surprise you is that, as machines get better at doing routine cognitive jobs, employers increasingly require skills of the heart rather than the head – the “soft skills” needed for “interpersonal and creative roles, with uniquely human skills like creativity, customer service, care for others and collaboration, that are hardest of all to mechanise”.
Such heart skills will be needed most in the services sector, where people rather than machines are the key to driving how value is created – government services, construction, health, professional services and education.
So, what must the government be doing to meet this need? The report doesn’t say. Its focus is on what employers – private or public – should be doing.
“With skill requirements changing faster and becoming more job-specific [good point], the future of work will require much more, and much better, on-the-job learning than Australia has today,” it says.
“Business leaders will have to make active choices, and just buying skills won’t be enough, they will have to adopt an investment frame of mind, and train them.
“With investment in on-the-job training cheaper, more relevant and more focused than classroom learning, the future of work will be a combination of learning and work integrated into one. And refreshing the skills of current, experienced workers will be just as critical as producing students and graduates with the skills they need.
“By making workers smarter and better suited to the jobs of the future, and improving the match between what businesses need and what workers have, we will make our workplaces happier and more productive.”
Who’d have thought one of the big four chartered accounting firms could talk so much sense?
