The Modern Industrial Revolutions - PART III - Deindustrialisation, Globalisation, Economic Rationalism

- Image by Copilot 

Let's continue our sweep through history and take a look at the last 50 years or so, before we look at how we could best manage the latest wave of displacements. Bear with me here, because I think it's important to understand the economic and political climate as well as the thinking, which were the backdrop and sometimes the driver of the events which followed. 

If you were an Aussie kid born after the War II– things just got better and better. Although things might have been a bit tougher for migrants kids like us, they too continued to improve. Our family got a washing machine, not long after Mum got a job, then a refrigerator and finally, a small TV. Before that we, like other people stood around  around in front of electrical shops to watch the flickering screen and once a week we would watch Disneyland at a friend's house. Around us, more and more families were getting cars. When we were old enough to get jobs, they were easy to find in an ever -expanding economy. There were thousands of clerks, typists and telephonists everywhere. Clothing shops, hairdressers and sales of cars, appliances and waterbeds boomed.

While there may have been rumblings on the international stage – the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war, and the Vietnam War – we were only dimly aware of them. The election of handsome young JFK in 1960, may have caught our attention, as did the Moon Landing in 1969, but otherwise Australia rode on the sheep’s back in bucolic bliss and isolation, its own industries protected by high tariff walls. 

[This is the era conservative politicians look back to so fondly, thinking that by putting women back into the kitchen and getting rid  of ‘foreigners,’ everything would be hunky dory again. What changed was that outside events had begun to impinge on the Australian economy, whether we liked it or not].

It wasn't until young men started disappearing from the office I worked in because they had been called up, that we began to pay more attention. By the end of the 1960s, the mounting casualties in Vietnam had sparked protest movements and even normally reserved citizens like our Mum were joining peace marches.   

How the Keynesian Cookie Crumbled (1970s)

The Oil Shocks (1973, 1979

By the early 1970s, the cost of the Vietnam War and Great Society spending had already pushed the US to abandon the gold standard in 1971 and let the dollar float freely – leaving the global economy already primed for inflation when OPEC delivered the real shock. 

In 1973, in retaliation for supporting Israel during the Yom Kippur War, earlier that year, the oil exporting countries in OPEC increased the price of oil by 400%  with a further increase in 1979, making it ten times more expensive than it had been at the start of the decade. As we know only too well from the present situation, those additional costs increased the price of almost every product, whether in manufacture or distribution, as well as daily life.

Places like like Australia and New Zealand were hit by a double whammy. That same year, Britain which had been the main market for their exports - mostly only a handful of agricultural products needed by the UK, joined the European Common Market (EEC), sending their economies and whole industries such as Tasmania’s apple industry into free fall. Butter exports alone fell by 90%. New Zealand suffered similarly, having previously supplied the UK with large quantities of lamb and butter.

Stagflation 

For a while, most oil importing nations simply attempted to paper over the cracks by printing more money, but instead of the economy booming, there was not only no growth to recover the debt, but debt simply expanded. A 1975 Report by the US  Federal Energy Administration estimated that the 1973 -74 oil embargo of 1973-74 cost the US economy between $10 and $20 billion, and approximately 500,000 jobs. 

In the USA, monetarists such as Milton Friedman who had never liked Keynesian economics anyway, argued that nothing less than a short sharp recession would fix the problem. At first,  higher interest rates were used to rein in credit, but since that failed to bring down inflation which was running at 11% by the end of the decade, unemployment rose to 11%.  Three – quarters of the layoffs were in goods manufacturing, a further 24% were in construction and 22% were in the auto industry.  

Other countries floated their currency against the US Dollar, rather than being tied to gold reserves, and many such as Australia, which needed to find new markets for its produce, opted for trade expansion and devalued its dollar. These approaches may have worked, had there not been further disruptions.

Trade Liberalisation

The doctrine of Free Trade,  espoused by influential economist Adam Smith,  two hundred years earlier, holds that if each country uses its comparative advantage -in resources, skills, labour and so on, and the market was allowed to develop freely – without tariffs, all parties will benefit, both from being able to build their own wealth as well as  being able to purchase goods at the lowest possible price. 

I am not sure, if it ever worked as it was supposed to, because there were always unequal power relationships between countries as well as other trade -offs, but in reality, capital could move swiftly to any location, country or state which offered the cheapest costs, lowest taxes and least regulation, leading to something of a race to the bottom, where employee safety and environmental concerns could more easily be disregarded (thinking of Bhopal here!) or were minimally enforced, as poorer countries grew dependant on foreign capital and jobs.

Adam Smith* also argued in "The Wealth of Nations" – his 1776 book on upon which much modern economic thinking is still based – that workers could improve their lot by selling their labour where wages were higher, but by the late twentieth century, the movement of workers was increasingly restricted by immigration controls, while capital faced very few barriers.

Through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), established in 1947, which became the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995, tariffs on most goods were gradually dismantled. Australia's own car tariffs, for example, fell from 60% in progressive stages from 1988 to zero by 2015, at which point the entire Australian car industry shut its doors, because it could not compete against cheaper Japanese imports. 

[There are other parts of Adm Smith's writings, which people who quote him like to forget, especially during the merger mania of the 1980s and 90s and that is that there must be a large number of sellers and perfect competition between them - just take a look at what has happened with our media and food production, and a large number of buyers who are fully informed]. 

Deindustrialisation 

The US car industry also underwent a massive decline, if for different reasons and over a much longer time frame. Initially the high fuel prices encouraged many to buy smaller, more fuel -efficient Japanese cars - indeed so much so, that Reagan called for voluntary export restraints on Japan, but it was primarily automation - higher output, with a much smaller workforce, which caused the most damage, along with the setting up of new factories in non -unionised states such as South Carolina. 

The town of Flint, Michigan famously lost 70, 000 automotive jobs and half its population from the 1970s onwards. With the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, other manufacturing industries moved to Mexico and to China, which began emerging as an industrial superpower after joining the WTO powerhouse in 2001 and in 2023, produced 29% of the world's manufactured goods. Though new jobs did emerge in the USA in the ensuing period they did not generally include those who had been displaced.   

Globalisation

Beginning in around the mid -1970s advances in communication in the form of cheap international calls, and in transport such as the arrival of wide -bodied jets (747s), containerisation and streamlining of ports, made it profitable to either import mass produced items made in low wage countries abroad or relocate whole industries there. 

As tariffs were progressively dismantled, domestic industries could no longer compete and were progressively shut down – beginning with clothing and footwear, then whitegoods along with industries which had supplied components and raw materials. This led to very high unemployment in advanced economies and the gutting of local businesses and communities in which they had been major employers. Most of those displaced from such industries never really found alternative employment and demands on the public purse grew.

While arrangements such as social security softened the blow, the men - and they were mostly middle -aged men, who were laid off from the  railways, the steelworks, the textile mills, mines and the dockyards, did not generally become financial services consultants or IT engineers. If they did find work it was likely to be less well paid and less secure. Most just got sadder, older and sicker, with many turning to alcohol or substance abuse and sometimes taking their frustrations out on their wives. 

The rates of alcoholism, domestic violence, and mental illness in post-industrial communities in the UK, the US, and Australia spiked precisely during and after those closures and is well documented. See for example the Deaths of Despair study for the UK or the Youngstown Steelworks study in the USA. 

Bitter Medicine

In 1979, unemployment in the UK stood at 5.4% with inflation running at around 24-25%. By 1980 inflation had eased somewhat but was still around 18%, and by 1982 unemployment had doubled to 10.7%.

In the USA, monetarists such as Milton Friedman who had always been opposed to Keynesian economics, argued that a short sharp recession was needed and a series of layoffs followed. At first,  higher interest rates were used to rein in credit, but since that failed to bring inflation down – running at 11% by the end of the decade, unemployment rose to 11%.  Three – quarters of the layoffs were in goods manufacturing, with 24% in construction and 22% in the auto industry.  

The Coming of the Economic Rationalists and “Razor Gangs”

This was the moment economists such as Friedman had been waiting for. Through a think tank established by Friedrich Hayek in 1947, which included political figures and treasurers from many different countries, they propagated a set of principles collectively known as neoliberalism, which gained traction in many developed countries and broadly included the following, and some which may sound very familiar in the present context. 

·       Reduce taxes on the wealthy

·       Cut public services, spending and regulations and reduce the size of government to allow the free market to operate

·       Privatise services such as water, health care and power

·       Reduce inflation by raising interest rates

·       Break the power of the unions

These ideas were sold to electorates in western countries on the promise that once the economy recovered and the economic pie was bigger, wealth would once again ‘trickle down,” forgetting that it only did so in the past due to interventions by governments and unions. Unions had thus far been the only thing besides governments holding business in check and raising the incomes of working families.[See previous post here].    

In the United States, incoming conservative President Ronald Reagan slashed the top tax rate from 70% to 28% over the decade, deregulated banking and the savings and loan industry, cut welfare programs including food stamps for over a million families, and crushed the air traffic controllers' strike of 1981 – a single act that emboldened employers across the country to break unions for the rest of the decade. Unfortunately, an increase in military spending absorbed whatever benefits may have been gained from tax cuts and cuts to social security, resulting in the biggest deficit the USA had ever seen. Nor was there any evidence of 'trickle down" effects. Instead it produced the greatest jump in inequality seen since the 1920s.  

In the UK, Thatcher, faced with an escalating balance of payments problem, cut the top rate from 83% to 60% in her first budget, then to 40% by 1988, privatised over fifty state-owned companies including British Telecom, British Gas, and British Airways, and passed a series of Employment Acts through the early 1980s that stripped unions of their power, culminating in the defeat of the miners in the 1984-85 strike. Inflation, which had peaked at around 18% in 1980, was only brought down through punishing interest rates of 17%. The civil service was cut by 22.5% with a loss of almost 2,000 jobs. Cutting school milk for 7 -11 year -olds earned Thatcher the title of, " Maggie, Maggie, milk snatcher.'

It was a Labor Government which led the charge in Australia. Facing double digit unemployment when it was elected In 1983, the Hawke -Keating Government floated the dollar, deregulated the banks, reintroduced university fees through HECS in 1989, and began privatising the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas in the early 1990s – not through confrontation with the unions as in the UK and US, but through the Prices and Incomes Accord, in which the peak union body, the ACTU itself, agreed to wage restraint.

The real union-busting waited for John Howard's Workplace Relations Act (1996) and Work Choices (2005), which introduced individual contracts that bypassed unions altogether. Along the way, in 1990, Treasurer Paul Keating delivered "the recession we had to have" that pushed unemployment to almost 11%, describing it bluntly as "The recession Australia had to have."

The Decade of Greed – 1980s -

Cheaper, faster global communication did more than move factories offshore – it also allowed money itself to move at a speed and scale never previously possible. Banks and investors could now shift billions between countries in seconds, chasing the highest return regardless of where it was generated. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) encouraged deregulation of banking and capital controls to promote economic growth and expected that the ensuing money flows would also benefit developing countries.

Making Money, not Things 

This new mobility of capital, combined with the deregulation within countries, gave rise to what economists call financialisation – an economy increasingly organised around finance and investment, rather than the manufacture of goods, and one which put the interests of shareholders and financial markets ahead of any other consideration - not company loyalty, not workers or the broader society, often invoking an obscure 1919 court ruling -rarely used in the meantime, that a corporation's only real obligation was to maximise shareholder returns. This boosted the fortunes of a vast army of financial consultants, accountants and tax minimisation specialists along with that of a shadow banking industry and tax havens such as the Caymans.  

Not only did the volume of financial transactions balloon, but new financial products such as hedge funds, derivatives and futures evolved which, did not trade in goods themselves but the profits which were likely to be made from their shares. According to one US study, between 1980 and the 2000s, even non -finance related companies such as manufacturers and supermarkets were deriving over 50% of their earnings from investment -related activity, rather  than from their normal operations. Many also invested heavily in that aspect of their business, rather than on things like upgrading plant and equipment. Click here for more on this. 

Merger Mania and Consolidation 

Junk bonds, pioneered by Michael Milken in the 1980s, enabled ruthless traders to borrow heavily and buy into ordinary companies – whether the companies wanted to sell or not, via ‘hostile takeovers,’ strip their assets and dismiss their employees.

Increasingly, the general public was encouraged to participate in the share market, or did so unwittingly through their pension funds, so that when such schemes began to unravel, governments were left holding  the bag, because otherwise much of the global banking system would have collapsed. 

The Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s which originated in the USA, ultimately cost taxpayers there an estimated $124 billion. When the Dot.com bubble burst in 2008 because stocks were widely overvalued without any earnings to be seen, shareholders were left to bear the cost and interest rates in most OECD countries except Japan rose sharply to cool rampant speculation.

However, since this caused a sharp contraction in the economy, they were raised again shortly afterwards. Investment then turned to tangible assets such as housing, with increasingly insecure loans being made to people who couldn't really afford them (sub – prime) and bundled with other investments which were sold around the world. As interest rates rose again to dampen speculation, many marginal borrowers were unable to repay their loans, sparking the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 and collapse of respected, long -established banks and investment houses.

The economic damage and human costs were staggering. US bank bailouts involved 700 hundred financial institutions and amounted to $700 billion, around 3.8 million Americans lost their homes to foreclosures – some say between 6 -10 million, and unemployment reached 10%. In Europe, it affected 50 major banks and cost €600 billion in bailouts. In Asia around 10 major banks were affected and a smaller number in other places such as Canada, Iceland and Australia. Similar measures had to be taken in most other developed countries as well and a long slow recovery followed, lasting until around 2017. 

 Privatisation 

The belief that private enterprise would be more efficient and less wasteful, and thus cheaper than government-provided services, led to the privatisation of many previously public services. With the US having few state-owned industries left to privatise, it was the newly elected Thatcher government in the UK that began a new round of sales of government-owned assets from 1979, to meet its growing balance of payments deficit. Britain's heavy industries, such as shipbuilding and steel-making, had already become uncompetitive – first against Japan, then South Korea, both of which had modern automated factories and considerable government support.

To ease its immediate cashflow problem, the UK government's fire sale began with public housing stock, followed by companies and utilities such as telecoms, gas, steel, electricity and water. Unions were blamed for overstaffing and high wage demands that made these services uncompetitive compared with their overseas counnterparts. Between 1979 and 1990, more than 40 government businesses and industries were sold off. Six hundred thousand people lost their jobs, along with public assets worth £60 billion.

Australia was next to follow suit, privatising its Commonwealth Bank, and partially privatising Telstra (telecom) and Qantas its airline, but retaining some oversight and control. Although this move provided a quick cash injection and made phone calls cheaper, the loss of Telstra – later fully privatised under Howard – also lost an important source of ongoing revenue. It also lost its position as a global leader in the field, as it no longer had an extensive R&D department. This was also a lament among researchers into the British Rail privatisation, which not only raised prices for consumers – the highest in the EU – but required increasing subsidies to remain profitable for its now mostly foreign owners, to the point where renationalisation is now in progress.

Others such as UK Water and parts of the US electricity sector, which neglected maintenance altogether, were positively disastrous.

In the UK water bills have risen by 40% since privatisation. One water executive took home £2 million in pay the same year his company was fined £20 million for dumping 4.2 billion litres of raw sewage into rivers. By 2017, 83% of the British public wanted water renationalised — up from 79% who already opposed the sale in 1989 — and by 2022 water companies remained heavily in debt.

In the case of privatised power companies in the US, several – particularly Enron in California, were found to have deliberately manipulated power prices through rolling blackouts and artificially raising the cost of wholesale power from $US 7.4 billion in 1999 by 277% the following year. Pacific Gas and Electric in California has been held legally liable for several large fires in California, for failing to properly maintain its transmission lines. In Texas, grid operator ERCOT has been blamed for catastrophic failure during a winter blizzard in 2021, for not requiring power plants to winterise their equipment, leaving 4.5 million homes without power and led to the death of more than 200 people.

Because of the human suffering involved, privatisation of Human Services such as Hospitals in Australia, and Aged Care, also fared badly. Both services have not only ended up costing taxpayers more, and paved the way for industrial scale fraud on the part of providers - as had the privatisation of Employment Services, but the outcomes for users have also been poorer. 

Although most other OECD countries also adopted these measures to some degree, they generally did so later and more slowly - Sweden for example, did so only after its products could no longer compete on the international market, and while some privatisations have been successful, the need to prioritise shareholder returns (and CEO remuneration) meant that things like customer service and maintenance of assets declined, while prices not only rose for users, but required increasing government support. 

Though the GDP of many countries who had gone down this path did in fact improve in the ensuing years – for example, in the USA real GDP grew by over one-third during Reagan's presidency and 3.6% over eight years and in the UK GDP per capita did outperform most other G7 economies during the 1980s, economists are divided as to whether this growth was due to the austerity measures themselves or would have happened anyway, as the growth rate of the economy did not substantially differ from the previous 30 years.

Indeed, Reagan's own record shows productivity growth was actually slightly lower in his eight years than the eight years before. Furthermore, just because GDP is up, it doesn't mean society benefited in any way. Car accidents raise GDP because money changes hands, so do divorces. Nor is per Capita GDP meaningful unless you know how wealth generated was distributed. If Average GDP per head went up by 5%, it may well mean that one person got 99% of the proceeds and the other 1% or none at all, which is is pretty much the way it has been for 40 years.  

However, the switch to the economic rationalist model, was not the only disruptor. Another wave of technological change was already gathering steam and ready to burst on the scene. 

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The Computer Revolution

In the early 1970s in Australia, enormous mainframe computers were already being used by large concerns such as the military, universities, government departments like the Census Bureau, and very large corporations such as airlines and BHP. Medium-sized companies booked computer time by the hour to do things like accounts, budgets and payrolls, using punch cards to record information on magnetic tape. 

The hardware - the computers themselves, had been getting smaller and smaller since 1981 when IBM launched its desktop PC, but computers only became genuinely user-friendly, and no longer needed programming skills to operate them, after the development of graphical interfaces from the early-to-mid 1990s. Although Apple's Macintosh was the first to incorporate them in 1984, it was Microsoft's Windows, especially Windows 95, (1995), which made computing accessible to the general public and led to the mass adoption of desktop computers in offices and homes over the next two decades. 

In the meantime too, China's economy — and its electronics industry in particular, was opening up to the world and Shenzhen, once a sleepy fishing village, became one of China's first Special Economic Zones in 1980, a full decade before computers and the internet became mainstream.

The Coming of the Internet 1990s

The internet itself grew out of the World Wide Web, developed by Tim Berners-Lee between 1989 and 1991, and reached ordinary households through dial-up connections during the 1990s, connecting people around the world by computer instead of the telephone, which was still relatively expensive. Australia had one of the highest uptakes of digital technologies in the world at this stage — second only to South Korea, according to Pew Research's 2016 global survey, with 93% of Australian adults online by that point.

The Office

By the time I returned to the city in the late 1990s, the clerks and the typists had disappeared from offices, along with most of the paperwork. Instant communication via email became increasingly preferred over neatly typed letters which took days to arrive and a week to get a reply. They were also free, so long as you had a computer, a phone line and a paid internet subscription.

I assumed new jobs such as data entry and the newly emerging call centres had absorbed some the former office workers, while the extension of study for teachers and nurses — from one year to three at university, rising to 4 years for teachers in 1990 — would also have taken up some of the surplus. Indeed, anyone displaced from a job was urged to get a degree.

Trouble on High Street

With the coming of the internet, High Streets and Malls began to empty as people started to shop online. You could say that Amazon founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, started the ball rolling. Originally an online bookseller, he soon started replacing bookshops and publishers and then diversified into other products. Since then, it has become one of the world's largest retailers, employing roughly 1.5 million people worldwide while displacing many multiples of that number of jobs from traditional stores.

Meanwhile the Music store was replaced by music streaming platform Spotify in 2008, while simultaneously reducing demand for CDs and cassette tapes. 

Bank branches had already been greatly reduced as a result of deregulation and rationalisation, but as online banking took off in the 1990s many more were shut down. Between 1993 and the early 2000s, Australia lost more than 2,200 branches. Post Offices followed much the same trajectory, as mail volumes began to fall, though many were licenced to other businesses such as newsagencies for a time, although these postal services have also been experiencing closures for some time. Telegrams died with narry a whimper in 1993.

Video streaming platforms such as Netflix, begun in 1998, soon ousted video stores such as Blockbuster, which had itself only started in 1985. By 2010 Blockbuster was bankrupt and its 9,000-plus stores were closed. Cinemas also suffered, though some — like Hobart's State Theatre, were able to reinvent themselves by offering plush lounges, coffee shops and smaller, more intimate screening rooms.

American-based international platforms such as Expedia (1996) and TripAdvisor (2000), and Airbnb (2008), changed the way we booked travel.

Do or Die

Beyond the neighbourhood there were other changes too. Faced with the onslaught of cheaper imported products, retailers and manufacturers had to adapt or go under.

Retailers responded by going online themselves, trimming the number of lines they carried, buying more cheaply from elsewhere, and reducing the number of outlets and staff. In the case of supermarkets, one on of the more recent strategies has been the adoption of self-checkouts, first developed in 1996. By 2013, 191,000 units had already been deployed globally, and that number was expected to reach 1.2 million by 2025. By 2019 reported job losses in the sector due to self-checkout were estimated to be around 75,000, with up to 150,000 anticipated in Australia alone.

The Factories

Manufacturers responded by moving their own operations overseas or closing altogether. Tasmanian bootmaker Blundstone, which had been around since 1870, shifted most of its manufacturing overseas in 2007, at the cost of around 360 Tasmanian jobs. Waverley Woollen Mills in Launceston, which had supplied woollen blankets to Qantas and once held 80% of the Australian blanket market, went into administration in 2005, having shed half its workforce. Textile and apparel maker Pacific Brands, founded in 1893, closed its seven Australian factories in 2009 and moved most of its production to China, with the loss of 1,850 jobs.

Globally, other major industries also found digital technology nipping at their heels. Film manufacturer and processor, Eastman Kodak for example, was gradually displaced by digital photography. From 2003 onwards Kodak closed 13 manufacturing plants and 130 processing labs worldwide, with a loss of 47,000 jobs, and filed for bankruptcy in January 2012. Ironically, the technology itself was invented by one of its employees in 1975, but seeking to protect its core industry, it was kept to a niche market, until it was taken up by others such as  Sony, Fuji and Apple, and by 2007, every smartphone maker.

Desktop publishing and digital search engines had a similar impact on industries such as printing and publishing. In 2012, Encyclopaedia Britannica, born in 1768 and the first English language book of knowledge, published its last volume as Google (1998) and  Wikipedia (2001) had rightly or wrongly taken over its role as repositories of knowledge. Now both Google and Wiki are themselves under threat by direct responses from AI chat models.    

IT and Call Centres — 1980s onward

New jobs did open up in the 1980s and 1990s but not necessarily in those areas where they had been lost. Early entrants into the IT sector were in high demand — building and installing computer systems, and as software engineers and web designers — but IT work and programming also progressively moved offshore to lower-wage countries such as India. In Australia, an early adopter, the ANZ bank began sending IT work to 400 programmers in Bangalore in 1989.

The Y2K remediation boom — remember that? (1998–2000) — accelerated Indian firms' entry generally; then a wave of majors followed in the 2000s. Hutchison a Hong Kong an early 3G Telecom, moved 200 jobs to Mumbai in 2003, Telstra shifted 450 IT jobs from IBM Australia to IBM India in 2004, with 1,500 expected to follow. By the early-to-mid 2000s the sector was already being hollowed out.

Online shops still needed people to answer telephones and take orders. Despite or because of online banking and similar services, businesses still needed customer service, hence the proliferation of call centres. Many call centres were also relocated to places such as the Philippines and South Africa in the mid-2000s. Optus moved call centre jobs from Devonport, Tasmania to India in 2004, but more recently still they too are being displaced by automated chatbots.

Your Cleaner May Have a PhD

Meanwhile, from 2000 onwards at least, those newly-baked graduates found themselves unable to find work in their chosen fields. In Australia, the incoming 1996–97 Howard government, having made much of the budget deficit at 2.6% and falling, though still lower than most European countries at the time, began cutting tertiary education and the public service, alongside health and welfare. Scientific establishments were also under the knife. Draconian measures were deployed against the unemployed, and perhaps worst of all, was blaming them for their predicament - calling them "Dole Bludgers" and "Job snobs" and stirring public sentiment against them, when they too were victims of structural adjustment. 

Some went on to advanced studies hoping to put themselves ahead of the competition for any available jobs, even though further study had become progressively more expensive and student debt ballooned. School leaving ages, untouched since 1945, were raised from 14 - 17 in most states and published unemployment data now excluded those who had been employed for as little as one hour in the reference period and the hidden unemployed -those who had simply given up. 

Most had to take whatever they could get —often low paid, short-term, insecure work, well below their qualifications. The arrival of online platforms such as Uber, which began in the USA in 2009 and came to Australia in 2012, and the Australian platform Airtasker (2012), offered some relief from financial distress but also accelerated the shift to gig work. 

Nor was this problem confined to Australia. In the USA, where Uber was displacing taxi drivers, some have committed suicide after not being able to pay for their expensive licence medallions. Now Uber drivers themselves look like being displaced by self-driving cars. Waymo currently runs roughly 3,000–3,500 autonomous, driverless vehicles across 10 US cities and expects to make that 14 cities by the end of 2026, with London and Tokyo as its first international markets.

This pretty much brings us up to the present as AI begins to reach into every other industry and profession [see Part 1]. It seems to me that we have not yet adequately addressed the fallout from these previous transitions, and now they are coming at us thicker and faster than ever. Claude thinks I am writing a book, because I have asked so many questions, so I had better stop here for now. I'm sorry this got sooo long. You should see how much I have had to cut out!

Thanks to Copilot for the illustration. Claude, Ecosia and ChatGPT have supplied data, references and food for thought