Automation (computerization) made possible the franchization of business
(Concluded from Part 1, above.)
I had a revelation one day in around 1990 driving my car through a small rural town on Vancouver Island that had always charmed me. We’d stop in a Mom and Pop restaurant, look around the M&P stores and shop. It was great fun.
This time I was stunned to see that the Moms and Pops had all been replaced by Macdonalds, Subway, A&W, branch banks, and every other franchise that fills the streets of the big city where I live. The rural town was completely gone. And this sight was like a complete eye-opener for me. My jaw dropped.
I said to myself, something like, automation did this. This is the result of automation. Oh, my God, what have we created?
Well, fast forward to the present day, and our children do not have the kinds of jobs we had. They have no job security. They can’t look forward to a pension. Dental work? No money for it. Prospects? None.
Everyone does their work on their own computer. Goodbye, secretary, office, location.
Where does this leave our children?
The “gig” economy. I wept when I heard the term. I don’t know what it’s like for our children but I do know that those I know of that generation have no idea of the many skills we learned from working.
They do odd jobs, whatever they can get their hands on. They’re loving. They help each other. They don’t care for pretense or restrictions.
And they don’t always keep their appointments. Their word is very flexible, shall we say? They have not had the training that we got on the job. On a good-paying, secure job where you learned not to be late, to complete the loop, and to be responsible for giving your word.
When I see people expecting their kids to “carve out a career,” I want to sit them down and let them know what their children are facing. Very few younger people I know have a “career” to carve out. Vast numbers of career options we had they don’t have.
At best they become entrepreneurs. But even there it’s only a small proportion of them that succeed. They just don’t have the money.
Someone told me that a year at most universities in the States costs $40,000 a year. It cost me perhaps $700. The kids I know don’t even consider university. Whom do I know that could pay $40,000 a year for university? No one.
While we were playing Tetris on our blue-screen computers, we allowed some pretty greedy people to eliminate jobs, careers, work, pensions, the whole kit and caboodle.
To add insult to injury, we allowed them to export our remaining jobs to low-paying areas of the world, making our countries unfriendly to its own workers.
What our kids are facing now is what we allowed to be created.
Is there a way out? Of course there is. Universal basic income. Share the wealth. Redistribute it. This is not socialism. It’s equality and common sense.
Don’t bother calling me a leftie or a commie or whatever. (1) I’m none of those and you only show your own baseness and ignorance.
Universal basic income will solve this and many other problems. It’s bound to come. But we could eliminate a lot of suffering in our world if we brought it in now.
Footnotes
(1) I’m actually a centrist but I’m also a servant of the Divine Mother. As such, I support universal basic incomes and sharing the wealth equally, doing on Earth as it is done in Heaven.