Within 10 Years Most Workers Will Be "Task Rabbits". R. Reich.

[lunatica]

3. It will be as few jobs as is possible after computers do most of the work

That sounds crazy, but it's exactly what's happening. I work in UC Berkeley which isn't supposed to be a corporation. It's one of the most famous institutions of higher learning. But it's rapidly being turned over to an administration that is cut back to the barest of bones, all jobs being done online and believe it or not almost off shored. There are hundreds of us who in the past were part of each department doing the administrative work keeping each department viable. Then along came the concept of what Mitt Romney's Bain company did.

The Chancellor et al, because our state budget had been cut back for a few years in a row so badly that the university had to come up with something to stay afloat hired contractors, advisers to study and come up with ideas. They spent 3 million dollars doing this. To make a long story short they eventually decided to make the contractors into a department that would save the university millions (!!!!), yes, millions (!!!!) of dollars in just a mere half dozen years.

They created a thing, a kind of monstrous entity that took every person from each department that did the same things and ripped them out from the departments and housed them in a type of warehouse far from the campus to do these jobs. These were the jobs that were the very heartbeat of each department. Reimbursing research travel and entertainment (millions of dollars worth), hiring the important graduate students who actually do the teaching and the research, running the financial and budgetary issues and doing all the purchasing of scientific research essentials, and they basically off-shored them dozens of blocks away from the campus and departments.

and now, because they actually haven't saved any money and their debts are coming due, they have told us, the very people described above that there will be hundreds of layoff. Most of us find it quite questionable whether they can do this and succeed in any way. There are things about universities that don't lend themselves to the corporate way of doing business, and those of us in the trenches know this. Corporations are in the business of making a profit. Research universities like UC Berkeley are in the business of spending money in the pursuit of the betterment of humanity. But just like all this didn't matter or even cross the mind of Mitt Romney's Bain corporation because the whole point was for the company, and in this case the university is to fail.

I weep for my job which will probably be gone soon, but I also weep for the entire concept of the UC Berkeley education and research in whose students have to pay outrageous tuitions for a more mediocre education, limited by the loss of institutional memory and heart.