Aibu for being increasingly worried about the job market?

[gymboe]

another threat of redundancy here. Business not going well and to be honest we are full steam ahead with AI.

a quick search in my large town in south of England:

• 5 x nhs jobs (4 of which I am not qualified for and one is really terrible pay as just three days per week)
• school jobs: just three and very low pay
• our high street is mostly made of charity shops and vape stores. Retail doesn’t offer what I want.
• a big employer now hardly owns any office space. There are just a few jobs. I’m not qualified.

I do have a degree but found myself in a specialised account/client mgmt type role. Pays around £50k.

10 years ago there were loads of these type of jobs, decent salary even if you had to start low, good career progression, hundreds of them and tonnes of temp agencies. And the nhs had loads of admin jobs. Not to mention school jobs being plentiful.

where the hell have they all gone?

this is a huge issue. Massive. I’m really worried.

Where will the grads with a few years experience come from in future though if new grads can't get jobs?
My DS graduated this year and has just found a job but it is in a field he worked in before he did his degree and is totally unrelated to his degree so effectively an experienced hire. Our experience has been that there are a vanishingly small number of grad jobs around or even entry level jobs if any kind.
Everyone else he knows is working for minimum wages in fast food, working for parents or unemployed. It's truly dire. I fear for a whole generation.

This was exactly why the Luddites existed - they were skilled workers who were concerned that their jobs would be automated, because even if what was produced as a result was utter crap, it saved people money. They weren't technophobes, they took pride in their work and were against poor quality automisation designed to maximise profit above all else.

Yep, I’m pretty terrified.

and then people say cut your cloth accordingly…

how? I am tied into my mortgage. Tied into my car contract. There are so many of my bills that’s are not immediately able to cut back- and then people ask why I’d have such bills in the first place? Perhaps because I was earning so well and consistently so for many years- in which I cut my cloth accordingly at the time.

out of nowhere my business has been battered and my health has plummeted. I am scraping by whereby before I was a high earner. I have no idea how to survive the next two years before I can get rid of some of my higher financial commitments.

im qualified for nothing else. My job isn’t AI replaceable but the people that use my business are being affected and I am a knock on.

This. All of the fast food joints / restaurants / delivery drivers this side of London are all Indian workers who came to the UK when Sunak authorised thousands of Indian work visas. One of my flat shares is a lovely chap who works 7 days a week and accepts all ove time hours. Working like robots!

I remember when I was a teenager and if a job didn't suit my weekend plans I'd quit and be able to get a new job by the Monday.

There just aren't enough jobs going and the ones that are, have so much competition. Hundreds upon hundreds of applicants, for a job in a cafe in a garden centre. Two week trial shifts? Madness.

Do you think that we are repeating the industrial revolution but with AI this time? And that, because it'll predominantly be office/managerial/degree-level jobs that can possibly be done with AI, it's the 'middle-classes' who'll be most affected by it and way more vocal than the generation who were affected by the industrial revolution?

AI will bring massive societal change much like the steam engine did. Work will change but the aim, I think; is to increase productivity with less human work which, managed right, will mean there will be more work done with less cost so workers will be paid the same but for fewer hours. Rose-tinted spectacles perhaps - and it doesn't help the shift happening right now......

I have never had a query resolved by an AI bot. I always have to repeatedly type

• chat to live agent
• chat to live agent
• chat to live agent

and if they really won't put me through, I bring out the big guns:

• Complaint.

I start to feel like a bot myself by the time I'm finally through to a real person behind the chat button.

The workers who would be safest would be tradespeople

But only for the essentials - if we are talking about a universal income similar to universal credit then there won't be enough work as no one will have money to pay for trades.

You can't have anything new if you are not earning, and if you are not working then you have time to watch YouTube videos and do your own plumbing/tiling etc.
For the physically able plumbing is not difficult or dangerous.

There are certainly many higher tax rate jobs at risk in my company, particularly with a creative or editorial bent.

I won't be affected but I am advising my younger family members to avoid such jobs.

Reading everywhere about AI makes me think that one of two things is going to happen within the next couple of years: 1) the AI bubble bursts as the tools ultimately fail to deliver the efficiencies and cost savings that businesses hope for; everyone realises AI was hyped up beyond reason or 2) the AI bubble does not burst, tools improve in line with expectations and mass redundancies accelerate. That in turns leads to explosive social unrest, destabilised societies, cost of living and funding crises on unprecedented scales and basically an end to our democratic systems (not to mention a 'truth' crisis where it's increasingly harder to tell fake from real). I'm not sure where that situation would lead because without wealthy consumers, those AI firms will be worthless... I can't see a good outcome here- or an endgame- unless we can find a way to create enough new jobs quickly enough to offset the effects of those mass redundancies. I'm not an economist but I'd love to hear an expert's thought on that point. Plus, we're going to suck the planet dry.

Yes, how will anyone pay for a gardener or a cleaner when they have no money? They will just do it themselves.

And for a purpose. My good friend worked in the UK for twenty years, 7 days a week all the hours.

He has now returned to his home country a very rich man, has married a girl from home and at 38 is now basically retired.

I'm barely clearing the interest on my property.

Not going to happen. For that model, you'd have to factor greed out of the equation. Companies will NEVER pay workers the same for fewer hours.

I think YANBU at all, but the reason for my post is that I don’t understand how we’ve moved from a post Covid workers shortage (so 3 years ago ish when employers struggled to find people) to the dire jobs market we have now. Is it AI? Immigration? IDK, would love it if someone could shed some light on it!

See my first post. That was my second.

I'm not sure anybody who is pro labour actually wants to work, that's part of the problem and Labour are too incompetent to see it.

They will have to, or pay massive taxes, otherwise nobody will be able to afford to buy their products and services.

We are just at the start of an interim phase, which will be brutal, before this fact about the world's economy is realised.

I fully understand some of the concerns on this thread as I work in an industry that will be impacted in the next few years but… not having children or advising your children not to have them? Really?! This seems extreme to me. Humanity has been through world wars, genocides, pandemics, multiple technological revolutions of various sorts. Not having children because you can’t solidly guarantee what their job will look like 21 years from now… I think might prove to be a decision you regret.

I think the jobs market is already worse than the official figures suggest and I can only see it going downhill. I don't think it's mainly AI at this stage though. I think it's a recession here/nearly here plus Labour increasing taxes on employment. A lot of employers took on a lot of workers just post pandemic and have been hoping that demand would increase but things have got worse and worse. Redundancies have clearly increased and that trend will continue. I'm sure AI is having an impact in some sectors but I think less than the two other things. It's hard to know what the impact of AI will be over time. I've heard a lot about early adopters picking up lots of mistakes and cutting back on use. Its use will be limited by the cost and the fact that it uses so much energy and water. How long that will take to impact, I have no idea.

It’s a funny one. Unemployment is currently at 5%, which is higher than it’s been in the past 3-4 years, but is not THAT high in a historical context. The way people are talking on here and on social media, you’d think it was 10%.

I wonder whether it’s just that it’s different types of jobs, and different people, affected this time around?

For my industry, 45000 redundancies globally since 2022 and counting, the number increases daily. Most due to studios moving to ai, big corporation publishers buying up smaller studios for the IP and closing the studios down etc. All while the industry is still making huge profits. All those people have to find jobs and there just aren’t enough. This is just one industry, now repeat this across multiple industries.

You could train as a science teacher. You would be inundated with offers.

There are also opportunities in the care sector, or anything migrants used to do pre-Brexit.

Are you in pharmaceuticals?

And everyone says “do a trade as they are immune from AI”.
not true at all, because I live in London and plumbers charge a fortune I used AI to diagnose my radiator problem and fixed it myself. Now I’m not going to install a gas boiler, but the internet and AI does make it easier to do more straightforward jobs. Also my son and I replaced a boot latch on his VW using a you tube video for guidance, normally I’d have just taken it to the garage and spaffed £300 minimum probably.
Also if AI hits the jobs markets, it will impact the property market which will indirectly affect trades. So it is hard to find immunity from it.

My firm is increasing TCs / apprenticeships because of the recent Mazur judgment (though this has an expedited appeal hearing next year).

I also wouldn't trust AI with drafting or research. Bearing in mind it tends to make up case law (a barrister is up before the BSB for citing AI-created case law in court), I'm pretty sure it can't actually be trusted.

We aren't allowed to use AI in our drafting / communication. It's just not reliable.