Category Archives: jobs

AI and Entry-Level Jobs

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Richard Smith, Johns Hopkins University’s Human Capital Development Lab Professor of Practice, and Arafat Kabir, writer about AI, in their The Wall Street Journal op-ed think that AI is spelling the death knell of entry-level jobs.

When AI automates routine tasks, organizations often find they need experienced employees who can combine AI capabilities with years of business knowledge. What those organizations don’t need is entry-level employees learning the basics. Data shows rising unemployment since 2022 among 22- to 25-year-olds in AI-affected sectors—even while employment for older workers remains stable.

Not so much. The transition from hand-spinning thread from cotton balls—an entry-level job for making cloth—changed with spinning jennies, powered looms, and the like. Entry-level work didn’t disappear, it transitioned to requiring different, and better, skills and the knowledge required to understand the more complex work. Hand spinners and weavers had to upgrade their skill sets and knowledge or go unemployed. New basic employees learned those new skills and gained that new knowledge. Employers who invested in the requisite training prospered, those that didn’t, didn’t.

Similarly, the transition from hand-fabricating and assembling automobiles to the assembly line changed the nature of entry-level work. Henry Ford blew away his competitors when he invested in training his new employees, which along with a small pay raise increased worker retention with its associated reduced labor costs from worker turnover and needing constantly to get new ones trained. OJT of hand crafters no longer could cut it, but the entry-level work, while changed in nature, remained in fact.

So it is with AI when it’s properly put to use. The scut work and grunt work of interns as gophers along with the routine most basic work that will be done by AI applications also does not replace entry-level work; it merely changes the nature of that basic work and, as before, requires a bit more knowledge of how to do it. The existing work force—those older workers—will retire sometime between sooner and later. Their loss will require companies to train their replacements in this new entry-level work, and those that do will move ahead, while those that do not will fall behind.

Smith and Kabir acknowledge as much without, apparently, recognizing so.

[R]ecogniz[e] that AI represents a fundamental shift rather than merely another tool. One example could be focusing on “AI native” tracks in which, instead of starting new employees with routine tasks that AI can handle, they begin with AI oversight and optimization roles. They learn to train, monitor, and improve AI systems while simultaneously building domain expertise—combining technical fluency with business acumen.

Yet, that’s precisely what a tool does. The steam-power was a fundamental shift for industry and industry-related work. It powered mining drills, heavy transportation, forges, and on and on. That fundamental shift, though, was just a means of getting new tools for more efficient work with an associated change in what constituted entry-level work. That basic work ranged from running those new tools to maintaining them to manufacturing them.

As technology evolves, so too does the nature of “entry-level.”

Some Arithmetic Regarding Social Welfare

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This arithmetic centers on the Western canonical welfare State of France, but the lessons apply to us also.

Today there are 39 seniors for every 100 working-age people in France. But by 2070 working-age French will account for only 50% of the population, down from more than 55% in 2023.

That works out to ratios of 1.8 working age persons for every retiree and 1 working age person per retiree, respectively. Each working age person in 2070 will have a retiree on his payroll whether he wants that or not.

That’s the outer bound.

[M]any of France’s working-age ranks aren’t actually working. The French unemployment rate was 7.7% in October 2025….

That reduces today’s ratio to 1.6 actually working person for each retiree. That’s an outer bound on the burden actually laded onto the worker. Those working age unemployed, those 5+ of the 100 who are unemployed, are being supported him, too.

Our demographics are only a couple of generations behind France.

A Union MFWIC Brags about Disrupting Americans’ Holiday

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The lede laid it out.

Holiday travelers heading to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) faced severe disruptions as hundreds of protesters blocked the road outside during one of the busiest travel periods of the year, according to reports.

These were perpetrated by the United Services Workers West, a union that represents security officers and that is disputing with Flying Food Group, one of LAX’s largest airline catering contractors and by the Unite Here Local 11 which has 32,000 hotel workers across Southern California and Arizona.

The disruptions included blocking access to LAX’ main airport building, blocking a major street into the airport, blocking access to the airport’s main pickup and drop-off zones, and interfering with passenger flow in one of the airport’s other terminals.

There’s this from Susan Minato, Co-President of Unite Here Local 11:

[She] defended the timing, arguing that demonstrations during peak travel periods are necessary to draw attention.
“It is a busy time of the year, no question,” she said. “But that’s also how you get some attention.”

You have gained my attention, Madam. I’m calling for the decertification of your union and of the USWW and the termination from employment of those members who participated in these disruptions. Neither your union nor the USWW were picketing this employer or attempting to block its receipt of supplies. You were deliberately interfering with wholly unrelated Americans who were trying to go about their own business instead of yours.

That’s unacceptable.

A Prediction

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With the government newly fully operational again (the pundits’ hysteria notwithstanding, it never did fully shut down), the shutdown-delayed jobs report is out.

US job growth defied expectations in September, according to a Labor Department report issued nearly seven weeks late due to the government shutdown.

The headline was more specific.

Hiring Defied Expectations in September, With 119,000 New Jobs

This strikes me as a spike, not a resumption of a trend.

I don’t ordinarily make predictions on labor, but here’s one I make this time: the October jobs report, covering the bulk of the period of the “shutdown,” will reflect a spike down in new jobs, possibly even a negative number, paralleling August’s revised jobs report.

The October report will show me to be correct, or it will demonstrate why I don’t often make this kind of prediction.

“individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance”

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Jenna Norton, Program Director of the NIH’s Division of Kidney, Urologic, & Hematologic Diseases, has strongly encouraged, in deed and writings,

“individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance” to stop President Trump and valorizes those “willing to ‘break the law’ when the law is evil.”
“To do nothing is to be complicit in the horrors we are visiting upon the world” and “small, individual acts of noncompliance are also tools that can frustrate great and evil powers[.]”

Such acts, in fact, vary from civil disobedience to outright insubordination.

Civil disobedience, though, demands consequences be applied to the civil disobeyer, else the disobedience is just insubordination, or worse—vandalism or sabotage—with no message of value involved. Insubordination requires its own punishment separately from any attached to claimed civil disobedience.

And so: Norton was put on “non-disciplinary” administrative leave as of 2 pm Thursday [13 November].

She claims

I was not given a reason…but I strongly suspect it is because I have been speaking up in my personal capacity about the harms that I’ve been witnessing[.]

Yet the reason, even if not explicitly stated (and that has not been established), seems obvious; certainly it should be, even to the most ardent, blindered Leftist.

Some—the Left—will decry the evident unfairness of such retaliatory behavior by her employer. They will be, of course, badly mistaken, even as they revel in their Precious dudgeon. Individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance are not limited to one direction. Employers are allowed—and correctly so—to take explicitly individualized, person-to-person acts of resistance against those employees politically and socially resisting them. To that end, employers acting to resist insubordination couched in political and social resistance terms are necessarily acting, in part, politically and socially in their resistance to their employees’ misbehavior.

Indeed, the individualized part is mandated by law, and the person-to-person part is simply optimal business practice. The acts by the employer in such cases also are nothing more than enforcement of the inherent nature of the employer-employee relationship and an emphasis of who works for whom.