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THE ROBOTS’ NEXT VICTIMS During the lаst big wаve оf аutоmatiоn in the 1980s and 1990s, technology produced new jobs and made others obsolete. The demand for rote-labor workers had diminished, while that for workers with computer-based skills had gone up. Laborers who had little additional experience were hit the hardest, and they tended to be black. Who will the biggest victims be in this new age of automation, in which artificial intelligence dominates and even driving is computerized? Americans favor assigning to robots jobs that are dangerous and unhealthy rather than those that require human sensibilities, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center. Latinos, especially Latino men, are heavily overrepresented in those challenging and often repetitive roles. The top 20 most popular occupations among Latinos are mostly in agriculture, roofing, and construction, involving hard, manual, often dangerous work. Construction, for example, had the most fatal work injuries among the Bureau of Labor Statistics categories. Latinos make up a whopping 63 percent of drywall installers, a dangerous job because of the harmful irritants in drywall dust, while 30 percent are white and 7 percent are African American. Latinos are also overrepresented in repetitive work that requires few digital skills—such as that in hospitality. Automation has already begun in the aforementioned sectors, which have many job openings (in construction, for example, nearly 200,000) that employers can eliminate using robots, which also save the companies money in the long term. And the automation of jobs such as drywall installation and roofing is also appealing because the positions are so dangerous: countless injuries and deaths could be prevented. All this suggests that the current workforce-automation trend is beneficial not only for the economy, but also for the workers in those jobs—provided that they can develop the new, relatively advanced digital skills required to manage the machines or find other decent-wage jobs. However, few Latinos have these opportunities. While the construction sector has many openings, for example, sometimes they are in new areas to which displaced workers can’t travel. This reality isn’t surprising. In an effort to gauge the impact of automation on different racial groups, one study assessed the “automation potential”—a measure that pertains to how many tasks can be automated using today’s technology—for the 20 occupations in which each racial group is most concentrated. Latinos, the researchers found, face the highest automation potential at close to 60 percent, followed by blacks at 50 percent, Asians at almost 40 percent, and whites at roughly 25 percent. Creating more education opportunities that target Latinos could help improve their employment prospects. Entrenched school and housing segregation means that Latinos have far less access than whites to resources that determine their longer-term education and job trajectories, largely by influencing who gets what skills early on, for example, schooling that can lead to a computer science degree at MIT versus schooling that all but limits one to a job in housekeeping. Latinos have the highest high-school dropout rate—at 10 percent—in large part because they tend to pool their resources together to have one household income, said Jaime Dominguez, a political-science and Latino-studies professor at Northwestern University, alluding to the fact that so many Latino families are low-income. “There is an obligation to work.” Automation threatens to exacerbate a pattern in which Latinos are stuck at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder: In depriving them of jobs—and often pushing them into the devastating cycle of long-term unemployment, the trend makes it increasingly difficult for low-income Latinos to enter the middle class. Yet few resources have been dedicated to ameliorating the trend’s impact on this demographic’s workforce. The most recent federal-job training program, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act of 2014, has specific provisions for Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian individuals in recognition of those groups’ unique disadvantages. However, the act does little to explicitly target support for Latinos.
Federаl wаge-hоur lаws cоver all emplоyers engaged in interstate commerce.