White Paper

We entered the fourth industrial revolution. This revolution is characterized by a fusion of the physical universe, digital and biological. Innovations - artificial intelligence and robotics, Internet of Things, augmented reality and virtual, additive manufacturing technology, nanotechnology, quantum computing, etc. - evolve at an exponential rate profoundly transforming the world we live in and with it the labor market.  Faced with these changes, we are witnessing the last twenty years with the emergence of new repositories of skills and new assessment tools and training. Skills bases to the future skills, we present here a few. [googletranslate_en]

In the last century, there was a clear distinction between white collar and blue collar workers. Today, the line between these two categories is fading in favor of the "new-collar workers."  This neologism, introduced in 2016 by Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, will first apply to employees occupying new jobs in the digital industry analysts such as cyber security, application designers, specialists cloud computing, etc. (New-collar worker, wiki)  Originally the concept, there is strong demand for skilled labor that the education system does not respond. In 2016, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (Bureau of Labor Statistics) attests to the phenomenon by showing, with supporting figures, that the demand for graduates in information and communications technology is already two times greater than supply. (TechForce Foundation, 2018)  Therefore, players in the digital industry will reflect the skills required by these jobs to find that they require a combination of specific skills - that is acquired in a vocational or technical training - with a solution knowledge base of higher education, but not necessarily an undergraduate degree. (Ohm, 2018) Hence the intermediate positioning of the new collar workers. On this basis, they will invite companies to overcome the undergraduate degree as a condition of employment. (Eichler, 2018) [googletranslate_en]

In a world of automation, digitization and automation extends to all sectors of activity, here are five strategies to ensure their employability. From a book of Davenport and Kirby (2015) these strategies are based on a perspective that states that the relationship between man and machine must be complementary. [googletranslate_en]

Digital competence can be defined as "the use of safe and critical the information society technologies (IST) '(EC, 2006: 7). Competence iconic 21st century, it is essential to the formation, work, leisure and the citizen participation. Noting the shortcomings of the population in this area - 40% of Europeans have an insufficient level of digital skills and among those who have none (22%) 42% are unemployed (EC, 2016A 3) - Commission European designed the DIGCOMP, a framework for digital skills. The goal? Support European countries in the design of policies, measures, programs and other devices supporting the development of digital skills.  This framework holds our attention for its rigor, completeness and usability and the multiple uses to which it gives rise, including self-assessment skills tools. [googletranslate_en]

The current university system of credentials, accreditation and transcripts does not serve most undergraduate students well, according to this report. While the current system does an excellent job documenting students' knowledge of content, it provides neither students nor potential employers with an overview of the skills they have developed while studying - leaving employers to infer that skills from content knowledge can lead to a 'skills gap' and an inability to find graduates with the necessary skills to fill advertised positions. If universities are to use content as the vehicle for skill development, they need to ensure there is good evidence to support the claim that this development has occurred. The report raises the possibility of universities working together with employer groups to collaboratively discuss the desired skills and how they can be best reflected in the curriculum and in student records.

New and emerging work relationships arising in the “online gig economy” do not fit easily into the existing legal definitions of “employee” and “independent contractor” status. The distinction is important because employees qualify for a range of legally mandated benefits and protections that are not available to independent contractors, such as the right to organize and bargain collectively, workers’ compensation insurance coverage, and overtime compensation. This paper proposes a new legal category, which we call “independent workers,” for those who occupy the gray area between employees and independent contractors. Independent workers typically work with intermediaries who match workers to customers. The independent worker and the intermediary have some elements of the arms-length independent business relationships that characterize “independent contractor” status, and some elements of a traditional employee-employer relationship. On the one hand, independent workers have the ability to choose when to work, and whether to work at all. They may work with multiple intermediaries simultaneously or conduct personal tasks while they are working with an intermediary. It is thus impossible in many circumstances to attribute independent workers’ work hours to any employer. In this critical respect, independent workers are similar to independent businesses. On the other hand, the intermediary retains some control over the way independent workers perform their work, such as by setting their fees or fee caps, and they may “fire” workers by prohibiting them from using their service. In these respects, independent workers are similar to traditional employees. Evidence is presented suggesting that about 600,000 workers, or 0.4 percent of total U.S. employment, work with an online intermediary in the gig economy. Although there are probably many more workers who currently work with an offline intermediary who would qualify for independent worker status than there are who work with an online intermediary, the number of workers participating in the online gig economy is growing very rapidly. In our proposal, independent workers — regardless of whether they work through an online or offline intermediary — would qualify for many, although not all, of the benefits and protections that employees receive, including the freedom to organize and collectively bargain, civil rights protections, tax withholding, and employer contributions for payroll taxes. Because it is conceptually impossible to attribute their work hours to any single intermediary, however, independent workers would not qualify for hours-based benefits, including overtime or minimum wage requirements. Further, because independent workers would rarely, if ever, qualify for unemployment insurance benefits given the discretion they have to choose whether to work through an intermediary, they would not be covered by the program or be required to contribute taxes to fund that program. However, intermediaries would be permitted to pool independent workers for purposes of purchasing and providing insurance and other benefits at lower cost and higher quality without the risk that their relationship will be transformed into an employment relationship. Our proposal seeks to structure benefits to make independent worker status neutral when compared with employee status, as well as to enhance the efficiency of the operation of the labor market. By extending many of the legal benefits and protections found in employment relationships to independent workers, our proposal would protect and extend the social compact between workers and employers and reduce the legal uncertainty and legal costs that currently beset many independent worker relationships.

Demographics, automation and inequality have the potential to dramatically reshape our world in the 2020s and beyond. Our analysis shows that the collision of these forces could trigger economic disruption far greater than we have experienced over the past 60 years (see Figure 1). The aim of this report by Bain's Macro Trends Group is to detail how the impact of aging populations, the adoption of new automation technologies and rising inequality will likely combine to give rise to new business risks and opportunities. These gathering forces already pose challenges for businesses and investors. In the next decade, they will combine to create an economic climate of increasing extremes but may also trigger a decade-plus investment boom. In the US, a new wave of investment in automation could stimulate as much as $8 trillion in incremental investments and abruptly lift interest rates. By the end of the 2020s, automation may eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs, hitting middle- to low-income workers the hardest. As investments peak and then decline—probably around the end of the 2020s to the start of the 2030s—anemic demand growth is likely to constrain economic expansion, and global interest rates may again test zero percent. Faced with market imbalances and growth-stifling levels of inequality, many societies may reset the government's role in the marketplace.

From the 1970s to the early 2000s, the United States experienced an epochal wave of low-skilled immigration. Since the Great Recession, however, U.S. borders have become a far less active place when it comes to the net arrival of foreign workers. The number of undocumented immigrants has declined in absolute terms, while the overall population of low-skilled, foreign-born workers has remained stable. We examine how the scale and composition of low-skilled immigration in the United States have evolved over time, and how relative income growth and demographic shifts in the Western Hemisphere have contributed to the recent immigration slowdown. Because major source countries for U.S. immigration are now seeing and will continue to see weak growth of the labor supply relative to the United States, future immigration rates of young, low-skilled workers appear unlikely to rebound, whether or not U.S. immigration policies tighten further.

New estimates show that just eight men own the same wealth as the poorest half of the world. As growth benefits the richest, the rest of society – especially the poorest – suffers. The very design of our economies and the principles of our economics have taken us to this extreme, unsustainable and unjust point. Our economy must stop excessively rewarding those at the top and start working for all people. Accountable and visionary governments, businesses that work in the interests of workers and producers, a valued environment, women’s rights and a strong system of fair taxation, are central to this more human economy.