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In India, Engineers and MBAs Are Turning To Manual Labor To Survive the Economic Crash (washingtonpost.com) 127

As India's economy reels in the aftermath of one of the world's strictest lockdowns, a rural employment program has emerged as a lifeline for some of the tens of millions left jobless. From a report: The government program -- which aims to guarantee 100 days of unskilled work in rural areas -- was intended to combat poverty and reduce the volatility of agricultural wages. Now it is a potent symbol of how the middle-class dreams of millions of Indians are unraveling. The program is serving as a last resort for university graduates as well as former white-collar workers who find themselves with no other safety net. More than 17 million new entrants applied to access the program from April through mid-September. Nearly 60 million households participated during that time -- higher than the total for all of last year and the most in the program's 14-year history. The need is dire. India's economic output shrank by 24 percent in the three months to June compared to the same period last year, worse than any other major economy. During the nationwide lockdown, more than 120 million jobs were lost, most of them in the country's vast informal sector. Many of those workers have returned to work out of sheer necessity, often scraping by on far lower wages.
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In India, Engineers and MBAs Are Turning To Manual Labor To Survive the Economic Crash

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  • That's also every other country on earth, and before the pandemic.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 )

      No, plenty of countries have rising percent of people NOT doing manual labor, such as USA from early 1970s to now. To badly paraphrase "the good, the bad and the ugly" there are two kinds of people, those with skills, and those who dig.

      • by nomadic ( 141991 )

        In every country on earth you have a pool of overeducated, under- or unemployed people. Skills are meaningless when there are enough other people with skills to fill the available jobs.

        • yeah and the pool not shrinking in many places, it's growing.

          and new businesses and new wealth can be created, the pie can be grown, not a fixed sized pie that must be cut into ever smaller pieces which is the nonsense many socialist/communists try to hoodwink people with

          • Re:ummm (Score:5, Interesting)

            by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Thursday September 24, 2020 @01:04PM (#60540700)

            yeah and the pool not shrinking in many places, it's growing.

            and new businesses and new wealth can be created, the pie can be grown, not a fixed sized pie that must be cut into ever smaller pieces which is the nonsense many socialist/communists try to hoodwink people with

            Haven't looked at the US recently, have you? Wealth is only being created for the 1%. Businesses are consolidating and buying out competitors so they keep an ever growing piece of the pie. Salaries have only risen 11.9% in the past 40 years for the average worker which means they are making less than now 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation. The top 1% of earners now has the same, if not more, wealth than the entire middle class [forbes.com].

            The only people being hoodwinked are those who keep saying if you give corporations tax cuts that extra money will trickle down to the workers. It's never happened before, but the lies keep coming. And the pie keeps getting smaller.

            • Salaries have only risen 11.9% in the past 40 years for the average worker which means they are making less than now 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation.

              Source?

              According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, [bls.gov] real (inflation adjusted) wages for production and nonsupervisory employees are up 17% since 1980.

              • Source is here [cnbc.com] and it's only a year old. I'm certain things have changed.

                Even if the BLS numbers are closer (they aren't, but that's another story), that 17% is still eaten away by inflation so the average worker is still making less now than they were in 1980. Even the Pew Research Center, the gold standard for information, says the same thing [pewresearch.org] citing BLS numbers.

                • Source is here [cnbc.com] and it's only a year old. I'm certain things have changed.

                  Your source gets its 11.9% number from this report, [epi.org] which says the number is inflation adjusted:

                  From 1978 to 2018, inflation-adjusted compensation based on realized stock options of the top CEOs increased 940.3%. The increase was more than 25–33% greater than stock market growth (depending on which stock market index is used) and substantially greater than the painfully slow 11.9% growth in a typical worker’s annual compensation over the same period.

                  Apparently the author of the CNBC piece deci

            • You keep spewing lies when hard facts say the opposite. why don't you use google or other search engine, find out what authoritative sources say. Income going up, more people have jobs. Middle class growing.

          • And yet, you often get the situation such as in the US for the last 50 years - where the pie continues to grow at much the same rate as for the century prior, but virtually all of the new pie is going to the people that already had the biggest slice, while wages stagnate for most of the population.

            The problem is that those who have the most pie, also have the most power, and use that power to change the rules of the game to further solidify their own claim to a disproportionate amount of pie.

        • Skills are meaningless when there are enough other people with skills to fill the available jobs.

          Not only that, but the supposedly trained frequently overvalue their supposed skills.

    • That's also every other country on earth, and before the pandemic.

      Not really; California tried a program whereby welfare recipients could get transportation and lodging in the countryside to do a stint at farm labor and get paid for working for a change. The people who tried it quit after a day saying it was too hard.

  • by LatencyKills ( 1213908 ) on Thursday September 24, 2020 @11:46AM (#60540402)
    My father supported me in getting my PhD in physics, but always told me to learn a useful skill as a fallback. People may not always need PhDs, but they'll always need plumbers.
    • by magarity ( 164372 ) on Thursday September 24, 2020 @12:05PM (#60540466)

      My father supported me in getting my PhD in physics, but always told me to learn a useful skill as a fallback. People may not always need PhDs, but they'll always need plumbers.

      After Rome was sacked plumbing was an unknown art in Europe for about 800 years. So, plumbers, watch out for Visigoths.

    • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Thursday September 24, 2020 @12:12PM (#60540488)

      My father supported me in getting my PhD in physics, but always told me to learn a useful skill as a fallback. People may not always need PhDs, but they'll always need plumbers.

      Wise advice at one time, but not really applicable today. As in right now, when every "fallback" industry will be getting flooded with desperation soon. 17 million applicants? 60 million households? One cannot merely dismiss or ignore these numbers. And they will get worse. Far worse.

      And in the meantime, Greed demands that we get rid of all these pesky, complaining, expensive, sickly human workers and replace them with machines, including degree holders.

      Our largest mistake going forward, is to continue to assume you can justify and sustain a human life solely based on their ability to get and keep a job. This is a stupid and dying mentality.

      Fact: There will not be enough jobs, for everyone. Likely ever again. And We need to figure that out, because Greed already has an answer; death.

      • Greed only causes death in proles. Zero impact on your kings and queens.

        But, yes, solid advice to learn some alternate skills.

        A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

        - RAH

        • Greed only causes death in proles. Zero impact on your kings and queens.

          Cleary you've never heard of the concept of Eat the Rich. Let me know how the kings and queens feel when their heads are on pikes. You act as if ignorant governments and greedy leaders are not building up a horrific case of human desperation the world over. Shit gets bad when humans are desperate. Real bad.

          But, yes, solid advice to learn some alternate skills.

          The only viable skill many humans will "learn" in the world of automation and AI, is convincing governments to not "lower taxes" by killing millions.

          A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

          Most of the shit on your antiquated list machines

          • by Saffaya ( 702234 )

            You should immediately give back your geek card on the way out.

            You failed to recognize that text as a quote from Robert A. Heinlein, author of Starship Troopers amongst other works, even though the original poster included the initials RAH.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

            https://www.azquotes.com/autho... [azquotes.com]

            • You should immediately give back your geek card on the way out.

              You failed to recognize that text as a quote from Robert A. Heinlein, author of Starship Troopers amongst other works, even though the original poster included the initials RAH.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

              https://www.azquotes.com/autho... [azquotes.com]

              It was an obvious quote, and searching on "RAH" (which I did), wasn't yielding clear results.

              And while I've not read the book, I've seen the movie. Written in the 50s but set in a future society, even by today's standards. Which makes the antiquated references even more pointless in the context of this conversation. (How ironic it was the specialized insects who were killing off the one-size-fits-all humans in this story, as the writer shits on specialization.)

              I also had to thoroughly explain why the new

      • Call a plumber and get a price to change out a faucet (a 10-15 minute job).

        Then tell me plumbers don't make any money anymore.

        • you'd know that the reason that plumber needs to charge so much for a 15 minute job is that he's not doing one 15 minute job after another. He's got long periods of downtime. The same went for me when I did freelance IT. You might have 8 calls today and nothing for the next 10.

          Worse, plumbers will suffer in a bad economy. When I wanted to get some work done on my house in the boom times of the mid 2000s I was quoted $5k so I jury rigged it and moved on. When the 2008 crash hit and building just stopped
          • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

            you'd know that the reason that plumber needs to charge so much for a 15 minute job is that he's not doing one 15 minute job after another. He's got long periods of downtime. The same went for me when I did freelance IT. You might have 8 calls today and nothing for the next 10.

            Worse, plumbers will suffer in a bad economy. When I wanted to get some work done on my house in the boom times of the mid 2000s I was quoted $5k so I jury rigged it and moved on. When the 2008 crash hit and building just stopped I go

          • Plumbers charge a lot for a quick job because they can. They can because you need tools, skills, and a willingness to work on equipment containing other people's feces. Contrary to popular belief you need to know more than shit rolls downhill and paydays are on Thursdays. A lot more.

            • Plumbers charge a lot for a quick job because they can. They can because you need tools, skills, and a willingness to work on equipment containing other people's feces. Contrary to popular belief you need to know more than shit rolls downhill and paydays are on Thursdays. A lot more.

              A quick job would be a faucet repair. Or a bad toilet flapper or seal.

              People pay plumbers for those simple jobs because A) they have disposable income, and B) they're too lazy to look on YouTube.

              See how much disposable income will be floating around in the next decade.

              • There will still be work, there just won't be as much quick work. It will probably be more shit work.

                That's the real reason people don't want to be a plumber. And it's reasonable.

                • There will still be work, there just won't be as much quick work. It will probably be more shit work.

                  That's the real reason people don't want to be a plumber. And it's reasonable.

                  Reason has already turned to desperation for many.

                  You know what I call a "shit" job that pays a living wage in 2020? Employed. Lucky. And thus to my previous point, alive.

                  Plumbers...mechanics...lawn maintenance....every market will be flooded soon with desperation. And it's reasonable to expect that.

        • Call a plumber and get a price to change out a faucet (a 10-15 minute job).

          Then tell me plumbers don't make any money anymore.

          I can charge $300 to install a WiFi router too. Doesn't mean it's worth it.

          Arguments like this used to have value.

          Before YouTube.

      • Why is this marked insightful? Like the industrial revolution was the end of civilization? We've already been through this transition. It was not a pretty transition, but most of society is no longer directly involved in food production. The main problems now are transitions happening too fast for the labor market to adapt, actual abuses (union busting), and people electing con-men as politicians who are actually working against the interest of their own constituency. The whole communism/capitalism str

        • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday September 24, 2020 @02:01PM (#60540892)
          there was decades of war, poverty and social strife following the industrial revolution. They gloss over it in any history book that isn't a 300+ level course. Luddites were real people whose livelihoods were taken away and who were made redundant. Eventually new tech came along... and employed their grandchildren. That didn't help them.

          The industrial revolution wasn't some quick, clean thing where people stopped working at the buggy whip factory on Tuesday and went to work for Henry Ford on Wednesday. There's a reason people called life then nasty, brutish and short.
          • by trawg ( 308495 )

            . Eventually new tech came along... and employed their grandchildren. That didn't help them.

            Cynical thought for the day: that they lived long enough to have grandchildren might mean they were actually better positioned than we are today

            • and didn't have grandkids because that was understood from this line:

              there was decades of war, poverty and social strife

              At the moment we're still better off, and likely will be for our lifetime. That's sort of the problem. All the terrible things coming down the pipe are going to hit are great grandchildren. We'll be long dead by then.

              Like I've said before, climate change is years from now but rent's due at the end of the month.

          • Not sure how you thought I meant it was easy. I marked the entire cold war as the coda, so pretty bad. The point is that it already happened. We now know how to handle steady changes in labor market, we just have to actually implement them. Since the industrial revolution we've gone through several cycles of massive changes in labor. Office work today bears no resemblance to what it did 40 years ago. Most of the labor then (secretarial, records, accounting, inventory) is now all done by computers. We

        • Why is this marked insightful? Like the industrial revolution was the end of civilization? We've already been through this transition. It was not a pretty transition, but most of society is no longer directly involved in food production. The main problems now are transitions happening too fast for the labor market to adapt, actual abuses (union busting), and people electing con-men as politicians who are actually working against the interest of their own constituency. The whole communism/capitalism struggle of the late 20th century was basically the completion of this transition. The conclusion was that command economies don't work, and a total free market doesn't work (which we knew all along, Smith advocated for a regulated free market, not anarchy). A mostly-free market, allowing decentralized decision-making, with socialized services and regulation is what works for a post-agrarian economy. Modest inflation forces re-investment and keeps labor moving to new opportunities when the current ones become more automated, while social services can maintain a minimum standard at a modest overall cost.

          More to the point... having a breadth of skills is really the kernel of the advice. i.e. mobility in the labor market is what is valuable in changing times. This is the actual purpose of college -- refining one's ability to learn. A college-educated individual should be much better able to learn how to do something new than someone who was only trained to do a particular job (like a plumber).

          You really don't get how this is different, do you?

          In previous revolutions, the answer for the redundant/obsolete masses was always "just go find another job." Go re-train yourself. Buggy whip users and all. The next revolution (Automation and AI), is eliminating the need for the human to do the damn job.

          Stop being ignorant by looking at history as if this is the same. It isn't. Not even close. Today we still value a humans value and worth on their ability to be employed. And Greed has no answer for

        • "We've already been through this transition. It was not a pretty transition, but most of society is no longer directly involved in food production. The main problems now are transitions happening too fast for the labor market to adapt"

          You were so close. When you got to this point you should have said "wait, that alone destroys my entire argument." The transitions are happening too fast for the market to adapt.

          We have NOT been through THIS transition, by definition. It's different from the last major transit

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        In India's case likely true. They have real deep seated problems with nationalism, racism and religious prejudice. This will likely feed nationalism and blame the other people, India is becoming a tinder box and the slightest spark could set it off. Watch for conflict between Pakistan and India, as many idle hands make for much conflict. Both governments politicians will resort to destructive nationalism and religious prejudice to keep power, war becomes a real risk.

        • In India's case likely true. They have real deep seated problems with nationalism, racism and religious prejudice. This will likely feed nationalism and blame the other people, India is becoming a tinder box and the slightest spark could set it off. Watch for conflict between Pakistan and India, as many idle hands make for much conflict. Both governments politicians will resort to destructive nationalism and religious prejudice to keep power, war becomes a real risk.

          This does sound rather horrific, but we are rather busy right now in the US, working hard to convert a political civil war into an actual civil war.

          Tinder Box, USA has its own zip code, and Amazon distribution center. Pray for peace, the world over.

    • I remember stories of the allies in WWI sending mathematicians and physicists to die in the trenches because that's all they were good for.

      Jesus fucking Christ what a world we live in that the above could get posted to /..
      • by ghoul ( 157158 )
        Thank god for that or the Atom bomb might have been invented in the 1930s and used during WW2. Just kidding.
      • by Cederic ( 9623 )

        There's a limit to how many people you need to calculate shell trajectories and design gun sights. Using sound to triangulate the location of enemy artillery only needs inventing once. Trench building needs engineers not physicists.

        Anyway, they should be grateful. They could've been trained as pilots.

    • My father supported me in getting my PhD in physics, but always told me to learn a useful skill as a fallback. People may not always need PhDs, but they'll always need plumbers.

      Not quite on the same level of training, but the late Jim Varney, comedian and movie star, used to tell people that if his movie career ever petered out, it was fine, he'd never go hungry, because he used to lay floor tile for a living and he still had his tile tools in the shed. And he was serious. And that's a great attitude to have.

    • by ghoul ( 157158 )
      I dont know. We have had some broken taps and other minor plumbing issues but we are postponing repairs as we are sheltering in place and just dont want an outsider coming inside the home unless its absolutely necessary or till vaccinations happen. I would have to say all tradespeople would be suffering from similar postponement of work much more than a knowledge worker who can continue working from home remotely.
    • Not in India, where "plumbing" is a combination of shitting on sidewalks or being the untouchable who climbs into the indoor shit pit to clean it out.
  • by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Thursday September 24, 2020 @11:59AM (#60540454)
    I'm not going to equate the US with India, but being in the process of the review cycle at work, they are pleading poverty on raises and saying no new hiring. Unemployment has dropped a bit but still stands at 8.4%, which is comparable to the Great Recession. It has gone down a little which is great, but hospitality and travel are not just going to bounce back and that is a LOT of jobs.
    • Sorry, but if you haven't already figured out that this is the greatest economic crisis since the great depression you haven't been paying attention. But it is not going to be felt uniformly. Nations that have managed their pandemic response correctly are way ahead.
  • Manual labor is harder than mental labor. Eventually manual labor, even if it is just carrying something back and forth, will be worth more than someone sitting in a chair thinking (or more likely watching a screen to make sure the automated computer is working as intended).
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by ghoul ( 157158 )
      Manual labor is so easy that people actually pay to do it. Peloton I am looking at you. Mental labor is difficult.
    • Manual labor is harder than mental labor. Eventually manual labor, even if it is just carrying something back and forth, will be worth more than someone sitting in a chair thinking (or more likely watching a screen to make sure the automated computer is working as intended).

      Only if society collapses. Otherwise the knowledge workers who invent the robot that carries something back and forth get paid, the people who employ them get paid more, and the people who it displaces get shown the door.

  • Sounds like a wonderful plan. Let's make ALL OF THEM do physical labor, since none of them know shit from shinola, and have destroyed the US economy.

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I predict stagflation. There will be inflation, heck I see about 20% in groceries already. There will no be wage growth though. Well, except for C suite.
      • Yep, it will be inflation for the stuff you have to buy, and deflation for technology and salaries. Things are going to get interesting for sure. For years the West had lots of job growth and opportunities for immigrants to come here and get high paying jobs. With high unemployment, those opportunities evaporated too.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • just sayin'. Also I got Kharma to burn.
          • i too have karma for the burninating. To the People:

            Ranked Choice Voting, motherfuckers. Then: repeal Citizens United v. FEC, repeal Buckley v. Valeo, repeal the DMCA, fix the 13 amendment slavery loophole, and secure womens' rights over their own bodies by replacing Roe v. Wade with a proper amendment.

            Yes, it's a metric (we are a metric country, yep) fuckton of work (actual unit). Do you want a home or a goddamn hellhole? Will you live your life standing up, or will you live and die on your knees?

            • On my knees , with my rosary in my hand sir. Live and Die, to protect women and children from being exploited by people who want to use women as sex toys then pay for them to kill their children. Until we as a society recognize human dignity is linked to human sexuality and that sexuality cannot be arbitrarily defined and sex always comes with consequences and responsibilities, we will never fix the root cause of the #metoo movement. Women will continue to be exploited and no right of any kind will be saf

    • by ghoul ( 157158 )
      India is trying to solve the excess labor problem by reopening everything even though cases are rising. India govt has decided India has excess manpower anyway so better to save the economy.
  • This way they can take pennies on the dollar to do your job and put you out of work (once you train them of course) so that you have to do a manual labor job to survive.
  • by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Thursday September 24, 2020 @01:35PM (#60540812)
    Than they are at programming, otherwise the fields they're working in will be littered with random holes
  • Virtually all of them deserve it, no, they need it.
  • "Who's right doesn't matter, who has the power does" --Thucydides (471 BC - 400 BC)
    1% owns 73% wealth in India https://archive.is/pOmij [archive.is]
    UC/BC/SC/ST/MC should become Prime Minister of India on Rotational basis every 5 years https://twitter.com/0x101/stat... [twitter.com]
  • What else can we expect when 50% Ministers in Modi regime are Brahmin; And Brahmin are just 3% in India; https://archive.vn/wip/8MNNs [archive.vn]
  • In 1932 British regime offered a separate country to BC/SC/ST where Upper caste can live on a Visa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]

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