Article**: The Economist
Welcome to the blue-collar era. This is the main argument of the content of the latest issue of The Economist's homepage.
This article mainly analyzes the changes in the productivity and wage levels of blue-collar and white-collar workers after the advent of digitalization and AI, as the title of the article says, the wages of blue-collar workers are **, and the income gap is also narrowing, while their standard working hours are declining.
This content has caused some discussion on some domestic platforms, including Weibo and Zhihu, and the main reason for everyone's attention is that this situation is not far away, and one of the reasons for explaining blue-collar wages in the article is the decrease in the supply of blue-collar workers, and China is also facing an aging population and a sharp decline in the number of people willing to work in blue-collar jobs, especially the shortage of high-skilled blue-collar talents and skilled workers.
Therefore, we will take two articles about the Economist's recent series of articlesThe reversal of pay for blue-collar jobsThe content has been translated and sorted out for your reference, especially for labor-intensive enterprises, hoping to inspire your company's blue-collar employment management.
Overall productivity is improving, and blue-collar salaries are rising
David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, coined the term bullshit work to describe unnecessary and meaningless work, which he believes is all too common. Because recovery from the global financial crisis from 2007 to 2009 took time, about 7% of the labor force in rich countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was completely unemployed. During that period, wage growth was slow and income inequality appeared to be rising.
Now that society is aging and labor is becoming particularly scarce, blue-collar workers are entering an era, especially for manual workers who are difficult to replace with technology. Despite growing skepticism about free markets, evidence of income inequality in developed countries is becoming less and less convincing.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has helped low-skilled workers become more productiveto get a higher pay. Especially in places where labor is scarce, harnessing the power of technology to raise workers' wages will bring about a shift in the way the labor market works.
Since 2016, the real weekly wages of the bottom of the U.S. have grown faster than those at the top.
According to statistics(as shown below).This post-pandemic wage compression skyrocketed in 2019, which was enough to reverse the 40% pre-tax wage inequality that had occurred over the past 40 years. This is due to the fact that demand, population size, and digitalization in the labor market are all changing in a way that is beneficial to people. 
Demographic changes, labor shortages in various countries
Due to demographic changes, the increase in manpower demand is limited by the shortage of working-age population.
In 2015, China's working-age population reached 99.8 billion people. But with China's working-age population dwindling, other poor countries not having the capacity to develop industries on a large scale, and geopolitical instability, developed countries are facing even more severe labor shortages.
The problem of talent shortage was confirmed in a recent survey conducted by staffing firm ManpowerGroup that spanned 41 countries.
The survey found that 77% of companies are struggling to fill twice as many positions as in 2015. Many manufacturing companies in Poland say that labor shortages are one of the main reasons constraining production. In Germany, public transport services have been reduced due to a lack of bus and train drivers. In South Korea, older people are increasingly staying in the workforce to avoid labor shortages. Data shows that 59 percent of South Korea's 55 to 79-year-olds are working, a 53 percent increase from a decade ago.
Labor has become so valuable that businesses are beginning to stock up on labor. A survey of small businesses in the U.S. found that more than 90% of businesses retain employees as much as possible. In Germany, 730,000 jobs have been recruited at job centres since the beginning of last year, close to an all-time high. The foreign-born population is growing at a record rate and the size of immigration is growing, and these initiatives are still not enough to fill the looming labor gap. 
Shortage of workers, what are the faces of enterprises in various countries?
So far, Germany's employment agencies have recorded 48 new jobs facing severe worker shortages this year, most of which require skills rather than academic qualifications.
In addition,Japan is also offering time-limited visas to workers in 12 sectors, including machinery parts manufacturing and shipbuilding, and wages are growing faster than at any time in the past three decades. The wage premium for those with a college education is already shrinking and is likely to fall even faster in the future.
While many Western countries are facing labor shortages, unions are also demanding more rest time for workers, which makes it even more difficult for companies that lack employees to bear. Germany's steelworkers are seeking to reduce the 35-hour workweek to 32 hours in upcoming negotiations. In Spain, the new** plan to reduce the standard 40-hour workweek by 25 hours. Based on survey data and working hour data, Americans also want to work fewer hours. 
The digital transformation has affected the salary of personnel
Many businesses are beginning to look to fill this gap with artificial intelligence, which can perform tasks that require creativity, improvisation, and learning Xi that machines can't do. Dean Alderucci and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University conducted a preliminary study of firms using U.S. patent data from 1990 to 2018 and found that companies using AI in its basic form grew jobs 25 percent faster and revenues 40 percent faster than other similar companies.
In fact, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson also found that when AI bots helped, those employees were able to solve more problems in the same amount of time, with the worst-performing workers benefiting the most. According to a survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), about 80% of workers in the manufacturing and service sectors say that AI has improved their productivity.
For those who work in the professional services sector, such as doctors or lawyers, there are often high-stakes decisions that need to be made in exceptional circumstances. Since there is often no right answer, this requires judgment as well as extensive training. AI may be able to help people achieve the required level of expertise. Imagine an AI-assisted ** taking over the doctor's tasks, or a limited number of coders being able to take on more complex tasks. In this way, in the future, artificial intelligence will allow more people to participate in high-paying professional jobs.
According to a survey, ChatGPT reduces people's monthly income by 52%。However, this is only a demonstration of the impact of AI before the labor market adjustment, and how it follows will depend on how the labor market adjustment progresses.
If manpower demand rises sharply at the same time as the decline in personnel salaries, AI-impacted positions may benefit from their higher productivity. For example, a robot is better at making mobile phones than humans, and using it will make mobile phones** cheaper, so that the demand for mobile phones increases, which in turn prompts more production. At the same time, this also means an increase in demand for mobile phone designers and app coders.
In short, a productive economy can create more demand for labor, as well as demand for goods and services that have less impact on new technologies. According to Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University, about half of the job growth between 1980 and 2010 came from the creation of new jobs. This process is likely to continue or even accelerate, and although AI will replace some workers, the skills required to create new tasks around it, and to perform those new tasks, are not necessarily digital skills, but the ones that are most complementary to AI. For example, hospitals need to look for those with excellent affinities to work with AI.
Melanie Arntz of the University of Heidelberg saidTo date, technological advancements have replaced a lot of transactional work, however, higher-skilled people tend to be on the complementary side of progress, so their salaries will be **
Demographic change and artificial intelligence will interact in different ways in different contexts. Places with faster aging populations will face chronic labor shortages, especially in occupations that require manual labor. And in the United States, where population pressure is less, the impact of AI is even more difficult**. As happened in Hollywood, it could threaten to drive down wages, trigger strikes, or prompt companies to create more new jobs so that more people can benefit from the development of AI.