Since the 18th century technological advances have replaced people in the workplace. With today’s technology , this process is happening at a greater rate. Technology is increasingly responsible for unemployment. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement?
In this contemporary era, emergence of technological pieces has successfully overtaken the work being done by manual workers in many firms. Many suggest that this change in trend is highly responsible for rising unemployment. I partly agree with this opinion because although deployment of machines is replacing lower pay scale workers like labouring jobs in many workshops but it is not responsible for the unemployment of skilled workers. I will discuss how installment of machines and other major factors are responsible for unemployment in below paragraphs.
Looking at the unemployment due to machines, many firms are reliant on advanced technology like automated machines for producing goods in lesser time without compromising quality.
Recent analysis by Indian employment organisation, to find the reason behind workers being fired, presented that employment of one machine is replacing five workers on average in many giant industries. This is primarily impacting lower pay scale workers like labouring jobs, which could be tackled to some extent, not all, by giving them jobs like machine maintenance and testing result products, that too after training. Thus, it can be clearly seen that how technological emergence is creating unemployment for labourers.
As innovated materials replaced lower pay scale workers only, there are other major factors like drastic rise in population, economic crisis and market shift, which are responsible for unemployment at greater extent for all type of workers. Taking overpopulated country India as example, number of graduates passing out every year are ten times more than jobs created every year in India, therefore, this being the major reason for unemployment and Similar is the case with labouring jobs. Apart from this, sometimes many employees lose jobs due to economic crises, like it happened in USA in year 2008 when many workers got fired due to economic issues and whole market got shifted to China. Thus, it proves that there are other primary factors too which increase the unemployment rate in a nation.
To sum up, above discussed points clearly reveal that it’s not only technological enhancement which is rising unemployment rate but other issues like overpopulation, market shifts are more responsible for rising unemployment. I hope governments will take step towards providing alternative jobs to labours and more working opportunities to graduates.
