Word: white-collar
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...these forces are liberating. Blue-collar robots took the grunt work out of factory and warehouse and dockside. The same will happen to white-collar work. Just as workin' the line at U.S. Steel was no walk in the park in 1946, passing papers in the tower is no great joy. My dad did it for 41 years at the Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. He was, sad to say, a white-collar indentured servant...
They are your nightmare, these "white-collar robots." The complex products from German software giant SAP will do to your company's innards exactly what forklifts and robots and containerization did to the blue-collar world circa 1960. Installing these tools is not easy. The technical part is harrowing; the politics are horrendous. When the blue-collar robots arrived, the unions raised hell. This time it's management bureaucrats who are turning Luddite. Why? These tools threaten their cozy baronies, carefully crafted over several generations...
THIRD Outsourcing. M.I.T.'s No. 1 computer guru, Michael Dertouzos, said India could easily boost its GDP by a trillion dollars in the next few years performing backroom white-collar tasks for Western companies. He guessed that 50 million jobs from the white-collar West could go south to India, whose population hit 1 billion last week. The average annual salary for each of those 50 million new Indian workers...
FIFTH Time compression. It took 37 years for the radio to get to 50 million homes. The Web got there in four. Hence my belief that while it took about a century to revolutionize blue-collar job practices, this brave new white-collar regime will be mostly installed in a tenth of that time--10 years...
Each of these five forces is fact, not supposition. Each influences the others multiplicatively. Therefore my unwillingness to back off my predictions about the power of the white-collar tsunami bearing down on us. Unsettling madness is afoot. Especially if I'm a 48-year-old white-collar staff member or middle manager entombed in a corporate tower in Manhattan or Miami or Milan...