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This cartoon considers the factors that must be taken into consideration for basic living needs, in accordance with issues like minimum wage standards not equating these standards of living. The cartoon calls into question how much employers value the quality of life their employees endure, and the almost impossible decisions some people are forced to make.

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The locals complain that there aren't enough young people moving to Nevada County. When you compare wages with a tight rental market that favors landlords, you aren't going to be a very attractive location to younger folks even if they are earning two paychecks.

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The locals complain that there aren't enough young people moving to Nevada County. When you compare wages with a tight rental market that favors landlords, you aren't going to be a very attractive location to younger folks even if they are earning two paychecks. This entry was posted in Culture, Local.

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This unreleased film follows the occupation of the public library when a city's homeless community tries to escape the deadly winter storms. The film appears to deal with themes of criminalization of poverty, and the often aggressive, sometimes militant, response of police to repress the voices of the poor.

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Adam Ruins Everything - Work 40 Hours a Week

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Adam Ruins Everything - Work 40 Hours a Week

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Adam Conover's TruTV series sheds a light on the history of how employers have historically exploited workers to the point of blue-collar mobilization. Many of these efforts established things like the weekend, which were only further exploited for corporate interests.

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"The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China. It’s Automation." by Clair Cain Miller

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"The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China. It’s Automation." by Clair Cain Miller

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Miller's article explores the reality of America's crumbling industrial might, and the actual factors that have factored into the depletion of blue-collar jobs. The automation of American jobs in the name of capital growth has left many unemployed, wondering where new employment opportunities could possibly arise.

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Robot Revolution

A worker at a steel minimill in California. Minimill technology has enabled steel plants to cut 75 percent of employees over five decades, while keeping production the same. Credit... David McNew/Getty Images

The first job that Sherry Johnson, 56, lost to automation was at the local newspaper in Marietta, Ga., where she fed paper into the printing machines and laid out pages. Later, she watched machines learn to do her jobs on a factory floor making breathing machines, and in inventory and filing.

"It actually kind of ticked me off because it's like, How are we supposed to make a living?" she said. She took a computer class at Goodwill, but it was too little too late. "The 20- and 30-year-olds are more up to date on that stuff than we are because we didn't have that when we were growing up," said Ms. Johnson, who is now on disability and lives in a housing project in Jefferson City, Tenn.

Donald J. Trump told workers like Ms. Johnson that he would bring back their jobs by clamping down on trade, offshoring and immigration. But economists say the bigger threat to their jobs has been something else: automation.

"Over the long haul, clearly automation's been much more important - it's not even close," said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard who studies labor and technological change.

No candidate talked much about automation on the campaign trail. Technology is not as convenient a villain as China or Mexico, there is no clear way to stop it, and many of the technology companies are in the United States and benefit the country in many ways.

Mr. Trump told a group of tech company leaders last Wednesday: "We want you to keep going with the incredible innovation. Anything we can do to help this go along, we're going to be there for you."

Andrew F. Puzder, Mr. Trump's pick for labor secretary and chief executive of CKE Restaurants, extolled the virtues of robot employees over the human kind in an interview with Business Insider in March. "They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex or race discrimination case," he said.

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At Eatsa, an automated restaurant chain, customers never interact with a human. Credit... Jason Henry for The New York Times

Globalization is clearly responsible for some of the job losses, particularly trade with China during the 2000s, which led to the rapid loss of 2 million to 2.4 million net jobs, according to research by economists including Daron Acemoglu and David Autor of M.I.T.

People who work in parts of the country most affected by imports generally have greater unemployment and reduced income for the rest of their lives, Mr. Autor found in a paper published in January. Still, over time, automation has had a far bigger effect than globalization, and would have eventually eliminated those jobs anyway, he said in an interview. "Some of it is globalization, but a lot of it is we require many fewer workers to do the same amount of work," he said. "Workers are basically supervisors of machines."

When Greg Hayes, the chief executive of United Technologies, agreed to invest $16 million in one of its Carrier factories as part of a Trump deal to keep some jobs in Indiana instead of moving them to Mexico, he said the money would go toward automation.

"What that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs," he said on CNBC.

Take the steel industry. It lost 400,000 people, 75 percent of its work force, between 1962 and 2005. But its shipments did not decline, according to a study published in the American Economic Review last year. The reason was a new technology called the minimill. Its effect remained strong even after controlling for management practices; job losses in the Midwest; international trade; and unionization rates, found the authors of the study, Allan Collard-Wexler of Duke and Jan De Loecker of Princeton.

Another analysis, from Ball State University, attributed roughly 13 percent of manufacturing job losses to trade and the rest to enhanced productivity because of automation. Apparel making was hit hardest by trade, it said, and computer and electronics manufacturing was hit hardest by technological advances.

A vacant factory parking lot in Luzerne County, Pa., which flipped from blue to red. Donald J. Trump railed against trade and offshoring, but automation has killed more jobs. Credit... Mark Makela for The New York Times

Over time, automation has generally had a happy ending: As it has displaced jobs, it has created new ones. But some experts are beginning to worry that this time could be different. Even as the economy has improved, jobs and wages for a large segment of workers - particularly men without college degrees doing manual labor - have not recovered.

Even in the best case, automation leaves the first generation of workers it displaces in a lurch because they usually don't have the skills to do new and more complex tasks, Mr. Acemoglu found in a paper published in May.

Robert Stilwell, 35, of Evansville, Ind., is one of them. He did not graduate from high school and worked in factories building parts for tools and cars, wrapping them up and loading them onto trucks. After he was laid off, he got a job as a convenience store cashier, which pays a lot less.

"I used to have a really good job, and I liked the people I worked with - until it got overtaken by a machine, and then I was let go," he said.

Dennis Kriebel's last job was as a supervisor at an aluminum extrusion factory, where he had spent a decade punching out parts for cars and tractors. Then, about five years ago, he lost it to a robot.

"Everything we did, you could program a robot to do it," said Mr. Kriebel, who is 55 and lives in Youngstown, Ohio, the town about which Bruce Springsteen sang, "Seven hundred tons of metal a day/Now sir you tell me the world's changed."

Since then, Mr. Kriebel has barely been scraping by doing odd jobs. Many of the new jobs at factories require technical skills, but he doesn't own a computer and doesn't want to.

The Skechers distribution center in Moreno Valley, Calif., is fully automated. Credit... Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Labor economists say there are ways to ease the transition for workers whose jobs have been displaced by robots. They include retraining programs, stronger unions, more public-sector jobs, a higher minimum wage, a bigger earned-income tax credit and, for the next generation of workers, more college degrees. The White House on Tuesday released a report on automation and the economy that called for better education from early childhood through adult job transitions and for updating the social safety net with tools like wage insurance. Few are policies that Mr. Trump has said he will pursue.

"Just allowing the private market to automate without any support is a recipe for blaming immigrants and trade and other things, even when it's the long impact of technology," said Mr. Katz, who was the Labor Department's chief economist under President Clinton.

The changes are not just affecting manual labor: Computers are rapidly learning to do some white-collar and service-sector work, too. Existing technology could automate 45 percent of activities people are paid to do, according to a July report by McKinsey. Work that requires creativity, management of people or caregiving is least at risk.

Ms. Johnson in Tennessee said both her favorite and highest-paying job, at $8.65 an hour, was at an animal shelter, caring for puppies.

It was also the least likely to be done by a machine, she said: "I would hope a computer couldn't do that, unless they like changing dirty papers and giving them love and attention."

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The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China. It's Automation. (Published 2016)

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Robot Revolution The first job that Sherry Johnson, 56, lost to automation was at the local newspaper in Marietta, Ga., where she fed paper into the printing machines and laid out pages. Later, she watched machines learn to do her jobs on a factory floor making breathing machines, and in inventory and filing.

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The classic Pixar film tells the story of a struggling energy company and *SPOILERS* its attempt to increase revenue by automating its production through unethical means. When two of the company's best employees uncover this scheme, they manage to foil the plan and seize production to ensure ethical practices and worker productivity.

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Directed by Pete Docter, David Silverman, Lee Unkrich. With Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Mary Gibbs, Steve Buscemi. In order to power the city, monsters have to scare children so that they scream. However, the children are toxic to the monsters, and after a child gets through, 2 monsters realize things may not be what they think.

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Advocates: The U.S. Still Profits from Slavery Because the 13th Amendment Perpetuates Prison Labor

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Advocates: The U.S. Still Profits from Slavery Because the 13th Amendment Perpetuates Prison Labor

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This interview includes the explanations of America's current prison system and how it's reinforced by the dependency clause in the 13th Amendment, allowing for involuntary servitude under imprisonment. The interview explores how this new caste system in the U.S. has been perpetuated by a system that continues to exploit free labor based on a racially-charged history of slave labor.

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Advocates: The U.S. Still Profits from Slavery Because the 13th Amendment Perpetuates Prison Labor

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Music has always been an evocative means to expressing the resilience of the human spirit in the face of oppression. This playlist contains a complication of songs from various genres and time periods that depict both class warfare and worker struggle.

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A playlist featuring Jeremy Jordan, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Rattle Box, and others

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The time-honored story of a family displaced by poverty and on a cross-country search for work, The Grapes of Wrath depicts the genuinely devastating effects of the Great Depression, and how it impacted the humblest of America's citizens. This struggle is embodied in the formidable presence of corrupt farms and banks, taking what little these people own and exploiting their desperation.

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The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

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The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

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On the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, these socio-economic theorists explore the history and nature of class struggle and the capital society requires for an individual to impact the happenings in society. This pamphlet would ultimately become the platform for anti-capitalist revolutionary sentiments.

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The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

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The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

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Lewis' relaying of the housing crash of 2008 sheds light on the corruption in Wall Street and how America's economic elite preyed on working-class people in what ultimately led to the recession. The story grimly reveals hards truths about who is held responsible for economic turmoil in this country and who walks away scot-free