El fin del trabajo

[muyuu]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/rise-of-the-precariat-the-global-scourge-of-precarious-jobs-1.3093319

Rise of the 'precariat,' the global scourge of precarious jobs
Barely one in four of the global workforce has a stable job, UN reports

With relatively little notice, the world passed a modern milestone recently, one that makes any yearning for more stable times seem very farfetched — the global jobless total passed 200 million.

To help put that in perspective, that's 30 million more without work than at the height of the global recession in 2008, according to the UN report that crunched the numbers.

This is a shocker on its own. But even more ominous is the growing precariousness of the job situation for those that have them, according to the UN study, "The changing nature of jobs."


It warns of "widespread insecurity" spreading as momentum shifts from societies with full-time jobs to shaky short-term employment across much of the globe.

Another scary fact the study unearths is how many people these days have stable work contracts of any kind. That's barely one in four of the globe's workforce. 

The overwhelming majority of people on the planet struggle with temporary work, informal or illegal jobs, long spells of unemployment and unpaid family work.

In other words, most are caught in a disadvantageous spiral where exploitation is a real risk.

Wave of refugees

Want more perspective on how today's world works? Much of temporary work simply can't sustain families anymore and one quarter of the world's workforce earns around $2 a day.

As the UN report notes, mass unemployment and underemployment puts steady downward pressure on wages — along with increasing child labour, estimated conservatively at 73 million, many working in near slave conditions.


The combined scourges of job insecurity and unlivable wages contribute to the quite unprecedented wave of the estimated 54 million global refugees, people attempting to escape both violence and destitution, many risking death at sea to avoid no-hope futures.

International relief agencies and national intelligence services alike are well aware that social anxieties on this scale guarantee more violent explosions in the future.

Especially worrisome is the fact that neither political nor economic leaders seem to have answers.

For something appears to have gone very wrong in an era that pinned so many hopes on globalization and high-tech solutions, large and small, but which seems instead to have reinforced the trend towards social instability.

Rise of the precariat

What was once viewed as a passing crisis now seems to be the new normal, producing deep psychological unease within the workforce and growing inequality between those with stable incomes and those without.

Global financial officials are worried to the point they've again started using the term "hysteresis," borrowed from physics, to warn that long-established unemployment is becoming "structural" and therefore harder to correct, as the jobless lose skills and companies grow addicted to cheaper, temporary labour.

The Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, often called the developed world's think tank, describes this ugly phenomenon as the rise of the precariat — a play on the working-class proletariat and meaning those trapped in precarious lives with neither material nor psychological welfare.

In this situation, already tense areas of the world will almost certainly become more turbulent.

The Middle East and North Africa, for example, have the highest youth unemployment in the world, close to 30 per cent.

And there, as in much of the less-developed world, it is the more educated young people, those with degrees, who have highest rates of job insecurity.

What forward movement?

This growing global joblessness helps explain the rash of risk-all migrations we've seen these last several years, as well as the expansion of extremist doctrines in what some analysts call the age of terror.

But while the number of those migrating in search of work keeps rising, the doors of prosperous receiving nations are slamming shut because they have their own job crises — 18 million jobless in Europe now — as well as angry workforces and populist parties insisting low-wage migrants will only make matters worse.


The reality is that many societies today, including the prosperous ones like Australia and Canada, face greater social inequality as the shift to a "hire and fire culture" of temporary workers lowers the chances of those toiling on low wages to move up the economic ladder.

The situation is likely worse than we think. For the "quality" of Canadian employment — meaning less job security and fewer benefits — is currently at a 25-year low, 10 per cent below what it was in the 1990s, according to the latest CIBC work quality index.

Even in the glittering horseshoe of Southern Ontario, barely half of working adults have full-time permanent jobs, and almost all job growth now seems only to expand the insecure work, the kind that has little prospect of outstripping inflation.

It's hard to escape the feeling that even as our societies grow richer we are, bizarrely, looping backwards.

"The GDP per capita keeps going up. The problem is that we're not sharing the wealth at all equitably," says Wayne Lewchuk of McMaster University who researches precarious employment. "In many ways we've gone back to a 1920s mentality"

The Twenties did not have an encouraging outcome, as we know.

Still, looking at these striking global trends in joblessness and precarious work, as well as at the soaring refugee numbers and widening inequality, it's difficult to get around the nagging feeling that this century's forward movement has stalled and is on slippery ground.

[burbunova]

Por cierto.

Ha muerto el presidente de American Express

http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2015/05/31/actualidad/1433064219_749429.html


55 años y parece que tiene 80

Alabemos la coherencia de este CEO: vida express, muerte express.

Como diría la empresa de la competencia: "... no tiene precio". 

[muyuu]

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/business/AJ201506040093

Kawasaki to market compact robot to short-handed plants, offices

June 04, 2015

By KEIKO NANNICHI/ Staff Writer
Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. has developed a near human-size robot that can work side by side with humans at short-handed companies.

The beauty of the dual-armed industrial robot called "duAro" is that it can fit in to just about any work space occupied by a human. It is 130 centimeters tall and needs just 60 centimeters square.

“The robot can work for at least 10 years, and it will never give up its jobs halfway like human workers may do,” said Kawasaki executive officer Yasuhiko Hashimoto, adding that the robot is targeted mainly at small and midsize companies suffering from labor shortages.

The duAro is designed to slot in for a human worker on a production line or office space.

It can be programmed for numerous tasks, for example, assembling machine parts, inserting documents into files or arranging food in "bento" lunch boxes. The industrial machine is equipped with wheels and can be easily moved around the workplace.

The duAro is priced at 2.8 million yen ($22,500) without tax. Kawasaki also plans to market the robot to factories and offices in emerging economies where labor costs have been rising.

By KEIKO NANNICHI/ Staff Writer

http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/the-duaro-robot-developed-by-kawasaki-heavy-industries-ltd-news-photo/475836958

[muyuu]

http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21651925-robotic-sewing-machine-could-throw-garment-workers-low-cost-countries-out?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/madetomeasure

A robotic sewing machine could throw garment workers in low-cost countries out of a job

HUMAN hands are extremely good at making clothes. While many manufacturing processes have been automated, stitching together garments remains a job for millions of people around the world. As with most labour-intensive tasks, much of the work has migrated to low-wage countries, especially in Asia. Factory conditions can be gruelling. As nations develop and wages rise, the trade moves on to the next cheapest location: from China, to Bangladesh and, now that it is opening up, Myanmar. Could that migration be about to end with the development of a robotic sewing machine?

There have been many attempts to automate sewing. Some processes can now be carried out autonomously: the cutting of fabric, for instance, and sometimes sewing buttons or pockets. But it is devilishly difficult to make a machine in which fabric goes in one end and finished garments, such as jeans and T-shirts, come out the other. The particularly tricky bit is stitching two pieces of material together. This involves aligning the material correctly to the sewing head, feeding it through and constantly adjusting the fabric to prevent it slipping and buckling, while all the time keeping the stitches neat and the thread at the right tension. Nimble fingers invariably prove better at this than cogs, wheels and servo motors.

“The distortion of the fabric is no longer an issue. That’s what prevented automatic sewing in the past,” says Steve Dickerson, the founder of SoftWear Automation, a textile-equipment manufacturer based in Atlanta, where Dr Dickerson was a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The company is developing machines which tackle the problems of automated sewing in a number of ways. They use cameras linked to a computer to track the stitching. Researchers have tried using machine vision before, for instance by having cameras detect the edge of a piece of fabric to work out where to stitch.

The Atlanta team, however, have greatly increased accuracy by using high-speed photography to capture up to 1,000 frames per second. These images are then manipulated by software to produce a higher level of contrast. This more vivid image allows the computer to pick out individual threads in the fabric. Instead of measuring the fabric the robotic sewing machine counts the number of threads to determine the stitching position. As a consequence, any distortion to the fabric made by each punch of the needle can be measured extremely accurately. These measurements also allow the “feed dog”, which gently pulls fabric through the machine, to make constant tiny adjustments to keep things smooth and even.

Dr Dickerson patented the idea in 2012 and won a $1.3m research contract from DARPA, a US Department of Defence research-and-development agency. The military interest in sewing arises from a 1941 requirement that the department gives preference to American suppliers when buying uniforms. Bill Lockhart, a SoftWear Automation executive, says last year the project began successfully stitching together pieces of fabric robotically and that one machine being developed is now able to stitch a perfect circle—something that only a highly skilled human operator would dare to attempt.

But neat stitching is only part of the sewing process. Most garments are assembled from various different pieces of fabric: 20 or more sections typically for a pair of jeans. This means a robotic sewing machine also needs to be able to pick up material, feed the appropriate sections to the sewing head and remove them when complete. To do that, the company has developed a materials-handling system which it calls LOWRY. This uses a vacuum grip to pick up pieces of fabric and move them to another machine, which might cut, stitch, add buttons or carry out other finishing tasks. LOWRY is programmable, so can switch easily from working with one size of material to another.

A stitch in time
Although the first LOWRY will be delivered to an American factory later this year, commercial versions of the firm’s robotic sewing machines capable of automating the more difficult tasks in making garments will not be ready until next year.

Frank Henderson, the boss of Henderson Sewing, an Alabama-based textile-equipment firm, and an investor in SoftWear Automation, reckons that robotic sewing will be attractive to American fashion brands wanting to bring production closer to home and produce garments rapidly to catch new trends. Inditex, a “fast fashion” Spanish company, whose brands include Zara, famously does this by making many of its garments manually in Europe to speed up its time-to-market. With designs and samples shuttling to and from Asian factories, it can take months before new clothes finally turn up in other American and European stores—by which time they can be out of fashion.

Jack Plunkett, of Plunkett Research, a market-research company, says pressure on Asian clothing manufacturers to keep wages low while improving working conditions is leading many to look at automation, too. On that point, SoftWear Automation’s Mr Lockhart says a Bangladeshi company has already expressed interest in the firm’s technology.

But it is not only the production of garments which could be increasingly automated. Nike is now using a technology called Flyknit to make some of its trainers. Flyknit uses a computer-controlled knitting machine to automatically weave strands of polyester yarn into the shape of the upper part of a shoe, instead of having it manually stitched together from individual panels, the way most trainers are made in Asian factories. Nike has not said how far it intends to take the technology, but it has the potential to produce customised trainers for individuals and to do so locally—perhaps even within stores.

Shoemakers are already using 3D printers, which build up material additively, to make prototypes of shoes. Exotic clothing and shoes made with 3D printers are becoming regulars on the catwalks at many of the world’s leading fashion shows, although the materials they are printed from tend to be various sorts of plastic, which can make the garments somewhat clunky and shoes a bit clog-like. However, researchers are working on ways to print more flexible materials. One such project involves a collaboration between Disney, Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University. Their 3D printer uses layers of off-the-shelf fabric to make soft objects, such as cuddly toys.

The real test of how successful robots will be at making clothing and shoes will depend on how efficient and reliable they will be, and how fully they can automate the process. If time-to-market and customisation are priorities, then the robots might win—even if some manual intervention in production is required. But for mass-produced lines, where every cent matters, any human involvement could keep manufacturing offshore. The lesson from industrial automation in other sorts of factories, though, shows that robots keep getting better and cheaper. It may be a while coming, but the writing seems to be on the wall for sweatshops.

[NosTrasladamus]

http://www.inventati.org/ingobernables/textos/anarquistas/Bob%20Black%20-%20La%20Abolicion%20Del%20Trabajo.htm

La Abolición Del Trabajo

por Bob Black
 

Nadie debería trabajar.

El trabajo es la fuente de casi toda la miseria en el mundo. Casi todos los males que puedas mencionar provienen del trabajo, o de vivir en un mundo diseñado para el trabajo. Para dejar de sufrir, tenemos que dejar de trabajar.

Esto no significa que tenemos que dejar de hacer cosas. Significa crear una nueva forma de vivir basada en el juego; en otras palabras, una convivencia lúdica, comensalismo, o tal vez incluso arte. El juego no es sólo el de los niños, con todo y lo valioso que éste es. Pido una aventura colectiva en alegría generalizada y exhuberancia libremente interdependiente. El juego no es pasivo. Sin duda necesitamos mucho mas tiempo para la simple pereza y vagancia que el que tenemos ahora, sin importar los ingresos y ocupaciones, pero, una vez recobrados de la fatiga inducida por el trabajo, casi todos nosotros queremos actuar. El Oblomovismo y el Estajanovismo son dos lados de la misma moneda despreciada.

La vida lúdica es totalmente incompatible con la realidad existente. Peor para la "realidad", ese pozo gravitatorio que absorbe la vitalidad de lo poco en la vida que aún la distingue de la simple supervivencia. Curiosamente -- o quizás no -- todas las viejas ideologías son conservadoras porque creen en el trabajo. Algunas de ellas, como el Marxismo y la mayoría de las ramas del anarquismo, creen en el trabajo aún mas fieramente porque no creen en casi ninguna otra cosa.

Los liberales dicen que deberíamos acabar con la discriminación en los empleos. Yo digo que deberíamos acabar con los empleos. Los conservadores apoyan leyes del derecho-a-trabajar. Siguiendo al yerno descarriado de Karl Marx, Paul Lafargue, yo apoyo el derecho a ser flojo. Los izquierdistas favorecen el empleo total. Como los surrealistas -- excepto que yo no bromeo -- favorezco el desempleo total. Los Troskistas agitan por una revolución permanente. Yo agito por un festejo permanente. Pero si todos las ideólogos defienden el trabajo (y lo hacen) -- y no sólo porque planean hacer que otras personas hagan el suyo -- son extrañamente renuentes a admitirlo. Hablan interminablemente acerca de salarios, horas, condiciones de trabajo, explotación, productividad, rentabilidad. Hablarán alegremente sobre todo menos del trabajo en sí mismo. Estos expertos que se ofrecen a pensar por nosotros raramente comparten sus ideas sobre el trabajo, pese a su importancia en nuestras vidas. Discuten entre ellos sobre los detalles. Los sindicatos y los patronos concuerdan en que deberíamos vender el tiempo de nuestras vidas a cambio de la supervivencia, aunque regatean por el precio. Los Marxistas piensan que deberíamos ser mandados por burócratas. Los anarco-capitalistas piensan que deberíamos ser mandados por empresarios. A las feministas no les importa cuál sea la forma de mandar, mientras sean mujeres las que manden. Es claro que estos ideo-locos tienen serias diferencias acerca de cómo dividir el botín del poder. También es claro que ninguno de ellos tiene objeción alguna al poder en sí mismo, y todos ellos desean mantenernos trabajando.[...]

[Greco]

http://www.inventati.org/ingobernables/textos/anarquistas/Bob%20Black%20-%20La%20Abolicion%20Del%20Trabajo.htm

La Abolición Del Trabajo

por Bob Black
 

Nadie debería trabajar.

El trabajo es la fuente de casi toda la miseria en el mundo. Casi todos los males que puedas mencionar provienen del trabajo, o de vivir en un mundo diseñado para el trabajo. Para dejar de sufrir, tenemos que dejar de trabajar.

Esto no significa que tenemos que dejar de hacer cosas. Significa crear una nueva forma de vivir basada en el juego; en otras palabras, una convivencia lúdica, comensalismo, o tal vez incluso arte. El juego no es sólo el de los niños, con todo y lo valioso que éste es. Pido una aventura colectiva en alegría generalizada y exhuberancia libremente interdependiente. El juego no es pasivo. Sin duda necesitamos mucho mas tiempo para la simple pereza y vagancia que el que tenemos ahora, sin importar los ingresos y ocupaciones, pero, una vez recobrados de la fatiga inducida por el trabajo, casi todos nosotros queremos actuar. El Oblomovismo y el Estajanovismo son dos lados de la misma moneda despreciada.

La vida lúdica es totalmente incompatible con la realidad existente. Peor para la "realidad", ese pozo gravitatorio que absorbe la vitalidad de lo poco en la vida que aún la distingue de la simple supervivencia. Curiosamente -- o quizás no -- todas las viejas ideologías son conservadoras porque creen en el trabajo. Algunas de ellas, como el Marxismo y la mayoría de las ramas del anarquismo, creen en el trabajo aún mas fieramente porque no creen en casi ninguna otra cosa.

Los liberales dicen que deberíamos acabar con la discriminación en los empleos. Yo digo que deberíamos acabar con los empleos. Los conservadores apoyan leyes del derecho-a-trabajar. Siguiendo al yerno descarriado de Karl Marx, Paul Lafargue, yo apoyo el derecho a ser flojo. Los izquierdistas favorecen el empleo total. Como los surrealistas -- excepto que yo no bromeo -- favorezco el desempleo total. Los Troskistas agitan por una revolución permanente. Yo agito por un festejo permanente. Pero si todos las ideólogos defienden el trabajo (y lo hacen) -- y no sólo porque planean hacer que otras personas hagan el suyo -- son extrañamente renuentes a admitirlo. Hablan interminablemente acerca de salarios, horas, condiciones de trabajo, explotación, productividad, rentabilidad. Hablarán alegremente sobre todo menos del trabajo en sí mismo. Estos expertos que se ofrecen a pensar por nosotros raramente comparten sus ideas sobre el trabajo, pese a su importancia en nuestras vidas. Discuten entre ellos sobre los detalles. Los sindicatos y los patronos concuerdan en que deberíamos vender el tiempo de nuestras vidas a cambio de la supervivencia, aunque regatean por el precio. Los Marxistas piensan que deberíamos ser mandados por burócratas. Los anarco-capitalistas piensan que deberíamos ser mandados por empresarios. A las feministas no les importa cuál sea la forma de mandar, mientras sean mujeres las que manden. Es claro que estos ideo-locos tienen serias diferencias acerca de cómo dividir el botín del poder. También es claro que ninguno de ellos tiene objeción alguna al poder en sí mismo, y todos ellos desean mantenernos trabajando.[...]

No, la razón para el trabajo es que no te fías de que tu vecino no pueda pasarte por encima con sus tanques, si tú no trabajas para tener los tuyos.

Y eso no tiene solución a la vista.

[Greco]

...
The Middle East and North Africa, for example, have the highest youth unemployment in the world, close to 30 per cent.
...

Nope, not the highest, we are worse than North Africa..., close to 60%.

[Republik]

EN Argelia nace 1M de personas al año y en Marruecos no muchos menos. Normal que estén así, Francia con todas sus paguitas tiene 800.000 nacimientos y es el record europeo.

http://www.fdesouche.com/433301-algerie-1-million-de-naissances-prevues-en-2014-pour-384-millions-dhabitants

Argelia tenía 10M de habitantes en 1963, y la fecundidad sube, en Marruecos ha pasado de 2,3 a 2,9  (Argelia de 2,4 a 3,2) y eso es una burrada porque ahora se reproducen los abbyboomers y no se contienen demasiado, con lo que el crecimiento demográfico será brutal y tendremos 50M de argelinos en pocos años. Tenemos una bomba bajo los pies.

[Mad Men]

...
The Middle East and North Africa, for example, have the highest youth unemployment in the world, close to 30 per cent.
...

Nope, not the highest, we are worse than North Africa..., close to 60%.

YES BABY, We are the Champions

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

EN Argelia nace 1M de personas al año y en Marruecos no muchos menos. Normal que estén así, Francia con todas sus paguitas tiene 800.000 nacimientos y es el record europeo.

http://www.fdesouche.com/433301-algerie-1-million-de-naissances-prevues-en-2014-pour-384-millions-dhabitants

Argelia tenía 10M de habitantes en 1963, y la fecundidad sube, en Marruecos ha pasado de 2,3 a 2,9  (Argelia de 2,4 a 3,2) y eso es una burrada porque ahora se reproducen los abbyboomers y no se contienen demasiado, con lo que el crecimiento demográfico será brutal y tendremos 50M de argelinos en pocos años. Tenemos una bomba bajo los pies.

Pues entre eso y lo que mencionaste de Egipto hace poco, parece un factor muy importante para el futuro!

[muyuu]

http://munchies.vice.com/articles/one-of-the-worlds-best-bakers-is-turning-to-robots-for-help

One of the World’s Best Bakers Is Considering Turning to Robots for Help

“Chad isn’t here … ”

The Tartine counter dude has run up the spiral stairs at the rear, asked somebody in the office, and scrambled back down to report the news. “… Yet. Should be pretty soon, if you want to wait.”

I don’t believe him. I have a funny feeling Chad Robertson—Tartine founder, cult baker, cookbook guru, and now, as he merges his business with Blue Bottle Coffee, Tartine’s CEO—will stand me up today. We were supposed to meet last week, before his publicist emailed to say that Robertson suddenly had to get on a plane, and could we push it to next week?

“Chad’s schedule is a bit crazy these days!”

Read: San Francisco Is An Urban Winemaking Haven
In April, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Blue Bottle Coffee was adding Tartine to its expansion plans as the two companies merged. Blue Bottle raised over $25 million last year—some of it from prominent players in Silicon Valley—to help fund ambitious openings in Los Angeles and Tokyo (James Freeman, a soft-spoken, ultra-wonky coffee geek, started Blue Bottle at the Berkeley farmers’ market 12 years ago; in 2012, Freeman’s company raised nearly $20 million in a first round of funding). Robertson already had plans with a Japanese business investment company to help launch a bakery in Tokyo. Now, Tartine’s bread and pastries will travel wherever Blue Bottle goes, and Robertson, backed by millions in capital, is planning to open massive bakery commissaries with enormous, custom-built ovens, in Brooklyn, LA, Tokyo, and the Bay Area.


[pic]


Standing in the café in San Francisco, the scale of Tartine’s expansion is almost impossible to believe.

The counter dude gives me a cup to pull from the coffee urn up front. I find a seat—just opened—in the room perpetually clogged with Instagrammers, jutting chairs, and a shambling line that ends, as it often does, way out and around the corner on the sidewalk.

A high, wet fog has kept the sunlight out of San Francisco for a couple of weeks now—the gloom suits Tartine like a thrift-store cardigan. Robertson and his wife, Liz Prueitt, opened the bakery in 2002. Robertson had spent the previous eight years baking bread up north, mostly in Point Reyes in the small-dairy country of western Marin County. He was a model of the silent, brooding artisan, immersed in the moods of ambient yeasts.

Tartine became that thing San Francisco loves: a neighborhood business with the earnest, scuffed-wall vibe of a college co-op commissary, turning out obsessively perfect food. Even after the world took notice and Tartine Bakery became the first place famous New York food writers would taxi-drop, dragging luggage en-route from the airport for a morning bun or a loaf of levain, Robertson and Prueitt’s place always felt like it belonged to the Mission.

This morning, Tartine smells comfortingly of pain au raisins; darkly tangy, caramelized at the edges, and butter-steamy. I walk to the back again to the spiral stairs opposite the blasting deck oven. A tall, bearded baker who is not Robertson, shaggy hair under his head wrap, has pulled out four pans of croissants, brown and shiny along the band of their girth-spirals.



[pic]


“Let me see if he’s here.” A kid just clocking in has asked if he can help, drops his backpack, peels off his sweater, runs upstairs to the office, and comes back with bad news. “I don’t think Chad’s coming in,” he says with a little smile of apology. “He’s been super busy lately.”

The thing is, I’m not even mad. Robertson—though he and Prueitt recently bought a house in San Francisco—doesn’t really belong to the Mission anymore. Chad Robertson belongs to the world.

“There he is,” Robertson says. “I wasn’t sure where we were meeting. I guess it’s here.”

He’s at Bar Tartine, the restaurant a couple of blocks from the bakery. It’s late morning; the restaurant won’t open until dinner. Robertson looks like he’s finishing up a meeting with co-chefs Cortney Burns and Nick Balla. With the Blue Bottle merger, ownership of Bar Tartine is transferring to Burns and Balla, who jump up when I walk in and then glide back to the kitchen.

Robertson has a partly feral look like he’s some California surfer, wiry and handsome—the kind who turns into a werewolf, only he’s stopped halfway through the change. He has luminous, pale-blue eyes and a short, scruffy beard that spreads across his neck. He’s wearing the uniform of the dynamic San Francisco male—gray hoodie and black, short-brimmed cap—except they’re nicer, made from better, plusher fabric than the ones most guys wear.

Robertson’s flying to Tokyo tonight to scout locations for Tartine’s commissary bakery. “It’s a quick trip,” he says. “I have to be in Toronto next week.” Robertson will be in Canada to talk on stage about a new documentary he’s in, The Grain Divide. It’s about the new culture of wheat and other grains, the revival of heirloom varieties and milling techniques, the farm-to-table movement applied to bread and pastry. Robertson plans to talk about regional grain economies.

“I’m really busy, but it’s a different kind of busy,” he says. “I really love change. A lot of people don’t, but I do.” A decade ago, Robertson was focused on how to perfect his technique for making spontaneously leavened bread. These days, Tartine bakes 250 loaves of that bread per day. Robertson’s challenge is now figuring out how to make thousands of loaves per day in four bakeries around the world.

He talks about scaling up as if it’s the culmination of something: the future of the craft-food movement. It’s why he’s working with chefs Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson to mass-bake low-cost sandwich buns for Loco’l, the sustainable-ingredient, healthy fast-food chain expected to launch in Watts this fall, followed quickly by a location in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.

“The farm-to-table movement is like a 1-percent movement,” Robertson says. “I’m looking at getting better food to different parts of the country, trying to mainstream something that has historically been for the wealthy alone. The most exciting thing I can do now is scale,” he says, meaning dialing up Tartine, from one guy jamming on an acoustic guitar to full-on EDM sound system levels.


[pic]


Robertson’s been in Germany, looking at high-volume ovens. He’s going back in a couple of weeks to take another look. “The technology is incredible. They make perfect loaves, they’re incredibly engineered tools.” Since they’re optimized, Robertson says, to bake notoriously finicky rye loaves, they can handle Tartine’s slow-rising, high-moisture doughs.

And, Robertson says, they’re capable of producing so many loaves. Some degree of automation is inevitable. The guy synonymous with artisan baking, in other words, is contemplating robot labor. How else can you produce thousands of loaves per day?

“I’m for sure going to automate what makes sense to automate,” Robertson says. “But then we’re adding a mill on the front end, to grind grain just before we mix the dough. We’re complicating some things while we’re streamlining other things,” Robertson says. “We’re trying to scale something super artisanal, but take full advantage of all the technology that’s applicable.”

The scaled-up craft bakeries Robertson’s visited in Sydney—as well as Steve Sullivan’s Acme Bakery in the Bay Area—all rely on degrees of automation. “When you want to bake as much bread as possible, you need robotic assistance,” Robertson says, “You have to get out of the way. If you have 12 or 15 oven decks, you can’t physically load it fast enough.”

Robertson suggests automation isn’t inherently a craft killer. It’s how it fits into a system. “You can source your grain from a regional economy, you can fresh-mill it, and you can bake 20,000 loaves using robots.”

Robertson says he’s taking his two top bakers from Tartine with him to Germany next time to see the factory process and try to zap their skepticism. “When I came back last time, they were like, ‘Chad, we’ve been with you for years, we trust you, but you’re starting to sound a little crazy.’”

Maybe he is a little crazy, checking his phone’s screen as we talk. Robertson says his goal is to make craft baked goods available to everyone. “We’re working on a whole sandwich menu,” he says. “You can’t really find a good thing to grab out of a case. No one’s making it and putting it into broader distribution, more accessible. I’m really excited to make that happen.”



[pic]



The guy who changed craft bread in America is now on a mission to make the grab-and-go sandwich not suck. Has he sold out to capital? Is Robertson taking the money and compromising his artisan ideals?

“There’s this whole culture against growing,” Robertson says, “against having people come in and finance your creativity.”

“Selling out is—if that word comes up, I’m like, ‘What does that word even mean to you?’ It’s an easy word to throw around, but I don’t know what that means. I’ve lost no one, everyone works extremely hard at Tartine Bakery. I’ve got the best team I’ve ever had. That said, in a way, they’re so good, doing the same thing for years, they make it look so easy. I wanted to kind of throw in a curveball. I wanted to say, ‘What if we all go to a place where we haven’t been before?’”

Point Reyes, that whole solo artisan baker thing: That was long ago, in Robertson’s past. “It was really just one stage of the thing. I wouldn’t go back to that, ever,” Robertson says. Except maybe, when he’s old, and the struggle to bring good bread to the masses is behind him. “Maybe I’ll build an oven by the ocean and bake one day a week and go surfing,” he says with a slight laugh. “Maybe.”

Right now, though, Robertson has to take a call from his wife. “I’m leaving for Tokyo tonight. Sorry, I’ve got to get this.”

[muyuu]

No pongo el texto aquí porque ya se ha reiterado bastante (MUCHA gente en EEUU vive de conducir). Estimaciones concretas en el enlace:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-tracy/autonomous-vehicles-will-_b_7556660.html

[muyuu]

http://utopiayouarestandinginit.com/2015/06/18/of-workers-working-more-than-50-hours-per-week-across-oecd/



Porcentaje de trabajadores con jornada de más de 50 horas.

[españavabien]

Aún es pronto, pero dentro de 10 años habrá que analizar la situación laboral de los que han comenzado su "carrera laboral" durante la crisis.

Cuando ha salido esta conversación en el trabajo, la gente que ahora tiene 30-31 años y que salió de la facultad en 2007-2008 (en pleno derrumbe económico), apenas cuentan con 3-4 años cotizados efectivos.

Y no es que hayan tenido muchos contratos diferentes hasta finalmente asentarse en una empresa, aún siguen en subcontratas y con contratos temporales, por lo que no es descabellado pensar que la tendencia entre esta generación sea esa durante toda la vida laboral.

Eso hasta que en uno de esos cambios de trabajo, cuando tengan ya una edad cercana a 40, los reclutadores de Recursos Humanos decidan que es inempleable.

Es deprimente el futuro que nos espera. Esto se le habla a alguien en la empresa con 50 años y no pueden ni concebirlo. Siempre salen con "ya llegará tu momento" o "esto es pasajero". Simplemente no les entra en sus esquemas mentales una vida así y rechazan la realidad. Y ellos son una parte importante del electorado.

[El afilador]

Aún es pronto, pero dentro de 10 años habrá que analizar la situación laboral de los que han comenzado su "carrera laboral" durante la crisis.

Cuando ha salido esta conversación en el trabajo, la gente que ahora tiene 30-31 años y que salió de la facultad en 2007-2008 (en pleno derrumbe económico), apenas cuentan con 3-4 años cotizados efectivos.

Y no es que hayan tenido muchos contratos diferentes hasta finalmente asentarse en una empresa, aún siguen en subcontratas y con contratos temporales, por lo que no es descabellado pensar que la tendencia entre esta generación sea esa durante toda la vida laboral.

Eso hasta que en uno de esos cambios de trabajo, cuando tengan ya una edad cercana a 40, los reclutadores de Recursos Humanos decidan que es inempleable.

Es deprimente el futuro que nos espera. Esto se le habla a alguien en la empresa con 50 años y no pueden ni concebirlo. Siempre salen con "ya llegará tu momento" o "esto es pasajero". Simplemente no les entra en sus esquemas mentales una vida así y rechazan la realidad. Y ellos son una parte importante del electorado.

Pocos años cotizados y nula especialización en nada porque el meme de los últimos años es ser creativo, flexible y proactivo (aunque suene a yogur para facilitar el tránsito intestinal). Si a ello le añadimos el hecho de que las empresas no gastan un duro en su formación y ellos no se la pueden pagar por lo paupérrimo de sus sueldos, vemos que esta generación es carne de cañón.

A los cincuentones/sesentones no hay nada que explicarles. Con su puesto blindado por antigüedad y nula empatía hacia sus propios hijos, no ven la realidad que nos están haciendo heredar a los más jóvenes.

Anecdotazo:

Hace dos años, cuando paseaba y daba el biberón a mi retoño por cierta calle de postín del Barrio de Salamanca, fui testigo de una conversación de una pareja sesentona que me produjo asco e indignación a la vez. La señora estaba hablando muy alterada con su hija, emigrada con su marido powerpointista a Brasil. La hija le contaba que estaba desesperada, que no se adaptaba al país y que tenía miedo de salir a pasear con los críos porque lo que veía en las películas era muy real si te salías de la urbanización con seguridad de turno. Pues su señora madre y padre le estaban chillando que "aguantara", que su Luis estaba haciendo unos buenos dineros allí y que ya lo vería todo con otros ojos cuando regresaran a España montados en el dólar. Acaba la conversación y el señor padre le dice a su esposa: "es que esa es la única manera, ya sabemos que tan joven Luis no puede subir en la empresa X si no hacen esto". Esos pijos madrileños estaban enviando a sus hijos al fango para mantener su estatus sin ningún tipo de remordimiento.

Mi retoño acabó de merendar, recogí los bártulos, lo metí en el carrito y me alejé prometiéndome no ser un miserable con mi hijo.

PD. Lo peor es que Luis muy probablemente seguirá siendo un pringado y no volverá a España cubierto de gloria hasta que la generación de su suegro esté bajo tierra.