With globalization in the early 2000's and AI in the 2020's, there has never been more of a need to protect the American worker that there is right now.
The idea of someone's career consisting of one job and one company is now a rarity. The pace of change can create, and wipe out, whole industries and completely negate years of training and investment.
We need to remodel our employee safety nets to account for the 21st century pace of change.
Legislation is needed to regulate how rapidly AI is allowed to replace American workers at their jobs. This can be done by increasing taxes on the "AI workforce" to better account for the costs of an AI agent.
The current system of unemployment provides benefits for those who have lost their job due to layoffs. As a pre-condition of receiving unemployment, it is required that a worker to show that they are looking for work.
In the context of the early 1930's, this may have been sufficient. The education requirements were comparably low between jobs, creating a large pool of jobs that a worker could choose from.
In the modern era, the nature of job requirements has changed. Workers could spend years training for certain jobs, only to watch these skills become outdated, outsourced, or automated with frightening speed. Whole industries could rise and fall in decades as a result of the rapid pace of 21st century innovation.
This is creating scenarios where the American worker can do everything in their power to get a job, but that it is simply not enough to gain steady employment in today's workforce.
Unemployment benefits should be revamped to cover at least three different scenarios.
The traditional method of unemployment benefits should still apply. If you were laid off of work and are looking for another job, then you are eligible for benefits while you look.
Given how quickly whole industries can change, there is a growing need for Americans to learn new skills to adapt. Unemployment benefit should cover at least some of these efforts to skill up and allow workers to focus their time on gaining the skills they need to be competitive in the 21st Century.
A third avenue that unemployment can cover is to provide some funding towards becoming a business owner. Both training and covering some expenses towards creating a small business can not only have positive effects at an individual level, but successful businesses can have multiplicative effects by adding more jobs for other workers as well.
The current system of unemployment provides benefits for those who have lost their job due to layoffs. As a pre-condition of receiving unemployment, it is required that a worker to show that they are looking for work.
In the context of the early 1930's, this may have been sufficient. The education requirements were comparably low between jobs, creating a large pool of jobs that a worker could choose from.
In the modern era, the nature of job requirements has changed. Workers could spend years training for certain jobs, only to watch these skills become outdated, outsourced, or automated with frightening speed. Whole industries could rise and fall in decades as a result of the rapid pace of 21st century innovation.
This is creating scenarios where the American worker can do everything in their power to get a job, but that it is simply not enough to gain steady employment in today's workforce.