Is Technology Killing Middle-Income Jobs in the U.S Essay

Is Technology Killing Middle-Income Jobs in the U.S - Essay Example While some middle-class workers have joined the top levels of income, a greater number of the middle-class workers have been pushed down to the lower-wage and lower-skill service jobs (Zaccone 1). The actual situation is worse than what it seems to be when studied from the surface. A vast majority of the jobs that have been lost are the ones that might never return, and the experts of the labor market consent that more of them are expected to disappear in the near future (Condon and Wiseman). These jobs from the US are neither only being lost to such developing countries as China nor are they simply factory work. These jobs are increasingly being lost in the service sector that is home to almost two-thirds of all middle-class workers in the US. Technology is rapidly obliterating these jobs. â€Å"If it’s not solved, then in the coming decades you can expect a self-perpetuating privileged elite to accrue more and more of the wealth generated by software and robots, telling the mselves that they’re carrying the entire world on their backs† (Evans). Science fiction has been warning of a future in which man would design his own obsolescence as he would be replaced by machines for decades, and that future has already become the present. The influence of technology on the contemporary systems and organizations is tremendous. Indeed, many of the contemporary systems fundamentally depend upon technology. Benefits derived from the use of technology in the workplace include but are not limited to improved productivity, improved and consistent quality of work, increased reliability of work, and streamlining and organization of different units in the system. Use of technology has benefited the entrepreneurs in two fundamental ways; firstly, it has increased the productivity and quality of work so that there are no reworks and wastage of time, and secondly, increased dependence on technology has reduced the need for manual labor, thus cutting down the co sts of businesses by obviating the need for the entrepreneurs to pay the workers. While on one hand, this has made the circumstances extremely favorable for the entrepreneurs and business owners, the situation is far worse for the workers on the other hand. The richest 1 per cent of the Americans have experienced a growth of 33 per cent in their income over the last two decades and have thus left a vast majority of the average Americans in the dust (Censky). â€Å"Today the top 1 percent of Americans control 43 percent of the financial wealth†¦while the bottom 80 percent control only 7 percent of the wealth† (â€Å"American Pie†). The widening gap between the rich and the poor is explained by two fundamental factors; globalization and technological advancement. Contemporary organizations are tremendously dependent upon the technology which can in part be attributed to the rapid advancement of technology. Software that are employed in running the computers and a ho st of devices and machines are upgraded every single year so that they become more powerful and sophisticated. One of the main objectives of designing and introducing new models in the market is to improve the machines’ capability of performing the tasks traditionally performed by manual workforce more efficiently. â€Å"The jobs that are going away aren't coming back. I have never