What if we oppose technology?

 

Technology, science, and information are not an exogenous force beyond our control, but as we noted at the beginning of this book, trying to stop the advance of technology is a futile, if not utopian, task. Do we know of any country or company that has prospered and achieved great benefits or profits using old technology? I doubt it.

 

Even so, there are plenty of examples of workers and politicians who opposed new technologies when they saw the continuity of various jobs threatened.

 

The only alternative, according to many experts on the subject, is the constant retraining of the active workforce because if it is prepared for what is to come, the working class will not fear losing their jobs but will actually be able to achieve a transition where they work hand in hand with machines, whether in the same sector or another. Even so, for this to be possible, several planets must align. The planets to align are those called: Companies, Governments, and Unions. The problem is not any of these three actors in particular, but the visions of their leaders. There, a development vision framed within ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) standards becomes crucial. Attacking unions will never be the solution, because for starters, without them, the rights that the working class enjoys today would not exist.

 

If retraining is not constant, when an employee over 50 becomes unemployed, their state of confusion will be absolute. This is not a fable but something that happens in the United States, and in Argentina as well, while in Scandinavian countries, workers usually enjoy constant training that keeps them optimal for the labor market throughout their lives. Constant training has become an extremely valuable requirement in the career of workers, as noted by Jeff Maggioncalda, founder of Coursera, during his participation in the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2022, when he stated that while job skills used to serve us for 15 years, now they only do so for 5 years. Job skills are what keep workers competitive, and therefore guarantee they can earn their salary. Today the greatest skill to develop is learning to learn, and for this reason, considering internet access as a human right, we should start discussing the free access to certain online education platforms, encyclopedias, or research. Will jobs be destroyed? In large numbers, but the problem is not eliminating jobs since that is a constant in our history; the problem is whether we are working to ensure that when that happens, the necessary conditions have been created to generate others, remembering once again that currently, the largest economies in the world with the highest density of robots per worker are precisely the ones with the least unemployment, as we saw with the cases of South Korea or Germany, both with 3.5%[207].

 

Just as in the 1980s Margaret Thatcher embraced a neoliberal agenda in England, Ronald Reagan did the same with the United States. This agenda had no room for investments in the fields of education, and the power of unions was seen as a threat to economic development. Thus, little by little, the power of unions was sidelined, while the market economy was promoted, with lower taxes on large fortunes as this was seen as a limiting factor to economic growth. This formula was quickly adopted by many other countries around the world, but the Scandinavian countries maintained their basic pillars to a greater extent. Although in the eyes of Thatcher and Reagan, these measures would free up funds that would generate a trickle-down effect in their economies, this deprived national coffers of the necessary funds for public services such as education and health. After nearly three decades of dominance, with the economic collapse of 2008, the days of neoliberal policies finally came to an end.

 

It is curious that, leaving aside the crisis triggered by COVID-19, if we could go back in time to November 2020, we could affirm that, as a global society, we have never been as well off as we were then. Compared to previous generations, we live longer, healthier lives, more children go to school, and many go on to university; at the same time, computers and cell phones connect us with the entire world at an increasingly lower price and with increasingly powerful features. Even so, while it seems that we live in abundance, there are growing complaints about the inequity and unsustainability of the system.

 

Many internet companies offer their services for free to their users, so no taxes apply to their products or services per se. Even though many of them operate in a long list of countries, having their headquarters in the United States or China but routing all their financial operations through tax havens, many countries face a major problem when trying to tax the operations of these companies within their borders when their products or services are purely digital. Even companies that sell physical products have found various ways to avoid paying taxes. One such case is Nike. The swoosh company has registered a headquarters in the Netherlands that handles operations for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, covering operating costs, payments to suppliers, employees, and other operations from there. However, after selling their products and covering these expenses, Nike does not proceed to pay taxes directly as a regular company; instead, when it reaches this point, it is steeped in debt. This is because Nike registered a company in Bermuda, and coincidentally, until at least 2014, this entity held the rights to use the image of the famous swoosh in its logo. So, instead of paying corporate taxes in the Netherlands or anywhere else, Nike claims that it first has to pay for the right to use its own logo to its headquarters in Bermuda[208]. Once there, Nike pays extremely low taxes since it is a tax haven, thus retaining most of its profits. Is this fair? Regardless of what we think, Nike found a way to create its own labyrinth legally.

 

Click here to read the next chapter 👉 
 


Click here to return to the Index 🔍 


[207] Williams, W. (2022). The Highest and Lowest Unemployment Rates in the World. Investopedia. Viewed on February 19, 2023, https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/062315/unemployment-rates-country.asp.

[208] Hopkins, N., & Bowers, S. (2017). Revealed: how Nike stays one step ahead of the taxman. The Guardian. Viewed on June 15, 2021, at https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/06/nike-tax-paradise-papers.