Job-finding rates have fallen the most for America's most reliably-employed workers

Ah, marvellous. The American labour market has finally found a way to punish the people who did everything right. Business Insider reports on a new analysis of job-finding rates, and the results are a masterclass in ironic karma: the roles most exposed to AI — defined, with all the precision of a patent lawyer, as the overlap between job tasks and capabilities listed in AI patents — have seen the biggest drops in job-finding rates. The most reliably-employed workers in America are now finding it hardest to land their next job. This is the sequel to the hollowing-out we talked about last week, and it hasn't got any funnier.

Consider the cruelty of the metric. Reliability has always been the currency of the working class: show up, do the same thing consistently, never make trouble. That's precisely why the patent-capability matching analysis flags these people first. Their tasks are so stable, so predictable, so well-documented that a machine can do them — or at least, a patent application can claim a machine could. The article says these workers' job-finding rates have fallen more than comparable workers, which is a polite way of saying the labour market has decided that dependability is now a pre-existing condition. You don't get fired; you just find that no one is returning your calls.

There is a tidy moral in this for the rest of us. If being reliably employed is now a risk factor, then the rational response is to become gloriously unreliable — take up juggling, develop a caffeine dependency, make your job description so chaotic that no patent could ever cover it. But most people can't do that, because most people have mortgages and children and a vague sense that this was all supposed to work differently. The analysis "complicates the picture," says Business Insider, in the way a sledgehammer complicates a window pane. The next report will presumably tell us that the sky is falling, and we should all feel fortunate to have a clear view of it from our rapidly-emptying open-plan offices.