In October 2017, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, announced
that the company would give $1 billion over the next five years to nonprofit
organizations that help people “adjust to the changing nature of work.”[1]
The digital skills philanthropic venture would essentially help otherwise
unemployed Americans get jobs that require high-tech skills. This would also
enable more people to use the
internet, and thus the company’s products. So a reporter at USA Today can be said to gild the lily a
bit in claiming that the initiative “is a tacit acknowledgement from one of the
world’s most valuable companies that it bears some responsibility for rapid
advances in technology that are radically reshaping industries and eliminating
jobs in the U.S. and around the world.”[2]
I submit that it is highly unlikely that such an acknowledgement ever took
place at Google, given the more likely scenario wherein the company’s
management saw an opportunity to enlarge (and hopefully enrich) its labor pool
and customer base.
In making the announcement from Pittsburgh, Pichai observed,
“One-third of jobs in 2020 will require skills that aren’t common [in 2017]. It’s
a big problem.”[3] Indeed.
He may in fact have been understating it. Giving $10 million to Goodwill’s
Digital Career Accelerator so it could “provide 1 million people with access to
digital skills and career opportunities” does not necessarily mean that 1
million people would become proficient at
such skills, which after all are not easy to master. There is also the matter
of attitude, which can function as a
wedge between digital skills and realized and
sustained career opportunities. Chronic unemployment itself can test and
even twist a person’s attitude, which can also be a factor in a person’s
unemployment in the first place.
Generally speaking, funneling a society’s extant labor force
and the unemployed through a skills-filter, in this case, digital skills,
ignores the innate diversity that exists within any societal labor pool (and
society itself). The heterogeneous nature of people vocationally is happily in
line with the fact that a diversified economy is more stable than one that
privileges a certain sector or even its skill-set.
[1]
Jessica Lynn, “Google
to Give $1 Billion to Nonprofits and Help Americans Get Jobs in the New Economy,”
The New York Times, October 12, 2017.
[2]
Ibid.
[3]
Ibid.
