U.S. banks will cast off about 10 percent of the industry’s workforce, or about 200,000 jobs, through 2030, Wells Fargo banking analyst Michael Mayo has predicted, according to the Financial Times.
“This will be the biggest reduction in U.S. bank headcount in history” as banks automate more and more tasks, Mayo told the FT.
The industry’s job count has been stable at about two million for the past decade, the FT reported.
Jobs first for the chopping block are those in branches and call centers, Mayo said; workers in technology or who deal directly with customers are probably safest.
The analysis agrees with a U.S. Labor Department forecast that the number of jobs for bank tellers will shrink by 15 percent through the next ten years.
The sharpening competition among investment vehicles and alternative ways to pay bills and store value “means more computers and less people,” Mayo said.
“Digitization accelerated [during the global shutdown] and that played to the strength of some fintech and other tech providers” such as PayPal Holdings and Amazon, Mayo said.
Banks now make up only about a third of the financing market, his study concluded.
Most of the industry’s 200,000 disappearing jobs will be erased through retirements and people choosing jobs in other industries rather than through layoffs, Mayo thinks.
Chicken Robotics
As a legacy of the economic shutdown, the $65-billion U.S. chicken industry is automating in the face of a worker shortage.
Line jobs in meat processing plants have always been hard to fill: workers stand for hours, making the same motions over and over in plants kept cold to keep meat fresher and where conveyors move at an often uncomfortably brisk pace.
Meat-cutting jobs, often filled by immigrants, also are among the most dangerous, according to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
COVID infections raced through several U.S. meat-packing plants, cutting production and driving away even more workers.
“It takes six days right now to get five days’ worth of work done,” Donnie King, Tyson Foods’ COO, complained to the Wall Street Journal.
Tyson has raised production-line pay to an average of $22 an hour and is testing flexible work schedules, but some of its plants still lack staff.
As a result, Tyson and competitor Pilgrims Pride are automating their plants.
Pilgrim’s already has automated about 1,200 jobs out of existence since April 2020 and will sink another $100 million into automated equipment over the next 12 months, CEO Fabio Sandri said in an April statement cited by the WSJ.
TREND FORECAST: Welcome to the 21st century. The Industrial Age is dead; the Hi-Tech world is alive and thriving and will dominate for this and future centuries. More jobs, both menial and skill-based, will be lost to digitization and robotics.
On the downside, while profits will grow, more people will decline into lower living standards and poverty. As a result, there will be resentment among the masses of the 10 percent and millions will take to the streets across the globe protesting the lack of basic living standards, government corruption, crime, and violence.
As Gerald Celente has long said, “When people lose everything and have nothing left to lose, they lose it.”
