We are used to hear about layoffs, so used to hear about layoffs that layoffs happen all the time and we are none the wiser about how they happen or even where they happen. What is even more odd is that we are not even aware of the real repercussions of the fact that people being laid off. We are not really aware of what is going Underground, under the ground of numbers and percentages we are being flooded with.
I guess that when you enter a bank branch - of the few that remain open compared to the numbers we had just a few years ago, or when you enter a local supermarket, you don't think about how many people have simply vanished from workplaces having been replaced by automation. You might think about how difficult it is to get a job or about how little people are being paid with salaries that will never allow them to climb the housing ladder, but you don't make the connection between automation and rising dispossesion. Somebody might talk about isolation, depression, anxiety, and so forth, but we seldom see the link between employment and many of the social illnesses, mental illnesses and physical illnesses.
Most of us build our present and think about our futures taking into account how much we earn doing what we are doing. You make plans and suddenly you get the news that you no longer have a job. You no longer have what it takes to support yourself, to pay your bills, to save for that ever elusive future that you might never have.
Like an economics teacher of mine said 'don't forget that all those numbers, those figures, those percentages, those equations and formulae are real people'.
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