How we can save some of the jobs destroyed by rise of the machines

Yvette Cooper’s strategy to support workers to move to new, good-quality jobs from those destroyed by the coming technological revolution is commendable (Automation could destroy jobs. We must deal with it now, 7 August). However, it presupposes that such jobs will themselves be enabled by the new technology, and that enough of them can be created. Both are debatable points.

An additional strategy is to support moves into good-quality jobs that depend less, if at all, on technology. An example is food production. In France, pioneering efforts at Bec Hellouin have proved that intensive cultivation of vegetables and fruit with well-designed hand tools can be as productive and profitable per hour worked as large-scale mechanised farming. Crucially, and counterintuitively, these results get better as the cultivated area per person gets smaller. Judging from the pioneers, such work is conducive to physical and mental health, soil health, family life, and time for activities outside work. This is not a return to peasantry.

Such “super-efficient market gardening” (my phrase) could make our country self-sufficient in vegetables and fruit, including most exotics, year round. I calculate that this would require at least 400,000 jobs but only 0.6% of our presently cultivated land area, thanks to its intensity. This calculation uses historical as well as modern statistics: it’s been done before, so we can do it again.

This raises other desirable possibilities, such as: towns and cities being supplied mainly from their own and surrounding areas, greatly reducing food miles; repopulation of the countryside and hence lower housing pressures in towns; large-scale sequestration of carbon in living soils.

Although half a million new horticultural jobs would absorb nowhere near those lost to automation, they do illustrate the additional strategy: society at all levels should identify and support any work which is more productive with human effort.

For example, support in market gardening might include co-operatives to acquire land, buy supplies and distribute produce – and it could start today!

Malcolm Fowles

Reading

• Kim and Nick Hoare’s heartfelt call for a cross-party action programme for tackling climate change is crucial (Letters, 9 August).

Yet there is a way that the UK could contribute to substantially reducing its domestic carbon emissions while addressing the other serious threat of rapid and ubiquitous automation raised by Yvette Cooper.

There are two major labour-intensive sources of local jobs: face-to-face caring in the public and private sector, and infrastructural provision and improvements. Both are difficult to automate and can’t be relocated abroad. There is much discussion of the former, but far too little of the latter, which is crucial to tackling climate change. This would include prioritising energy efficiency and the increased use of renewables in constructing and refurbishing every UK building. In transport the emphasis would be on increased provision of interconnected road and rail services in every community, encouragement of electric vehicles for private use and for example using plastic waste in resurfacing roads and mending potholes.

Aside from the obvious advantages of improving social conditions and protecting the environment, this programme will have two further very politically attractive effects. The majority of this work will take place in every constituency and will require a wide range of skills for work that will last decades. In addition it would also inevitably help improve conditions and job opportunities for the “left behind” communities in the UK.

Colin Hines

Convener, UK Green New Deal Group

• Just because some jobs can be replaced, why must that happen (Millions fear being replaced by machines, study finds, 9 August)? In my local supermarket, the many self-service tills are frequently empty while we customers choose to queue to be served by a real person.

The investment in this under-used equipment could have been used to pay staff who could then earn money to spend in the shop – and so the economy goes round.

And where is all the power going to come from to run this new machine economy? Perhaps the newly unemployed could work treadmills to generate it – truly a circular economy.

Susannah Everington

Marshwood, Dorset

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