By Gina Raimondo
Ms. Raimondo was the secretary of commerce during the Biden administration and the 75th governor of Rhode Island.
When the Bulova watch factory in Providence, R.I., closed in the 1980s, my father faced an abrupt end to his 30-year career. Like many American manufacturers, Bulova moved its production overseas, chasing the cheaper labor that new free-trade agreements made so hard to resist. At 56, my father was a casualty of a new economic rulebook stapled to an old work force model. There were no effective public or private initiatives to help him or millions of other Americans transition to new jobs in the new economy, leaving many American cities hollowed out and helping produce the politics of division that plague us today.
This story isn’t just my memoir; it’s history we’re about to repeat. Artificial intelligence is transforming work faster than our work force is adapting. Millions of Americans — from white collar to blue collar, entry level to executive — may soon find themselves jobless and without prospects. Leaders across the political spectrum and the private sector tell me this crisis is coming and there’s no obvious solution.
I refuse to accept that an unemployment crisis is inevitable. The answer, however, isn’t to slow down A.I. innovation and leave ourselves less competitive and less prepared. Nor is generic reskilling that pushes people into completely new roles and industries. Instead, we should build a modern transition system with better data to predict job losses and new forms of support to help workers transition between jobs.
What we need is a new grand bargain between the public and private sectors — one in which employers are held responsible for defining skills essential to the A.I. economy and for creating pathways into jobs and the government invests in the training, incentives and safety nets that help workers move quickly into them. The private sector has always been better positioned to see which new jobs are emerging, which skills matter and how quickly demand will shift. So this new bargain should start with businesses taking the lead and providing real-time, A.I.-powered insights into hiring plans, technology adoption and skill needs.
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