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Productivity/technology/tax/society

In light of several major unions agitating for a 4 day week, claiming technological improvements should allow workers more time off without loss of pay and forecasts of anything up to 30% of current jobs being lost to automisation over the next quarter century it seems a topic worth discussing.

Personally I can see on a macro level it's going to cause issues so its not something we can ignore but there don't seem to me to be any obvious easy solutions on a micro level.

Eg if you want a trench digging then if you spend quarter of a mil on lads on min wage you provide picks and shovels to then you cop for a fat NI bill plus they pay their taxes and VAT on a fair bit of what they spend their wages on. Buy a JCB and pay one bloke to operate it and you probably get the job done a lot quicker and you get a massive tax break on the investment so it's a no brainer but the tax take on the same job is a lot lower.

Ditto if you want your product shipping, invest in tech to make the process more efficient, tax breaks but as you're spending the cash to make the worker able to do more per hour why would you give them a pay rise based on your investment as you'd be paying twice?

No idea how we would square the contradiction between the macro and micro interests...any of our resident brainboxes got any ideas?
 
Machines make all the goodies,
95% of the population is on the dole, replaced by machines
who buys all the goodies ?
we are now in recession
 
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