As I always say in these articles part of the problem is the “build a wall” crowd who screwed them selves after ww1 by making most immigration impossible in ww1 because they forgot that all the “middle class” people had the educated jobs and didn’t need to work in factories and such
or as was in the comment section :
also what people forget is the middle class was built on the back of the mass immigration and sweat shops and depressed wages because there always was another boat coming in from 1870 to the first world war and sure once there was tightened immigration and people filled them but at rising wages and with the shrunken job pool let the unions basically hold up the government who needed the factories for ww2
Did tightening of immigration create the middle class since a smaller workforce allowed for greater increase of wages?
Or did high levels of immigration create the middle class?
It seems you are arguing both, rather incoherently.
(FYI–the middle class was created after WW2 left America as the sole industrial power unravaged by war & poverty. Education levels were largely irrelevant since factory workers received a middle-class income.)
The very modern idea of a middle class in America, with everybody a homeowner and able to support a family comfortably standards with broadly the same standard of living goes back to the postwar, although even then it was still partly a goal and not always the reality. And it’s absolutely true that this was built in an era when technological improvements and WW2 radically raised the returns on even unskilled labor when used in factories.
But the middle class has been around along time, even long before it was thought of as the middle class, or even a distinct class at all. America had a broad middle even before that. Class divisions certainly existed, but it was a little less clear and social networks were perhaps more likely to reach across them.
I looked through the linked to article, and it seems to be more about factory jobs rather than factories. The level of jobs is not coming back, but I suspect in 20 - 30 years the factories will. When we run out of low wage countries manufacturing costs there will rise. Transportation costs are a disadvantage of manufacturing overseas, as is control over your supply chain. While factories for foreign markets will stay there, ones for the US market might return. Robots in India get paid the same as robots here, after all. This won’t help high school grads but it might work process people and engineers.
Yeah, there is a real difference between factory jobs and factories. Manufacturing in the United States is just becoming vastly more automated. I once heard (and I do not know for sure how true it is) that if a machine can replace the work of one worker, then if the machine’s total cost is less than 3x that worker’s annual cost of employment to the employer then the machine is worth buying (it suggests manufacturers automate of course to save money, and their criteria is a fairly fast break even on the machine.) So if a machine costs $2,000,000 but replaces 20 workers, it could be pretty close to break even in three years for well paid factory workers (and could be break even in a year for the very well paid factory worker.) I personally know factory workers in some industries who are over $100,000 in gross income alone (this includes lots of overtime), and that isn’t counting any retirement plan costs, healthcare costs, employer share of payroll taxes and etc.
According to this chart, U.S. manufacturing output is up almost double from 1987. But obviously manufacturing jobs are not, the output of factories and the welfare of the factory job market are becoming very disconnected due to automation.
Automation is a concern for almost everything, and we eventually are going to need an answer about what to do when most of society doesn’t need to work. Do we let the small number of people who control the capital and automation machines basically become oligarchs and the rest of us become base peasants, or do we work out some other system? Note that I’m looking even at highly paid professional jobs eventually being automated away. Machines will eventually be better at making decisions and creating designs than humans, and that will make it very hard for any job to be competitively performed by a flesh and blood person.
Which, you know, not to be a filthy commie and all, but would not be such a problem if we were working on the assumption that the benefits of the machines should, at least in part, accrue to the flesh and blood persons in general.
I think we’ll see a lot more public openness to ideas of an expanded public commons on a quasi-European model, where not only primary/secondary education but things like higher education and health insurance are tax-funded benefits available to all irrespective of socioeconomic or employment status, once middle-class workers assimilate the idea that it’s not only ill-paid menial labor but many high-level career jobs that will be automated out of existence.
I mean, in the long run what’s the practical alternative, other than a grand genocidal bloodbath to maximize profits for the oligarchs by getting rid of the useless non-oligarchs? (And even then, where are serious profits going to come from if there aren’t lots of people to purchase goods and services?)
All this fear mongering drives me nuts. About 20% of everything made in the world is made in the US. This has declined from ~35% immediately after WWII (IIRC). The US is a manufacturing powerhouse in the world; only China manufactures more and they have only done it for 5 years or so. US manufacturing is doing just fine.
Manufacturing jobs are a different story. They are disappearing and never coming back. It is much cheaper to automate most tasks in a factory and nothing is going to change this. Soon we will also lose all our transportation jobs (taxi drivers, truck drivers, etc…) to automation. When these jobs start to disappear, it will not surprise me if people try to blame truck drivers from Mexico or other easy targets. However this transition goes and where the blame is placed, the story will be the same: It’s all about the robots. We are in the midst of the 2nd (or 3rd depending on how you count it) industrial revolution. The simple fact is we can build machines and create algorithms for many worker tasks for much less money than human beings. Foreign workers can compete to a certain extent as they are cheaper, but even this advantage will be overcome in the coming age of automation.
What “fear mongering”? As far as I can tell, the previous posters here have said pretty much the same things you’re saying.
[QUOTE=Happy Fun Ball]
Manufacturing jobs are a different story. They are disappearing and never coming back. It is much cheaper to automate most tasks in a factory and nothing is going to change this. Soon we will also lose all our transportation jobs (taxi drivers, truck drivers, etc…) to automation. […] The simple fact is we can build machines and create algorithms for many worker tasks for much less money than human beings. Foreign workers can compete to a certain extent as they are cheaper, but even this advantage will be overcome in the coming age of automation.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t see anybody here disagreeing with this. So where’s the alleged “fear mongering” coming in? ISTM that if most non-elite and many elite jobs are going to become irrelevant because of the replacement of humans by machines, that’s kind of a legitimate cause for concern.
Maybe what you’re objecting to is specifically “finger pointing” or “scapegoating”, as in the suggestion that declines in transportation jobs will be blamed on Mexican workers? I agree that scapegoating is not a constructive response to the loss of jobs to increased automation, but that doesn’t mean that workers facing redundancy and unemployment don’t have anything to complain about.
You are right that there is not much fear mongering going on in this thread; I am reacting to general opinion that foreigners have stolen our jobs aided by the crooks in Washington. It is a common refrain we seem to get every 4 years by the outsiders that run for president, never mind that many of them have spent decades working in Washington. The article linked by the OP seems to echo many of these refrains, albeit it is not as bad as most.
The title of the OP is what set me off. “The American Factory is Dead and Not Coming Back.” I disagree; the American factory is alive and well and this has been true since WWII. I agree with you that there are many causes for concern in the direction our economy is going and the displacement that is occurring. There is a lot to complain and worry about here. That said, the article is a piece of misdirection.
You can call this scapegoating if you want, but I do really believe it a type of fear mongering. The whole “let’s make America great again” or “let’s take America back (from the communists, fascists, Islamic extremists, corporations, what have you)” is fear mongering at a very basic level. Stating that all our factories have all closed and soon the Chinese will foreclose on us is very similar in my book. But call it finger pointing if you like.
There is no surprise that if you price the bottom 30% or so of American workers out of jobs with stupid economic policy that low skill work would leave the nation or be paid under the table. It’s no surprise that the foolish want to continue that trend. Honestly, why is a bottom tier American worker worth 10 times or more a foreign counterpart?
Of course both options will happen. Some countries will implement universal basic income and try and maintain something resembling our current society, others will turn into gated communities surrounded by vast ghettos.
I can also see that “assembled by humans” will probably end up having some prestige attached to it like “organic” does, even if the actual product quality is lower. And most people will probably always prefer being served at a restaurant, having their hair done or manicured by a human instead of a machine. The low skill / low paid jobs of the future will all be services or sales where there is a deliberate choice to use a human because of the “feel good” factor.
I don’t think anybody’s arguing that a low-skilled factory worker is intrinsically “worth” an order of magnitude more just for being American rather than, say, Chinese or Bangladeshi or Filipino.
But the point is that American workers live in a much wealthier society, one which is supposed to be more prosperous, more egalitarian, safer and healthier, better educated, etc., than the very poor developing nations where much of modern manufacturing hires its workers.
Even the most frugal American factory worker can’t survive in the US on the same wages that will support a Bangladeshi worker in Bangladesh. So trying to offer American workers Bangladeshi wages is merely a recipe for immiseration. You can’t run a factory in a developed free nation with workers who are literally homeless and starving.
This is why we need to raise the pay of other jobs to factory level jobs. So yes $15 an hour for fast food. If that means we cant eat out so often so be it.
And if then that means that there are many fewer jobs so be it?
But we’ve gone down these paths in other threads. There is a difference between advocacy for living wages (which varies by local costs of housing and food) and a flat across the country increase to $15. There is a reasoned debate to be had over various versions of guaranteed basic income.
Happy Fun Ball, the op was misdirection but the article linked to was actually reasonable, as far as it goes.
Technology is going to replace ALL of our jobs. Accountants have been replaced by software. Bloomberg has started using robots to write news articles.
Don’t thing education or social class or skill level is going to save you in the long run.
We need to be thinking of how to transition away from an economic system in which the vast majority of people sell their labor in order to keep the economic cycle moving. Because that’s going to grind to a halt.
Predictions are hard. Especially about the future.
Trying to leapfrog into a future which may never arrive at all is a sure-fire recipe for failure. We simply don’t know what the world will look like in two decades, let alone a century. Blindly projecting today’s trends into tomorrow and then demanding massive and social changes - which probably won’t work anyway - on that basis isn’t a good idea.
What “fear mongering”? As far as I can tell, the previous posters here have said pretty much the same things you’re saying.