How high must wages go to make large scale factory automation attractive?

[elucidator]

Its pathetic, to see them standing by the freeway entrance, with sad little 3x5 cardboard signs saying “Will index for food.”

[gonzomax]

@not_alice

And yet some here, maybe even you, wonder what is to be done with the underemployed people. When it is suggested they be educated to the level of the competition, or even beyond, you balk.

Weird.

I live in the bread basket of the world, California’ Central Valley, having moved here 5 years ago from the Bay Area. I am busy studying the history of just that in California, dating from the 1850s until the present time.

While I certainly have my share of illegal Mexican neighbors, I can assure you that the overall workforce in the fields is a tiny fraction of what it once was. Large crops such cotton and tomatoes are extremely automated. Others will be soon, and all crops rely on automation to some extent.

Of course, there are jobs creating, managing, and improving the automation

But it is a serious serious mistake to think that the farming workforce is anything like it once was. Our Valley, with its year round crops, is ~ 75 miles by 400 miles in area, so it is not that there is NO need for field workers.

But when Carey McWilliams’ “Factories in the Field” was published ~ 1939, he was referring in large part to the size of the fields and the standardization of processes done by field workers. Now, when we talk about Factory Farms, there is much much less need for labor, and what labor there is is increasingly skilled to run machines and do engineering tasks.

Not weird at all. If we get educated to Chinese levels, we still have to work for 1/3rd the wages we have been getting. Then we have to allow corporations to pollute at will and go unregulated. Then we would be competitive if the work was not already moved.
Corporate jobs are not owned by China. When pressure comes from the workers to raise wages, the jobs will move to someplace cheaper. Indonesia is getting hot now. Korea still is actively courting corporate work. We have a way to go before they exhaust all the countries of the world. Then they can start over.
The other option is the countries could unite to control corporations. There is some movement toward regulating banks now. It is a start.

[emacknight]

@gonzomax

Not weird at all. If we get educated to Chinese levels, we still have to work for 1/3rd the wages we have been getting. Then we have to allow corporations to pollute at will and go unregulated. Then we would be competitive if the work was not already moved.
Corporate jobs are not owned by China. When pressure comes from the workers to raise wages, the jobs will move to someplace cheaper. Indonesia is getting hot now. Korea still is actively courting corporate work. We have a way to go before they exhaust all the countries of the world. Then they can start over.
The other option is the countries could unite to control corporations. There is some movement toward regulating banks now. It is a start.

Interesting. And what was that bit about “American lifestyle?” What does that mean? And what happens when China gets it?

[elucidator]

Gonna be a damned interesting experiment. If the Chinese manage to avoid or overcome the ecological catastrophe they are headed for, they will have some lovely, lovely new technology to steal.

[HRoark43]

@not_alice

LOL dude, that has been the whole intent of computer science since von Neumann bent over and plugged something in. Do you have any clue at all as to how software is written? No one younger than 65 has ever written commercial ode to the bare metal since Kennedy was President.

Well… hackers do it all the time. It’s called computer viruses. Anyone who ports a C interpreter or Java compiler to a new operating system probably does it. Perhaps. (Bare metal meaning machine / assembly language, right?)

I studied CS at a top university 30 years ago and I have never even thought about having to do that - every line of code I have ever written or managed, including on some very well known state of the art projects, which adds up to maybe millions of lines of code, has undergone extensive automation, both in testing and creation during development and deployment.

You’re talking about compilers turning interpreted language into machine code, right?

I think that one can safely say that while computers do automate the compiling work, they do not automate the creative side of writing operating system code, which is such a huge amount of work in and of itself that it’s hard to notice the effect of automation in this area.

But if the OP’s point was that automation is not killing jobs and the example s/he gave was programming, I would say this is correct. This is how I see it: if they did not have automated machine coding (compiling) there would probably not be much of a computing industry. Nobody could afford the man-hours cost of writing the code for a web browser in machine language, multiplied by porting it to dozens of operating systems. Automation in this industry has actually made more jobs come into existence.

Automation is good for the working class, especially those who see it as an opportunity to start their own business.

Besides, Government can protect jobs from automation all they want. I can just leave and produce the stuff using machines elsewhere. Let the Americans pay for overpriced hand-made (or hand-compiled? LOL!!!) stuff.

[Kevbo]

It largely depends on the management philosophy:

Something I have noticed:

There is a certain type of manager, not too uncommon, that really prefers workers to be disposable commodities.

These people hate to depend on difficult to replace, highly skilled workers. They especially hate that they may need to pay these people a significant fraction of a management salary to retain them. My guess is that they gauge their own worth by what multiple of the next highest salary they take home. Worst of all, you can barely understand what they are saying, much less what they are doing. Fucking elitists!

For these people, replacing 20 McJobs with robots or other automation is not attractive because they will have to pay a couple of geeks about half that to tend to the robots, program PLCs, etc. The kind of geeks that have the nerve to tell The Boss they can’t estimate the repair time until they have determined the underlying cause and other nasty insubordinate shit like that. Seriously, what is the point of spending $1M on robots if you have to pay some snot faced smart ass $75K/yr. to care for and feed them?

For these, the way to be more competitive is to cut benefits, and even wages in some cases, and simply replace any workers that complain. All the better if they are undocumented so you can cheat them out of overtime. If a robot breaks, you have to spend real $$ to get it working again. If El McWorker breaks, just kick him to the curb, go down to Home Depot and pick out a new one.

When finally faced with the inevitability that they must automate, these will spend even more money outsourcing the tech work. I, and people I know, have done a lot of this contracting. If you have to pay some Prima Donna, better you don’t have to look at them every day.
Not all management is of this mindset. HOWEVER, I have worked as W-2 employee (vs 1099 contractor) for 6 companies, and my current employer is the only one that really eschews this kind of thinking. At some places it was just in the background, others it was front and center.

[mazinger_z]

@not_alice

Let me be clear. Every single line of code out of millions has been automated, and increasingly so.

There is no doubt that as automation in the areas you say don’t exist actually increase, programmers can do more, with increased quality, than before. There is no doubt this is the driving force behind software trends, including the software that is used these days to create and test hardware before it ever hits a fab.

Sorry, you really made me split a gut with your apparently sincere but exceedingly bizarre claim!

While I can’t attest to what code writing was like 30 years ago, I totally agree with the rest of this post. I just got back from internet [censor] hell of China and now in lag-heaven India. While I was dealing more with automation (machines vs. code) in China, I am dealing even more with it here in India (code, rather than machines).

More succinctly, programmers in my company cannot wait to automate a repetitive task because it allows them to work on what they consider real, more valuable issues. Also consider the environment in the poor/2nd/3rd world nations in Asia for IT workers – it’s super competitive! We have a harsh problem with employee retention and turnover, all of this in the face of increasing automation.

[mazinger_z]

@gonzomax

Not weird at all. If we get educated to Chinese levels, we still have to work for 1/3rd the wages we have been getting. Then we have to allow corporations to pollute at will and go unregulated. Then we would be competitive if the work was not already moved.
Corporate jobs are not owned by China. When pressure comes from the workers to raise wages, the jobs will move to someplace cheaper. Indonesia is getting hot now. Korea still is actively courting corporate work. We have a way to go before they exhaust all the countries of the world. Then they can start over.
The other option is the countries could unite to control corporations. There is some movement toward regulating banks now. It is a start.

Let’s not forget that these new workers create for themselves wealth, and the demand that naturally arises from this new found wealth. Competition simultaneously arises as well as an increase demand for consumption, driving up the need for more supply, which fuels the increase for more workers. To neglect this side of the equation is to truly see things in a vacuum.