In 1998 the US population was about 276,000,000 and Americans worked 222,346 million hours.
In 2016 the US population was about 323,000,000 and Americans worked 246,461 million hours.
That’s a population increase of almost 50 million people, yet we don’t show anywhere close to a similar increase in the total number of hours worked, even if we factor in that not all 50 million people would necessarily be part of the work force.
Roll your argument back. All the way back to peasant farmers working on their lord’s land. (we could go all the way back to cave men if you like) What has ‘labor’ done to increase productivity in all the centuries since that era?
It is correct to say that most people just do what they are taught, they don’t invent anything, and if you motivate them, they will perform labor. That is true for the majority of human lifetimes.
So the reason productivity has increased over the centuries is 100% a mixture of technological advances, investments in capital equipment, investments in education, and business model advances. None of which ‘labor’ are responsible for.
So using your worldview, everyone who isn’t from a tiny group of successful inventors or CEOs should get even less than they are now. They shouldn’t live any better than peasants did centuries ago, since they don’t “deserve” any of the increased production of the pie since they didn’t “create” it.
Allegedly, the only reason workers live any better than peasants do today…in most countries…is because those workers don’t like not getting any more of the pie. They banded together into unions and refused to work unless they got a bigger slice. They voted in various wealth redistribution policies and progressive taxes.
This has become less true in America over the decades. Oh, fun fact. How do you suppose a mere IT guy fits into this whole peasant/lord divide? What have you invented. What can you do that the next IT guy can’t? Which side you the fence are you on? I have an idea of which side you should be voting with but you tell me…
Crop rotation and new farming techniques mainly lead to increases in farm production. Down the road certainly, it was new strains of crops, hybrids, and of course automated farming equipment…which is what lead to fewer jobs in the farming sector.
Labor, however, was essential, as the tools didn’t do the work or plant the crops. And while it was interchangeable to a degree you needed a whole lot of it as it was very manpower intensive.
But the worth of their labor has varied due to the above. Regardless of whether you invented something or not, if labor itself (i.e. human labor) is critical to achieving some goal then it’s vital in and of itself. While no one factory worker was probably critical, they were critical in the aggregate…and thus had more of an impact. Today, with high levels of automation you don’t need that mass aggregate of labor. Instead, you have a few critical people at a given manufacturing plant who are well paid, not a large aggregate. So, labor has less power over that sector and less impact…and thus gets less of the fruits of the investment, since they didn’t have an impact on why and how the productivity increases happened.
Again, see above.
You sure make a lot of assumptions. I’m pointing out why something happens, and that makes it my ‘worldview’? And then you spout a load of horseshit strawmen of a position (mine) that clearly you don’t understand and wonder why I get annoyed.
Fun fact…I think I’m done here, with you at least. You are able to focus on an actual discussion only for a seemingly very limited time before shooting off into strawmen and ridiculous arguments that have no bearing to what’s being discussed. Thanks for playing…here are some wonderful parting gifts. The SDMB board game and this wonderful ceramic dog (both are made in China of course)…
The 65+ population increased 14 million and college enrollment increased nearly 6 million, in case you haven’t factored those in. I haven’t checked SS disability numbers, but I imagine they’ve increased.
But if you’re interested in the per-worker hours, I don’t have anything for you. IIRC we have slightly *lower *percentage part-time workers today than in 1998. And in general, people who work more make more. Although I work a lot less and make a lot more, so YMMV.
You may also be interested in the workforce participation rate. That suffers from the same issues re: demographics changes, so I like to look at the age 25-54 numbers. Which you will see has decreased a few points over the dates in question (although recovered somewhat over the past year.)
The workforce participation rate was about 67% in 1998. It is now about 63%. That’s 4% of the population over 16 that has simply dropped out of the work force. Part of that is that the baby boomers are starting to retire, part is the drop after 2008 that never came back.
There could be many other causes, but automation isn’t one of them in the aggregate, as actual unemployment is near all-time lows. The people who are looking for jobs are finding them. It’s the people who have simply dropped out of the work force and aren’t even looking that has increased.
I got funded by factory people for a lot of years, and have spent a good bit of time there. But you missed my point. In the past workers shared productivity gains from automation, though as you say the automation was paid for by capital. Today they are not. What has changed?
Labor in the farming sector probably is represented by the hands who did not have a direct stake in the success of the farm. Sure the farmer worked as hard or harder, but he had an upside, (and a downside) while the downside of the hand was being fired.
Given that they hired children for factories, I have a hard time seeing the critical importance of labor. Sure if unemployment was low and labor was scarce labor would have to be paid more, but that has nothing to do with automation.
Automation in factories is not about reducing the wages of labor, it is about eliminating labor, as shown by the fact that manufacturing in the US has increased while manufacturing jobs has decreased.
Now, if labor in the aggregate leads to higher wages, perhaps the analog today would be the fast food industry, with lots of relatively unskilled people. Why have they not experienced the benefits that factory workers supposedly did? Assuming constant unemployment rates, of course.
They do share in the gains…they just don’t share equally because they don’t have an equal impact. If 90% of the productivity gains comes from new automated systems that required investment and capital but not just hard work, well, that’s going to go towards those who ponied up the investment and capital.
Let me ask you…what do YOU think has changed? This has been the trend, why has it happened? Perhaps you can give me your thoughts on that.
You are missing the point, which is we went from over 90% of the working population working those kinds of jobs or jobs related to them and today we are at less than 3%…yet are more productive than ever (orders of magnitude more in fact). What happened to all those workers? Why isn’t there massive unemployment? And why when folks are pondering the near future where, perhaps, 30-40% of the current jobs will be taken over by new automation is it different? That’s the central question of this thread in fact. Thoughts?
No, it’s not about eliminating all labor. It’s about increasing productivity and profits, but there is a cost to benefits thing here as well. If you are going to reduce staff it’s going to cost a lot in up front capital, so you have to weigh the pros and cons and find a balance. If your ROI on the capital investment of replacing your 1000 workers with new automation and a reduced staff of 100 takes you 10 years, well, you can make a business case for that. If reducing it to 10 workers takes you 30 years, well, less so. If zero workers takes you 100 years, probably not happening.
Are you seriously comparing a large manufacturing plant that might have employed 1000’s of workers in a given town to, say, a few fast food restaurants that might employ a few dozen and asking why there is a disproportion of influence?
Also, fast food workers, especially today but even in the past are probably the most interchangeable labor force out there. Literally they hire kids with not only zero experience at work but who have very little life experience…and they fully expect a huge turn over. They plan for it in fact. And, of course, automation has made huge inroads there too. Today, you don’t even have a guy cooking on the flattop by and large, fries are pre-measures and use an automated system to ensure they are cooked properly, and I’ve even started to see kiosks in some of the local fast food places recently.
But how is this different from the case 100 years ago?
In fact, at one factory I visited, workers on the line were given the authority to stop the line if they saw an excessive number of defective parts coming to them. This was during the quality revolution. These modern workers contributed more than the ones at the beginning of automation.
I thought you’d never ask. Unions played a big role in getting a bigger share of productivity for workers. Get rid of the unions, and the share decreases, since, just like fast food workers, many low level factory workers are easy to replace.
You think the factory grinds to a halt if a worker drops out in Vietnam or Bangladesh due to horrible conditions? No, they are trivial to replace.
The factory does grind to a halt if the union can shut it down to get better pay and conditions.
And the same thing has happened with factory work - fewer people produce more. My point was that it makes no sense to talk about worker productivity when you get rid of the workers. However we do have to consider who does the non-automated farm work today - migrant labors, often undocumented. That’s the equivalent of sending labor intensive manufacturing offshore.
Farm labor went to the cities to work in factories. Factory labor went into the service sector. Where do the people automated out of the service sector go? I’m not seeing a place for them. Saying that those who are good fits for repetitive labor should become programmers and knowledge workers seems elitist. You can do it and I can do it, so why can’t everyone do it?
Well duh. Nothing gets done without positive ROI. I’ve mentioned a company which has not automated its SE Asian factories because the workers are cheaper than the machines. But in the US no matter what the intent was, the result was the elimination of factory jobs while factory output grew.
I’ve know enough factory managers to know that they don’t make unprofitable choices just to eliminate workers. But job elimination goes hand in hand with increasing profits.
First, most factories were not massive. They were relatively small places producing product used locally.
Second, you can’t look at a single fast food place. Many are owned by large franchisees who hire a lot more than a few dozen workers. And you have to look at the industry segment in the aggregate, which is big. Unions worked by organizing entire industries, not a factory here or there.
Third, a lot of the loss of manufacturing jobs came from moving the factories out of these towns. You can’t move fast food stores, so the workers should have more clout.
I’ve already mentioned child laborers. Not a lot of skill there, is there. My wife worked in a cannery when I was in grad school. They had some people there whose job it was to put pieces of bacon in cans of pork and beans. The McD worker who handles both customers in the store and in the drive-through line has a lot more skill than that.
As I mentioned, automation turned skilled craft jobs in factories to doing repetitive work. The kind that could be replaced by robots.
You mean in post 874? I’ve already noted that wages do rise in tight labor markets. Perhaps not as much as at other times.
I don’t agree that increased “benefits” should count as increased income growth. Much of this has been so that workers keep up with their previous level of insurance, and often involves an increase in money that had to be paid after employer contributions and things like higher co-pays.
Workers getting five percent raises might celebrate - unless it was given in an environment with 15% inflation. Sure they get more money, but they are not better off. So with benefits.
But at the beginning of automation you required a lot of warm bodies even in conjunction with the automation. Today, you require a very few in most cases where we are talking about highly automated manufacturing. If, say, 1000 workers walk off it’s going to be difficult to keep the plant running and find 1000 replacements quickly. If we are talking about 100 or so workers it’s going to be easier to simply shift those workers from somewhere else. If it’s 10 it’s even easier.
Sure, unions played a role, and still do in other countries. But wrt to what’s under discussion can you really see unions being cool with letting go of 30 or 40 or 50% of the workers without a huge fight? And what would such a fight accomplish? If the union wins then the company has to keep those workers, even when they don’t need them…and keep paying them large salaries in many cases. Or if there is a compromise then the company has to keep some of those workers it no longer needs. If the company wins, well, we get a weaker union where the workers feel betrayed.
I agree, unions did a lot in the past. Many of our safety standards and workers rights came out of such fights. But I’m unsure how they would fit into this new paradigm, especially since I personally think the days of those vertical jobs that you held for an entire career are over, and the workforce has to be more agile. Perhaps unions could change to fit the new reality, but they don’t seem to BE changing, at least that I’m aware of.
The point though is that every other time this has happened someone figured out ways to utilize that idle labor. It didn’t just sit around idle forever, it was used. I’m not saying they would all become programmers…that’s ridiculous. But they might become part of a team that uses humans, machines and AI to optimize the best of each, play to the strengths each has while covering the weaknesses each has. Or they might do something we can’t even conceive of. If you’d asked someone 30 years ago if some kid would make 6 or 7 figures playing a ‘video’ game for others to watch or make videos on their own that people could watch folks would have figured you’d been reading too much sci-fi. 50 years ago they wouldn’t even understand what you were saying and couldn’t fit it into a context that made sense, since that’s not how TV worked. 100+ years and there wouldn’t be even a glimmer of connection.
Go to the rust belt sometime. While, sure, not all of them were, many towns revolved around their factory or mine and were completely dependent on it, since it either employed most of the working people or employed those who supported them.
First (;)) I wasn’t talking about a single fast food place, I WAS talking about all of them. How many do you suppose there are in any given small town? And how many workers do you suppose they all use? Second, though, they are all different chains, so even if they were organized they wouldn’t be organized in the aggregate, unless there was some fast food workers union that transcended all types of fast food in the town. Even if it did you’d be talking a couple dozen people, as I said…unless you are counting the logistics and corporate folks who support the fast food places it’s a handful no matter how you slice it.
But you can easily replace those workers. If everyone at, say, the local Taco Bell walks out tomorrow it’s not going to take that much for the manager to just hire a new crew. I’m sure that local high school up the road has a few kids who would like to have some spending money to go out on the weekends.
Even if you could get everyone who works at Taco Bell, McD’s, Burger King and um…can’t think of another fast food place off the top of my head but just insert another one here…to be on the same page and walk out together you could STILL replace them all fairly easily, unless you could get the whole town to strike too.
I’m unsure of your point. In general child labor in the past didn’t have any power or say and certainly wasn’t getting all those sweet, sweet union bennies, so how does this factor into the discussion? I suppose wrt replacement the only thing that might make a factory manager pause would be that aggregate again…if they had, say, 500 children putting pieces of bacon in the pork and beans then might be difficult to replace them in the short term so maybe give them an extra puddin’ or something? Make them eat their meat first though…
Sorry, I just don’t get the context I guess but I’m obviously missing something.
Well…yeah. As you said, duh. That’s what we are discussing. Again, I must be missing something.
Just related to nothing, but I watched a video this weekend that was talking about a robot chef. It was very cool. I guess they hired various chefs to make signature dishes and modeled all of the movements and ingredients off of what they did. The robot even cleans up after itself. No idea how much something like that could or would cost, but if they could get it down to the level many restaurants could afford it you could have a top rated chef robot make signature dishes from various famous chefs. Even more wild, if you could get the price down where people could afford it you could have a robot cook in your home.
Why do you make this assumption? It seems quite likely to me that automation making low-skilled workers unemployable would turn them into “discouraged” former workers, taking them out of the workforce altogether. People only get counted as unemployed if they are actively seeking work, and they don’t actively seek work if they think it would be futile to do so. (That includes people who could perhaps get a minimum wage job but won’t work for so little.)
That’s a tempting line to take, but when the irrationality is felt by the vast majority, you can’t operate that way. You have to work within people’s strongly held beliefs, however irrational, while perhaps trying to nudge them just a little bit in the direction you want–but only a little at a time. This is a lesson the vanguard of the French Revolution learned the hard way.
But you seem to be eliding the basic point of the post you were responding to. There has in human history thus far always been a large segment of society that is too unimaginative to do any other labor than that which can be fairly simply explained and which then soon becomes routine. That’s what those former farm jobs were; that’s what the old assembly line factory jobs were; that’s what burger flipping was. When you automate the service sector stuff, what is going to be left that is simple to train a dull-witted person to do, but can’t be automated? You’re at a dead end, and talking about people who do creative or mentally “fast” things like playing video games or making entertaining videos doesn’t speak to the challenges a former restaurant dishwasher faces.
ETA: The robot chef does sound cool! It would be a great thing for society if it took us away from the era of eating prepackaged frozen dinners.
I’m not sure you can say that anything “necessitates” a larger piece of the pie that they’re no longer involved in baking. Any more than you can say it’s “necessary” to automate all the jobs.
But I think your example illustrates pretty well all the posts mentioning the wealth funneling to the top.
A 1998 Camaro LS - MSRP $16,625
A 2008 Camaro LS - MSRP $22,995
A 2018 Camaro LS - MSRP $26,900
Adjusted for inflation, the release price numbers are all virtually identical. The company shrinks its workforce from 1000’s to 100’s - but *doesn’t lower prices. It pockets all of the saved money from no longer giving a paycheck to those thousands of people. Is this “siphoning all the wealth to the top?” I’d argue that it is. They are still producing the same product for the same price, but now they make an incredibly larger profit on it because they’ve slashed their labor costs.
I don’t give a flying fuck where the capital for the automation came from - if the now-sacked workers donated it because they just loved the company so much, a venture capitalist wandered in and dropped it at their feet asking for 0.5% back in 50 years, Santa Claus stopped by, or Wells Fargo gave it to them from the millions of fraudulent accounts they opened in their customers’ names.
The end result is the same; the upper management and shareholders absorb the vast majority of the wealth, and the workers get displaced. Bear in mind that even when economies are booming and unemployment is low and employers are clamoring to hire, losing a job under any circumstance is damaging to a person’s earning potential. The longer you are at a company, the more likely you are to be receiving a promotion or pay raise.
Moving to another company starts you back at square 0. You’ll probably have a lower starting salary than the one you lost; you may be lucky enough to maintain the same salary you had at your previous job, but this is far from a guarantee as automation creates a race to the bottom where fewer and fewer jobs are considered “skilled,” and workers become more and more desperate to find new niches.
I believe the point is that not only are humans getting displaced from their jobs - and, up until now, successfully transitioning to others, a trend which is far from guaranteed to continue - the value of their work is continually being degraded. In a free market when skilled jobs become unskilled jobs, the market price for that labor drops. At one point it was considered reasonable to pay a craftsman a middle-class wage for his work. Now that factories can churn out craftsman-grade widgets using automation at a fraction of the cost and all they need are people to push a button here, pull a lever there, even if you have a factory comprised of exactly the same number of workers as before automation, guaranteed their wages are far lower because they are no longer skilled labor.
This is how wealth is being siphoned to the top; same number of hours of work, same industry, same end product, enormously higher profits - but they all go to the top, because the owners have replaced the skilled workers with any ready set of 2 hands + automation and can pay much smaller salaries, at the going market rate.
There will come a point in time in which a dollar value isn’t assigned to humans based on how “hard” their job is, but we’re a long way off from that yet.
I’m pointing out why something happens, and that makes it my ‘worldview’? And then you spout a load of horseshit strawmen of a position (mine) that clearly you don’t understand and wonder why I get annoyed.
Unions played a big role in getting a bigger share of productivity for workers. Get rid of the unions, and the share decreases, since, just like fast food workers, many low level factory workers are easy to replace.