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Pundits will debate the wellsprings of Donald Trump's election triumph for years. Right now, cultural explanations are in the lead. Multiple researchers and journalists are stressing the role of "racial resentments" and xenophobia as the deepest sources of Trump's appeal. And such explanations cannot be dismissed.
But the decades-long decline of U.S. manufacturing employment and the highly automated nature of the sector's recent revitalization should also be high on the list of explanations. The former is an unmistakable source of the working class rage that helped get Trump elected. The latter is the main reason Trump won't be able to "make America great again" by bringing back production jobs.
The Rust Belt epicenter of the Trump electoral map says a lot about its emotional origins, but so do the facts of employment and productivity in U.S. manufacturing industries. The collapse of labor-intensive commodity manufacturing in recent decades and the expansion in this decade of super-productive advanced manufacturing have left millions of working-class white people feeling abandoned, irrelevant, and angry.
To see this, one has only to look at the stark trend lines of the production data, which show a massive 30-year decline of employment beginning in 1980. That trend led to the liquidation of more than a third of U.S. manufacturing positions. Employment in the sector plunged from 18.9 million jobs to 12.2 million.
[...] In fact, the total inflation-adjusted output of the U.S. manufacturing sector is now higher than it has ever been. That's true even as the sector's employment is growing only slowly, and remains near the lowest it's been. These diverging lines—which reflect the sector's improved productivity—highlight a huge problem with Trump's promises to help workers by reshoring millions of manufacturing jobs. America is already producing a lot. And in any event, the return of more manufacturing won't bring back many jobs because the labor is increasingly being done by robots.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @11:22AM
You've got a flaw in your logic there, MIT guy. Already producing a lot in no way precludes us from producing even more. The upper limit is determined by resources, manpower, and machinepower not by how much we have produced in the past.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 21 2016, @11:58AM
"The upper limit is determined by resources, manpower, and machinepower"
You forgot another important factor. Market saturation. That doesn't mean that every consumer on the planet owns one of your gadgets, of course. It means that all consumers who are likely to need or want your gadget in preference to competitor A's gadget has one. Exceeding market saturation ensures that you operate at a loss. This is one of the things that Apple keeps in mind when they are preparing to launch a new device. They make it pretty clear that they are only going to make enough for the more elite and/or the more diehard fans to get a new device, and the less elite will have to take last year's castoffs.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @01:34PM
No, I didn't. Nobody's talking starting up extra factories to produce the same things already being produced. What's being discussed is moving existing manufacturing back and creating an environment where new manufacturing will not leave in the first place.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Monday November 21 2016, @03:34PM
You can bring more manufacturing back to the US, but you won't bring many jobs with it. Manufacturing is becoming more automated and efficient. Productivity increases while employment is flat or decreases.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @04:23PM
Any positive number of jobs is a positive number of jobs. Nobody's looking for early 1900s numbers, just positive ones.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @04:36PM
One additional worker getting a job already is a positive number. If that's all you need to be satisfied, I guess that's possible to achieve.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @06:25PM
Needless to say they're hoping for more than one.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday November 21 2016, @04:37PM
Yep, and you're barely going to get enough to notice. At a likely cost of trade wars that may end up making your inflation-adjusted standard of living go down. Neoliberalism is indeed a shitty political philosophy, but the underlying economics of free trade are reality-based.
And the rest of us will be left with the decidedly xenophobic authoritarian regime you traded for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @05:11PM
If there is a populist loose on America, then nonsense like SJW-style identity politics while ignoring basic economics of a vast segment of population put him there! If you care more about who uses which restroom than you do whether a great sector of the population has something to put on the dinner table tonight, then you do not get to lecture about economics ever.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday November 21 2016, @05:21PM
Bullshit. The median income of trump voters was higher than the median income of Hillary voters, according to exit polls. You wanted a xenophobic idiot because you're xenophobic idiots, not because your economic needs were ignored.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @06:24PM
That'll be enough of that, you two. This was an intelligent discussion up until now.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday November 21 2016, @07:13PM
Oh fuck off. Defending stupid pieces of shit with dishonesty doesn't deserve respect. The GGP lied. You want to ignore that lie, so you did and focused on my tone. Well boo hoo.
Letting lies and bullshit are exactly why Trump got elected, as much as you love to complain about how people telling the truth in a way that hurts your feelings are.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:34PM
Your tone is what got Trump elected. Rest assured, without the "I hate the self-righteous dickweeds on the left" vote, Trump would have lost.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:23AM
From the outside looking in, I'd say that the Democrats running a non-likeable right winger was as much a reason for Trump, who is pretty left, or at least pretends to be, when it comes to the truly left things like decent jobs for the common person.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:56AM
Honestly, what made Trump win could be called as anything that would have swayed enough votes the other way. Not being assholes would have done it, not running Hillary, even just telling her to stop smirking every time he spoke in the debates might have done it. Not calling half the nation racist, misogynist, homophobic assholes would definitely have cinched it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @06:35PM
Possibly, possibly not. That the economics of swiftly implemented, unrestricted free trade are decidedly unfavorable to those with a high standard of living is undeniable though. For free trade to work without giving the party with the higher standard of living a fiscal kick in the crotch, the trading economies need to be much, much closer to parity than, for example, the United States and Mexico are. You can either accomplish this rapidly and with much pain by dropping all trade barriers or you can do it slowly and sanely so the economies of the involved nations have time to adjust.
Every President since Clinton chose the former and we've seen quite a lot of pain from it. Hopefully Trump will manage to get us back to somewhere that we're not hemorrhaging jobs but I'm not holding my breath.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday November 21 2016, @07:05PM
It's been said the the problem is because capital is free to go where labor is cheap, but labor isn't free to go where living is cheap. I don't know how true that is, but it's certainly a factor. The reluctance to relocate is also a factor within an area of free movement, and I can't evaluate the weighings. But clearly labor has a cost when it moves...possibly selling an old house, buying a new one, and dealing with the bureaucracy. And capital has a cost when relocating, but less so when opening a new factory.
OTOH, automation currently typically de-skills jobs it doesn't eliminate, so you can hire a cheaper labor force. And this is another factor. It looks as if the next step is going to be replacing the low end jobs, but there are some indications that it may also continue cherry-picking the expensive talent. I.e., the people who have trained for years to become skilled in their art, whatever that is. Currently there is work on jobs typically done by paralegals, non-partner lawyers, oncologists, and probably other specialties I haven't heard of as well as work on replacing truck drivers.
Jobs not only aren't coming back, they're going to increasingly disappear. A factory that employs 20 people is not an unreasonable projection for 10 years from now. Every other job from stock boy to CPA is likely to be automated into ephemeralization. (You hire a temp CPA when you need your books audited...the rest of the time the computer does it. You have a single lawyer on retainer to make court appearances, but all the case prep is done by the computer system. etc.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:31PM
Interesting theory. I won't be putting my money on it but it's interesting.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shipofgold on Monday November 21 2016, @12:12PM
The upper limit is determined by resources, manpower, and machinepower
Ummm, the upper limit is determined by demand/price. Nobody is going to produce something just because they can. They need to sell it at a profit.
The dirty little secret to bringing back all those jobs is that if you get one of those jobs, the manufacturer will likely want to pay you the same as your Asian counterpart. Who is willing to sit on an assembly line for $10 an hour? If Trump's plans "force" or "allow" the manufacturers to pay $25 an hour, the price of the product is going to double...so even if you are making $25 an hour you probably won't be able to afford it.
All those "whites with no college degree" who put their hopes on Trump won't be happy either way.
I've told my kids they need to be shooting for jobs repairing the robots. We ain't going back to the old days. Sorry.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday November 21 2016, @01:17PM
You think that Chinese worker gets $10 an hour? That's very wrong: It's actually $3 maximum [bls.gov], and many make far less than that.
Of course, there are workers in America who make that kind of money - illegal immigrants, those who get the tipped minimum wage while their manager steals their tips (this is not uncommon), and some of those who are illegally classified as "independent contractors".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by t-3 on Monday November 21 2016, @02:06PM
I read an interesting story related to your comment earlier: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_secret_cost_of_chinese_buffets_part_1_20161102 [truthdig.com] They're making more than I expected, actually within the legal range at the high end (a lot of people around here would call that 2k a month a good job)
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Monday November 21 2016, @04:21PM
While the Chinese worker may get only about $3 an hour, they get other benefits such as safety nets to protect them when they try to commit suicide.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday November 21 2016, @08:53PM
Yes, and they get to sleep in the company communal dormitory for free so that they can be woken up at any time of day and night to go to work when there's a spike in demand. It also means they can be paid less since they don't have to rent their own home.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by el_oscuro on Monday November 21 2016, @11:07PM
1. Get free housing
2. Get less pay
3. Get woken up at any time of day or night whenever needed
Sounds like my stint in the US Army.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 1, Troll) by turgid on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:13AM
I bet the US Army has a lower suicide rate.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @01:30PM
You haven't been paying attention to the proposed methods to return manu jobs here then. They're talking tarrifs, which absolutely will allow manufacturers to employ people at a good wage. Their other effects on the economy are certainly arguable but that is not.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @02:12PM
So the Republicans are all about tarrifs to protect the union jobs? Isn't that supposed to be "socalism" or something? I need to re-wind the Fox News loop from a couple of years ago to see how we were supposed to feel about that then.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @04:32PM
Nope, it's protectionism. Different thing but they do often get used together. Don't take me as advocating in favor of it though. Today I'm just explaining the thinking behind it. My position on protectionism vs. globalism is a bit more nuanced than either political party's.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday November 21 2016, @08:01PM
The problem with protectionism is that US companies import products made cheap overseas, often by their own subsidiaries.
Protecting against cheap Indian Steel sounds like easy politics. But tariffs against Ford/GM cars made in Ford/GM plants 20 miles south of the border, or Apple/Intel/Microsoft gizmos made in Asia is an attack on US companies' profits, which is unlikely to get much congressional support.
In fact, even that cheap Indian steel is needed to maintain someone's profit margin, so every tariff turns into a political stuggle between the lobbyists of the local makers and the lobbyists of the heavy users.
There's a reason why Republicans typically push for free trade (democrats too, but we're talking about the new guy reversing course).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:46PM
That will almost certainly be a problem for Trump, yes.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday November 21 2016, @12:20PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @01:32PM
Robots are useful, yes, but they can't and don't do everything. Nobody's saying it will take us back to when the steel mill workers numbered in the millions but it will create jobs if it works.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @03:22PM
> but it will create jobs if it works.
Not necessarily. Money supply is not infinite. Money spent inefficiently on some jobs is money that can't be spent efficiently on other jobs. Net employment may easily go down as a result of misallocated spending.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @04:26PM
It doesn't need to be. If you profit from making things is what matters. Poor business decisions are outside the scope of this particular study.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @05:11PM
Such logic, much wow
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 21 2016, @06:41PM
Money supply is not infinite.
Money supply is near irrelevant. There appears to be a slight negative correlation between unemployment rate and inflation, but that's about it.
Money spent inefficiently on some jobs is money that can't be spent efficiently on other jobs.
How do you spend money "inefficiently"? Kite checks? What it sounds like you're saying is that the product purchased, employment of people in the furtherance of certain tasks is inefficient. That isn't a property of the money used. This would be better described as employing people inefficiently. And t would be a problem even if no money were involved, say you were using some weird barter or gift economy system (both which are often associated with the act of employment, let us note!).
My point behind this is that spending money is a poor description of the complicated economic transaction of employment, particularly because it focuses on a rather unimportant part of that transaction. And going from that to money supply veers into near complete irrelevance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @07:47PM
> My point behind this is that
Your point is that you are just smart enough to be willfully obtuse, but not smart enough to realize that we can see through it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 21 2016, @09:20PM
Nuh huh, you wrong
Look, I realize you think you're saying something relevant. But this is the essence of charlatans, kooks, and anyone who couldn't argue their way out of a wet paper bag.
Going back to the post I criticized, the phrase "money supply" shouldn't even be there. I explained why.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:31AM
> Look, I realize you think you're saying something relevant.
Hello, mcfly? Are you looking in a mirror when you write that? Of course I didn't say anything relevant, I just flamed your ass for a reductively meaningless criticism.
Seriously, is this some sort of "I'm rubber and you're glue" defense?
you are a damn child
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:07AM
a reductively meaningless criticism
And I explained why it wasn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @10:15PM
Not necessarily. Money supply is not infinite.
Yes it is, you total ignoramous! Where did you study economics? Trump University?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Monday November 21 2016, @04:13PM
I forget if I've explained this here yet. I run a small prototyping shop as part of a small medical device company. It's just one five axis CNC, my assistant, and me. We've recently expanded our duties to include some production, and I've been researching options for increased throughput. There are two ways I could quadruple production, both at about the same cost. I could buy three more of the same low-end machine, and hire more people to work them; this is the old fashioned way. The problem with that is that people tend to be unreliable; they're hard to train, they make mistakes, they break things, they go on vacation and sometimes just don't show up. The other option is to buy one high end machine with a built in pallet pool and high tool capacity. My one, already trained and proven assistant and I could set it up without more help, and it could run just about 24/7/365. More production, fewer mistakes, no additional workers. Plus, once the machine is paid for I'd still have it, whereas if you stop paying people they go away.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @04:22PM
That's a valid point for SMBs. But only for SMBs. Once you hit a certain scale, it's cheaper to hire a full time maintenance crew than call in someone when necessary.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Monday November 21 2016, @07:13PM
That seems tangential. You have to be pretty darned big before it pays to have your own machine repair team, and even then they're only doing the same work that would have been jobbed out. My point is that in the old days your staff would increase close to linearly with your production; that is no longer true. Let's say I did get the high end machine I was talking about and quadrupled my production. If then I wanted to quadruple again, I could buy three more of those machines, and maybe get another programmer and another assistant. That would be four people doing sixteen times the production. At that point it might be with it to get a CNC stock saw and a Fanuc robot arm or two.
Yes there would be some jobs in making and maintaining everything, but far fewer man hours than if I had sixteen mills with sixteen operators. Much less overhead and floor space too.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:39PM
Which is a fair point. Any jobs you farm out locally can't get counted against employment though because you are paying someone's way in the world. You're also paying the way of everyone involved in creating the machines you buy. It doesn't work out the same as if you'd relied on human labor entirely but it's more US wages paid by your existence than if your business had moved overseas.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @03:12AM
You're assuming he doesn't buy the machines from overseas.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 23 2016, @12:33PM
Yep, that's one of the assumptions. There are many necessary for protectionism to fly.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday November 24 2016, @06:19PM
Even if he does, it reduces his contribution back to the U.S. economy but it doesn't completely negate it. It's also one less thing a sometimes hostile foreign power can hold overt our heads later.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @01:25AM
You could even double one of the dudes up as a 'maintenance' guy. When the machines go sideways you just take him off the job to fix it. Then when fixed he continues where he was. He was standing around anyway more than likely.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DECbot on Monday November 21 2016, @04:15PM
Robots are useful, yes, but they can't and don't do everything.
Precisely! Take welding robots for example. Sure they can go faster and have more repeatablity. However, they are very inflexible for doing anything beyond the assigned task. When given a bin of bad parts, a manual welder will attempt two or three parts with a bad fit-up before inspecting the bin and complaining to the production manager that stamping has a problem. A robot will happily make terrible welds all day at twice the production rate of the manual welder and never complain of the bad fit-up. Thereby wasting an entire day's worth of production and generate perhaps thousands of dollars of scrap.
American manufacturing should absolutely add robots where it makes sense, and use people where it makes sense. In my example, there normally is an operator that would be responsible for loading and unloading parts from that section of the production line that could identify bad robotic welds. This is the common difference between American operators and operators and foreign manufacturing facilities, the Americans tend to care about quality at the lowest levels and will raise awareness to problems. In third world and developing world manufacturing plants, that level of ownership is not as prevalent and the operator cares little more than the robot.
So, yes, robots will take many of skilled laborers positions, but they cannot do everything. 20 years ago, 100 manufacturing jobs went to $NOT_USA, and if they come back now, there will be 80 robots and 30 laborers. However, the point is even 30 jobs added back to the US is better for the US than 0 jobs getting added. The more of these positions that return to the US, the more opportunities there are available for people without MBAs or Harvard degrees. This is a win for anyone with just a high school diploma or a technical degree.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday November 21 2016, @04:47PM
When given a bin of bad parts, a manual welder will attempt two or three parts with a bad fit-up before inspecting the bin and complaining to the production manager that stamping has a problem. A robot will happily make terrible welds all day at twice the production rate of the manual welder and never complain of the bad fit-up.
You have discovered a bug in the robot's programming: "evaluate fit-up" is missing. Add it. But I admit that I'm unfamiliar with welding. Is this something that's impractical to measure automatically?
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday November 21 2016, @05:55PM
Impractical as it is expensive and time consuming (hurts cycle time). Also, it tends not to work well on shiny surfaces, like aluminum and stainless steel--you know, the stuff you happen to be welding. The biggest this is the human welder can change their path automatically to accommodate bad or less than consistent fit-up. Robotic algorithms to measure and calculate a path based on measuring a joint's fit-up are still iffy. More so on any parts that require traveling around a curve. Also, if the gap between the parts vary by more than a millimeter, you may need to adjust your power, wire feed speed, or travel speed to accommodate. Stuff that experienced welders do really well on the fly but are still impossible for robots to do.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @04:48PM
You think the companies using robots are not doing quality control?
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday November 21 2016, @06:14PM
Except for aerospace, aggressive quality control may put in QC checks for the quality of the welds every 25 parts. Otherwise, it is just a simple 'is there a weld here check'--and these checks are still done by a person. Additionally, production continues making bad welds while the operator discusses the bad welds to QC.
Anyway, my argument was never that these checks weren't done, but rather that the (1) the quality of the quality control checks vary by workforce possibly allowing large volumes of bad parts to be produced and (2) both the QC supervisor and the operator making the checks are jobs that could be in the US if the manufacturing returned. Sure, there will be less welding and machinist positions than previously, but there will be additional operator, production supervisor, engineering, technician, procurement, and HR type jobs if the manufacturing returned to the US. From my discussions with engineers working with foreign plants, they are installing robots in those places because the workforce doesn't have any competent welders and they are looking for big data solutions for weld monitoring because can't trust the quality control measures in place.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 21 2016, @07:24PM
When you say "robots are useful ... but they can't do everything" you are technically correct, but misunderstanding things terrible. You need to date your facts. Robots today have certain limits that constrain their usefulness. Robots next year will have fewer limits, and the year after that fewer still. To get a feel for what this means look at the robots from 10 years ago. (In the first sentence I engaged in a bit of rhetoric, as the improvements are not smooth, but stepwise, and often there will be several years without much improvement.)
The thing to notice is that unless you are working with an extremely modern factory, or actually engaged in the development of robots, your image of them will be several years, if not several decades, old. A new factory will use state of the art, or even bleeding edge, robots. This will entail startup costs of debugging, but the factory will be in use for a long time, so you need to plan ahead. And jobs are designed to work with the particular robots installed. This allows maximal efficiency of the robots, and puts the places where they are inflexible at minimal disadvantage. But those places keep changing. A factory build next year won't have the same jobs as one built last year. Which minimizes the advantage of experience when moving between factories. Etc.
I don't expect the big loss of jobs to come within the next two years, but I do expect it in less than four years. This will be largely from truck drivers and those who service them. And it won't happen all at once, but it will snowball rapidly as the insurance companies decide that automated trucks deserve a lower cost for insurance. (Or, possibly, more and more companies decide to self-insure for vehicular damage.)
Naturally a lot of this depends on political decisions, but I don't really see this administration as acting in a way that businesses would object to.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:44PM
I'm really not. You're neglecting the fact that large companies will run a specific site into the ground before they shut its doors. There are factories and industrial operations operating now from sites over a hundred years old. Granted they've been updated some but they're nothing near as automated as a site would be if built today with automation first in mind. There's also the fact that buying extremely expensive machines is a very risky investment unless you're absolutely certain you will be able to make your money back on them before they become obsolete. Both of these factors keep automation growth in check.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @02:11PM
The upper limit is determined by resources, manpower, and machinepower
The upper limit is based on the lower limit that the minimum wage can be reduced to (if not eliminated completely).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @04:35PM
Industry rarely pays minimum wage, even to the most unskilled laborers. Unions have a vested interest in seeing that they don't and most large industries are unionized. That does affect profitability and is worth a discussion but it's also outside the scope of this FA.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday November 21 2016, @06:45PM
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:29PM
Interesting theory but it doesn't hold as much water as it needs to when you compare unskilled entry wages at a union shop to a comparable non-union shop.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 21 2016, @09:39PM
but it doesn't hold as much water as it needs to when you compare unskilled entry wages at a union shop to a comparable non-union shop.
Why don't people flee for the union shops, if the wages are that much better?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:48PM
Um, they do. There are only so many jobs per shop though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday November 24 2016, @06:50PM
Actually, no. As you drive the minimum wage down, you reduce demand for your product.