SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 5, Informative) by iwoloschin on Monday November 21 2016, @11:48AM
The problem is most of these new jobs are knowledge jobs, or at least highly skilled technician jobs. These are not the jobs everyone is clamoring for, being a coal miner doesn't require much in the way of education.
Also, most of the time, the number of jobs created by automation is less than the number of jobs that existed before. That's by design, why else would you automate unless you can save money? It's great if you're a skilled employee who can get a job maintaining the automation, but again, that's a percentage of the jobs that existed before.
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Monday November 21 2016, @12:04PM
Some industries, like coal, are obsolescing. However, a lot of the jobs that were lost to offshoring were already skilled jobs, in the automotive, textile, and furniture industries. Those jobs can come home.
Lots of technicians are retrained coal miners. Lack of education is usually a matter of opportunity, not motivation.
True, jobs per process become fewer, but profitable productivity leads to expansion and...wait for it...more jobs.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @02:50PM
There is no auto assembly jobs to come back. It was wash already due to all the factories foreign makes built and are running. Of course, these new factories didn't go where the older factories closed, the upper midwest. It went instead to the south where the wage is lower and the unions are weak. The upper midwest remains rust bucket, and that won't change any time soon.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @04:40PM
You're most likely absolutely correct. The unions up there have effectively priced themselves out of the market. I expect the same will eventually happen with the industries in the south too, because unions have no history of being able to tell when they are about to go a step too far.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday November 21 2016, @09:48PM
Worker safety (equipment, clothing, training, etc) time off for family issues, overtime pay, holiday pay, breaks, those unions just have to give up on having workers have quality of kife! It is BAD for the US!
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday November 22 2016, @12:08AM
If the economy will not support a business that pays what they're demanding, they do themselves no favors by demanding it. Short term gain, long term unemployment.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday November 22 2016, @12:33AM
Not having to work with a machine that can take your hand off?
8-hour day?
Time to see your family?
Yep. Definitely short-term.
Some unions may be money-grabbing, but generally, daddy or mommy are less likely to die at work because of them.
Also, paying people somlittle they need food stamps or other charity to be able to eat is evil.
If middle and senior managers only got paid up to 200% of the lowest paid worker, there would be enough to pay everyone a bit better.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday November 22 2016, @01:14AM
Very much short term if it causes the business to move the shop overseas or go out of business entirely. Yes. The union's objective should be to provide the highest sustainable standards for its workers. Most unions forget the word "sustainable".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Monday November 21 2016, @05:05PM
Lack of education is usually a matter of opportunity, not motivation.
Occasionally. But sometimes it's a matter of decreasing plasticity of the brain after 40 or 50 or whatever. And sometimes it's a matter of not being "college material" in the first place due to having been born with mild intellectual disability.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:06AM
Just remember that those are the ones with firearms, and can be whipped up into a frenzy at any time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @01:41PM
No, they're really not. It does not take huge amounts of technical skill to go replace a snapped conveyor belt, oil what needs oiling, etc... There aren't as many low-skilled jobs as there would have been back in the early 1900s but there are significant amounts of jobs, both highly and barely skilled, that come with any industrial facility, no matter how automated they are.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @02:19PM
It does not take huge amounts of technical skill to go replace a snapped conveyor belt, oil what needs oiling, etc...
That is correct. It will take minimal training and minimum wage to get that snapped conveyor belt replaced, to oil what needs to be oiled, etc. And because these "new jobs" employees will be relatively disposable temp agencies can supply a rotating stream of bodies that won't require permanent employment, raises, sick days, vacation days, health benefits, etc.
The only people truly benefiting from these "low skill" jobs will be the business/stock owners who can take full advantage of these "low skill" employees.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @04:27PM
Normally I'd agree but unions do still exist and they do tend to get their low-skilled members paid well above what their skills would otherwise merit.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @05:09PM
Sounds like you just described how to fix SDN deployments that blew up.
Doesnt take a smart person to spin up something in SDN. It does take a smart person to design the topology and understand how to fix it when it breaks.
The old days of the MCSE doing password resets are gone (and first went to overseas to foreign nationals), but IT still provides jobs. The easier ones are harder to find, much like easy manufacturing jobs.