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posted by n1 on Monday November 21 2016, @10:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the post-labor-economics dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Monday November 21 2016, @12:23PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Monday November 21 2016, @12:23PM (#430462) Journal
    It's a question of scale. A factory that employed 1000 people fifty years ago can now produce more employing 100 people. Yes, the factory is still providing employment for 100 people, but that doesn't help the 900 who are out of work. It especially doesn't help the 200 lowest skilled employees to tell them that there are still 100 jobs for the highest skilled ones.
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @12:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @12:28PM (#430464)

    To maintain full employment of Human Resources drones, 900 unnecessary job openings will still be advertised, and Human Resources drones will be paid to look at and ignore every application for jobs that no longer exist.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 21 2016, @03:04PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 21 2016, @03:04PM (#430540)

      It is somewhat serious that the formerly 1000 person factory will have 100 people on the robot maintenance front lines probably producing 10x to 100x what the human laborers produced, but they'll have a 10 person diversity department/council, and a 10 person safety department to handle OSHA stuff, and an extra 10 people just to handle SOX and HIPPA compliance and more and more. It'll never add up to the original 1000 employees back in 1950, but it might reach school district levels of one dead weight per one front line worker, and 200 is certainly a hell of a lot more than the current 0 at that empty facility.

      Its actually a kind of interesting puzzle if you assume 1 support person per front line employee, that means one robot technician needs one IT dude or whatever and working in a factory is an interesting experience and I wonder where we're gonna find the "safety nazi professionals" and "HR specialists in hiring factory workers" and "factory production specific lower to mid level management" and "IT professionals capable of installing hardware that survives factory floor levels of abuse"

      There's a lot of focus on finding robot techs, which oddly enough in 3rd world hell holes where there is no educational infrastructure it seems easier to produce people like that, which is damning for our legacy education system. But aside from that, we gonna need a lot of diversity department and OSHA compliance people and IT folks and accountants and receptionists and just random Joe6Pack folks.

  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday November 24 2016, @07:13PM

    by sjames (2882) on Thursday November 24 2016, @07:13PM (#432520) Journal

    Sure, moving manufacturing back isn't the one true solution, just part of the picture. But it is a part of the picture.