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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, 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.