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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: 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.