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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, @02:31PM
Said the smarmy little idiot who never set foot in a factory.
Different AC here. I worked in a factory for several years and these days some of my clients are manufacturers. Swapping things out is a prized luxury. It means the line is down for as short a time as possible, and shipping the parts out to be repaired or replaced is preferable rather than having a machinist or tool maker (or two) on the premises (let alone the investment in their tools, machinery and square footage).
Making sure we can track how many replacement parts are immediately available, and the lead time on getting the others repaired/returned is critical. Tying up capital in replacement parts is a much easier bill to swallow when compared to supplying a machine shop. No depreciation, no parts/maintenance on the machine shop tools/machinery, no high salaried skilled staff (just a low wage parts guy), no wasted space/utilities/overhead for the shop ... the list can go on and on.
Setting foot in a factory does not make you some sort of genius, it just means you've seen the new world of manufacturing (from the 90's) first hand and how it will continue to squeeze out most skilled labor.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @04:47PM
Depends on the size of the shop. Large shops it is still sometimes cost-effective to have your own machinist. When it's not, you hire a local(-ish) one because you don't want to have to ship something overseas and wait on it to get back; you want your part bloody well now. Either way, an American machinist is getting paid.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.