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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: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Monday November 21 2016, @04:21PM
While the Chinese worker may get only about $3 an hour, they get other benefits such as safety nets to protect them when they try to commit suicide.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday November 21 2016, @08:53PM
Yes, and they get to sleep in the company communal dormitory for free so that they can be woken up at any time of day and night to go to work when there's a spike in demand. It also means they can be paid less since they don't have to rent their own home.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by el_oscuro on Monday November 21 2016, @11:07PM
1. Get free housing
2. Get less pay
3. Get woken up at any time of day or night whenever needed
Sounds like my stint in the US Army.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 1, Troll) by turgid on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:13AM
I bet the US Army has a lower suicide rate.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].