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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: 2) by DECbot on Monday November 21 2016, @05:55PM

    by DECbot (832) on Monday November 21 2016, @05:55PM (#430701) Journal

    Impractical as it is expensive and time consuming (hurts cycle time). Also, it tends not to work well on shiny surfaces, like aluminum and stainless steel--you know, the stuff you happen to be welding. The biggest this is the human welder can change their path automatically to accommodate bad or less than consistent fit-up. Robotic algorithms to measure and calculate a path based on measuring a joint's fit-up are still iffy. More so on any parts that require traveling around a curve. Also, if the gap between the parts vary by more than a millimeter, you may need to adjust your power, wire feed speed, or travel speed to accommodate. Stuff that experienced welders do really well on the fly but are still impossible for robots to do.

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