SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Interesting) by mhajicek on Monday November 21 2016, @07:13PM
That seems tangential. You have to be pretty darned big before it pays to have your own machine repair team, and even then they're only doing the same work that would have been jobbed out. My point is that in the old days your staff would increase close to linearly with your production; that is no longer true. Let's say I did get the high end machine I was talking about and quadrupled my production. If then I wanted to quadruple again, I could buy three more of those machines, and maybe get another programmer and another assistant. That would be four people doing sixteen times the production. At that point it might be with it to get a CNC stock saw and a Fanuc robot arm or two.
Yes there would be some jobs in making and maintaining everything, but far fewer man hours than if I had sixteen mills with sixteen operators. Much less overhead and floor space too.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:39PM
Which is a fair point. Any jobs you farm out locally can't get counted against employment though because you are paying someone's way in the world. You're also paying the way of everyone involved in creating the machines you buy. It doesn't work out the same as if you'd relied on human labor entirely but it's more US wages paid by your existence than if your business had moved overseas.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @03:12AM
You're assuming he doesn't buy the machines from overseas.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 23 2016, @12:33PM
Yep, that's one of the assumptions. There are many necessary for protectionism to fly.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday November 24 2016, @06:19PM
Even if he does, it reduces his contribution back to the U.S. economy but it doesn't completely negate it. It's also one less thing a sometimes hostile foreign power can hold overt our heads later.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @01:25AM
You could even double one of the dudes up as a 'maintenance' guy. When the machines go sideways you just take him off the job to fix it. Then when fixed he continues where he was. He was standing around anyway more than likely.