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Old November 4th, 2016 #1
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Post Automation Is a Worse Cause of Factory Job Loss Than Bad Trade Deals

Automation Is a Worse Cause of Factory Job Loss Than Bad Trade Deals

The Presidential race has, thanks to Donald Trump, focused on American unemployment because of excessive immigration and factories offshored to countries with low wages. But that’s not the whole picture by any means because automation is now changing the work universe fundamentally.

Robots are getting smarter, faster and cheaper, so naturally business is using more of them to cut costs.

The good news is that some manufacturing is moving back to the US to save transportation costs. The bad news is the new factories will need far fewer human workers because robots will be doing a lot of the work. Therefore, if Trump is elected and can improve the inequitable trade deals, the resulting number of jobs returned to America may well be disappointing.

Pat Buchanan reported in 2012 that “the United States since 2000 has lost six million manufacturing jobs and 55,000 factories.” So it’s not a figment of Trump’s imagination that government trade deals have failed American workers.

As a result of the technological forces reducing jobs, Washington should wake up and reduce immigration accordingly, because. . .
Automation makes immigration obsolete.
The record immigration that we have now is entirely inappropriate to what America needs.

Why robots, not trade, are behind so many factory job losses, Associated Press, November 2, 2016

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump blames Mexico and China for stealing millions of jobs from the United States.

He might want to bash the robots instead.

Despite the Republican presidential nominee’s charge that “we don’t make anything anymore, “manufacturing is still flourishing in America. Problem is, factories don’t need as many people as they used to because machines now do so much of the work.

America has lost more than 7 million factory jobs since manufacturing employment peaked in 1979. Yet American factory production, minus raw materials and some other costs, more than doubled over the same span to $1.91 trillion last year, according to the Commerce Department, which uses 2009 dollars to adjust for inflation. That’s a notch below the record set on the eve of the Great Recession in 2007. And it makes U.S. manufacturers No. 2 in the world behind China.

Trump and other critics are right that trade has claimed some American factory jobs, especially after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and gained easier access to the U.S. market. And industries that have relied heavily on labor — like textile and furniture manufacturing — have lost jobs and production to low-wage foreign competition. U.S. textile production, for instance, is down 46 percent since 2000. And over that time, the textile industry has shed 366,000, or 62 percent, of its jobs in the United States.

But research shows that the automation of U.S. factories is a much bigger factor than foreign trade in the loss of factory jobs. A study at Ball State University’s Center for Business and Economic Research last year found that trade accounted for just 13 percent of America’s lost factory jobs. The vast majority of the lost jobs — 88 percent — were taken by robots and other homegrown factors that reduce factories’ need for human labor.

“We’re making more with fewer people,” says Howard Shatz, a senior economist at the Rand Corp. think tank.

General Motors, for instance, now employs barely a third of the 600,000 workers it had in the 1970s. Yet it churns out more cars and trucks than ever.

Or look at production of steel and other
read full article at source: http://www.vdare.com/posts/automatio...ad-trade-deals
 
Old November 4th, 2016 #2
JeffreyWaffenSS
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Even pharmacist are being replaced by automated machines that fill prescriptions now for many drugs. When high paying careers like this become automated we are really fucked.

But the economy is doing great Onigger says.

However Donald Trump has pointed out that most of these jobs are part-time, low paying and seasonal work, not full-time career jobs.
 
Old November 12th, 2016 #3
jaekel
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Except that won't matter b/c there will be so many jobs available in different fields. Construction for infrastructure repairs, energy industry, and factories will combine to provide plenty of work.
 
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