The jobs were not stolen, and they are probably not coming back either

[Enthusiastic Steward]

The basic crux of the problem is this. Lets say a company has 100 manufacturing jobs. The company realizes that they can replace 80 of those jobs with automation for faster and cheaper production. The company will need to hire a technical staff to maintain the automation they install. Let's be generous and assume that creates 15 positions. What are the other 65 now jobless employees supposed to do? They can not all become technical staff. The company is not going to lay off 80 manufacturing jobs to save money just to replace them with 80 technical jobs that require further education and thus would command a higher salary, that's farcical.

If more and more companies are doing this, the pool of unemployed former manufacturers is going to continue to grow. Yes, there will be jobs being created in the technical field, but not near enough to keep up with supply. R&D might make a dent, but remember that the next generation still exists, and will be going to school with a better understanding of what positions their generation requires and what will be available to them, so anyone unemployed trying to learn a new tradeskill to keep up with technology is also going to be competing with the next batch fresh out of college.

That leaves the service industry, and you'd be coming in at an entry level position that will not pay enough for you to maintain your expenses. At some point you're going to need to prop up the service employees. And its not "They don't deserve more than X/hour because anybody can be a cashier or flip burgers", its that in an increasingly service and consumer-oriented society and economy, people need to be able to PROVIDE those services and if they can't live off of doing that then why bother? Also fewer and fewer people are going to be able to afford the goods your cheap automated manufacturing is producing.

Long term its an unsustainable system in that form unless people can get off their high horse and realize providing a better wage for service employees is not to "devalue" your education but to sustain your economy and country rather than risk the whole thing collapsing.

I was having a similar discussion with a co-worker and I asked them if they had to pick, would they rather their grandchildren be wealthy or Americans? If you want to say wealthy that's fine, its your prerogative, but then you don't get to wave some patriotic bullshit in my face if some $ amount is more important to you than the long-term survival of your country. That's the common sentiment though. No more "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country", its now "I'm gonna get mine, and if you don't well fuck you that's too bad" and that's not a healthy mindset for a nation.

[The Plague]

What about people who simply lack the intelligence to climb the educational ladder? Should they simply starve? This is quite dangerous. If a significantly large group is entirely hopeless then it's possible it becomes a crisis. Heck, even the debt crisis is turning into a lost generation, hopeless of ever getting a job.

By the time automation gets competent enough to really take jobs on this scale I am sure there will be a way to augment your brain so that it can tap directly into the wisdoms of their ancestors through wi-fi

[Tuesdays]

By the time automation gets competent enough to really take jobs on this scale I am sure there will be a way to augment your brain so that it can tap directly into the wisdoms of their ancestors through wi-fi

I find it very funny that people see a few automated welder arms, and say robots took the jobs!

As if China and Mexico are the only two countries that have this technology, but I guess this huge push of misinformation about education will insure that every idiot has a student loan that will last a lifetime.

[zenkai]

They can't be brought back as people imagine them, AKA 1960 blue collar jobs that are enough to feed a whole family.

You were lucky in the USA, you have a long period in which such jobs were widely available. In Canada and in most of Europe, ''blue collar owning his own house'' was possible between 1950 and 1980.

Funny, most of the blue collar workers at my factory own their own house. You have no idea what you are talking about. There are lots of skilled labor jobs out there that pay well.

[sarahtasher]

Funny, most of the blue collar workers at my factory own their own house. You have no idea what you are talking about. There are lots of skilled labor jobs out there that pay well.

Hmm, you think that French and French Canadians blue collars were paid well before WW2 ?

BTW, of course there are still well paid blue collars jobs in the US-automotive workers for instance. The jobs that were lost, however, are not.

[Enthusiastic Steward]

Funny, most of the blue collar workers at my factory own their own house. You have no idea what you are talking about. There are lots of skilled labor jobs out there that pay well.

I think the problem you're running into more and more is a regional discrepancy (which is also why I'm against hiking the national minimum wage across the board. The same number could be more than sufficient in one area and grossly inadequate in another). I grew up in central Wisconsin, in a small town that was mostly manufacturing and farm families. Most of the blue collar factory workers there owned there own house. I recently lived in the bay area of California for several years. Most blue collar manufacturing workers there either do not own their own house or commute several hours a day because that's how far out they have to live to be able to find a house that is affordable on a blue collar salary.

Then there's the peripherals as well. In California my wife and I bought a small two-bedroom townhome in not the greatest area with not very good schools (scored 3/10). That townhome cost $500,000, and that was cheap for the area. Last year we moved back home to the Midwest. We bought a five-bedroom house in a really nice neighborhood with great (9 or 10/10 public schools) for over $100,000 less than our townhome. Yes, our salaries are a bit less as the bay area tends to adjust salaries up to account for the cost of living, but believe me the difference between salary and cost of living is not equivalent, we are much much better off in the Twin Cities making less money than in Silicon Valley.

Your blue collar job might give you a good life in some places, but that is not true everywhere and often where its not true it can be punishing, is the growing problem.

[TheTaurenOrc]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA..thats hilarious.... I work for a Honda supplier, and I can tell you for a fact, that even the most cutting edge automation technology needs CONSTANT attention and maintenance and checking of the parts being used/manufactured.

Then clearly you have been miss informed, I work in Silicon Valley for a manufacturing company. I can tell you that 80% of the assembly tasks do not require any specialist skill sets; but previously they could only be automated by systems that did cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and did indeed require engineers both mechanical and software to maintain.

Now 80% of those tasks can be performed by robots that cost less than $50k AND are not exclusively dedicated to that one task. I know the American mind set is manufacturing = automotive production, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. With the prices so low its becoming accessible to much smaller companies and they can even sacrifice a loss of efficiency temporarily with a cost recovery of only a couple of years. Its literally pennies on the dollar after that.

[Venant]

It seems ridiculous that everyone is talking about how automation is going to take away jobs when you consider that the advancement of automation has most definitely been retarded by the ability to just outsource jobs to other countries that supply what is essentially slave labor.

Furthermore, we should consider why highly advanced nations like Japan and South Korea and Germany still maintain a strong manufacturing industry yet we claim it is impossible in the United States. My guess is that in those countries, the population didn't allow corporate greed to completely screw over the country in pursuit of short term gains, a tendency that seems rampant in the US.

[Enthusiastic Steward]

Then clearly you have been miss informed, I work in Silicon Valley for a manufacturing company. I can tell you that 80% of the assembly tasks do not require any specialist skill sets; but previously they could only be automated by systems that did cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and did indeed require engineers both mechanical and software to maintain.

Now 80% of those tasks can be performed by robots that cost less than $50k AND are not exclusively dedicated to that one task. I know the American mind set is manufacturing = automotive production, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. With the prices so low its becoming accessible to much smaller companies and they can even sacrifice a loss of efficiency temporarily with a cost recovery of only a couple of years. Its literally pennies on the dollar after that.

In addition to what you said, it's also important to remember that just because automation requires attention and maintenance does not magically make the human resources required equivalent to the manufacturing requirement that the machines are now doing. One skilled technician can attend to and maintain automation that is doing the job of six manufacturers. Even if you add a person doing quality control just for that process (realistically it would be a small team of QC and a small team of technicians for the entire automation line, but hypothetically here), that's still two people doing the work of six.

More specific personal example:
I worked for a start-up in Silicon Valley. We had one of our R&D platforms that required 4 people to run to create approximately 35 linear feet of material. Now this was an R&D platform, so not optimized as it doesn't pay to build in extensive automation during R&D. As we refined the process and moved more towards production, we eventually created a production line that could be run by a single person, who was giving the constant attention, to produce 5,000 feet of linear material in the same time-frame.

Point being that, as technology and automation continues to improve, production lines and process are increasingly simply not going to have the manufacturing jobs to begin with as more and more is designed with minimal human component from the start.