Posted on 09/23/2016 10:27:52 AM PDT by Lorianne
Anyone who pays any attention knows that something unusual is happening to employment. Good full time jobs are disappearing, being replaced by lower paying and part time jobs. Experts and especially politicians have explanations and excuses: Offshoring to lower labor countries, excessive rules and regulations, illegal aliens, lack of education in the workforce…. The list goes on and on.
What I rarely hear: automation. When most people hear “automation,” they think “robots.” Most robots are dedicated and expensive and don’t replace that many people.
“Automation” or computer control is what gets the majority of the jobs, and it is not all that obvious.
E-mail is a great example. Almost everyone uses e-mail. Before e-mail, there was “snail mail.”
Every month, people sent you bills, magazines, catalogs, fliers, etc., and a guy in a truck came around once a day and stuffed your mail box full. You wrote checks, put them in envelopes, added stamps, and put them back in the USPS system to go back to your vendors.
Today, I get an average of two pieces of mail a month, mostly fliers that go to everyone in the neighborhood. I can’t remember the last piece of first class mail that I received. The USPS has half the employees it had a few years ago, and its business is basically a package delivery service and a deliverer of junk mail.
However, it is not just the loss of direct jobs. The USPS uses a lot less gas, trucks, tires, equipment, power, etc. All that reduction filters down to other vendors that supply the USPS.
The USPS has lost about 200,000 nicely paid employees since its peak. Since the losses were scattered over the total US, and over time, it wasn’t really all that noticeable. If some US company laid off 200,000 people at once, the uproar would be tremendous.
Even less noticed are the other people affected. People no longer buy envelopes because they don’t use them anymore. The amount of paper used in correspondence has dropped. Workers in forestry, paper mills, trucking, etc. all take a hit.
In addition, 200,000 or more people that would have a good paying jobs don’t have a job with the USPS and have to find something else to do.
It’s not just the USPS. Look at banking. It wasn’t all that long ago that you got paid, went to the bank, made a deposit, got some cash and went home, and wrote out checks to pay bills. Today, your salary is direct deposited, you get cash from an ATM, and pay bills on line. You have little need to ever go inside a bank, and branch banking is taking a hit. All those people that worked in a branch bank that got closed are unemployed.
Again the loss is not all that apparent. A few people here, a few people there. But it all adds up.
This goes on all throughout the economy. Accountants are being replaced by on line tax services. Lawyers are being replaced by automated discovery systems.
Kindle and Amazon came along and killed the bookstores. With a Kindle, you can buy a book on line at 3 AM in minutes and never talk to a human. The people working in forestry, in paper mills, in print shops that printed the books, in warehouses and distribution centers, in trucking, and in bookstores that sold the books all took a hit.
There’s a processing plant in California that makes 7.5 tons of guacamole per hour. It is run by a computer and has one person that oversees the operation. Guacamole is ultra-simple to make, but it is much cheaper to buy than to pay someone at a restaurant to make it. So, the person that made it on site is now gone.
SNIP
Those are part of the picture but the larger part is outsourcing through automation, including especially the computer.
Many higher paid jobs, any 'work' that can be transmitted over the internet are being outsources without actually having to move entire businesses overseas.
Computerization has been a wonderful thing but it has its dark side, like anything else.
All the leftist and offshoring has a dire effect. Go Green!!!
By the time 1/2 of America wakes up to it, it will be too late.
The Bank of America nearest to me got rid of ALL their drive-thru tellers months and months ago; ripped out all the machines for drive-thru transactions, and now still has the same 2 drive-up ATM’s and maybe 1 walk-up.
I can only guess there are less tellers working inside these days. Who has money to put in the bank? Certainly not me.
Still plenty-o-work here posting about headline rather than article content....
Humans need not apply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Nothing new, look at agriculture for example. Few would want to trade today’s farming productivity for a life of dawn-to-dusk hard work our grandfathers had to do just to subsist. As one grain farmer told me, he works like hell for a fewvweeks in the spring and fall, and sits in the coffee shop in between.
The challenge before us is how to harness the power of automation to create new value and new prosperity. The clock doesn’t go backwards.
For those who think that high tariffs are the answer that just raises costs to the consumer and results in a much lower standard of living and the unavailability of some products and services. Major producers would have to decide to be only offshore or only domestic. The domestic industries would exist and even proliferate to some extent but their costs must necessarily be higher and their profit margin would have to be higher to justify being domestic only. It would satisfy those who are uncomfortable dealing with anyone and anything foreign, but the standard of living would be lower for everyone. The wealthiest 1% would be a less affluent group because the very richest would all be domiciled offshore, themselves.
not allowed
Don’t read my posts.
I need this guy's secret. My mailbox is stuffed daily with sales, sales, promotions, offers, real mail, catalogs, papers, etc.
All that said, automation requires and automation repairman, an automation monitor, and an automation seller.
Those can be very costly for small business.
For a nation, though, a huge army of unemployed is unhealthy. It is better to have them employed than to have them turn into an actual army.
Someone finds a solution or we have a big problem
Immigration is not the problem? Automation is the future of farming. How does it help us to import tens of millions of low-skill low-educated peasants from Mexico and Central America as a permanent addition to our workforce in our modern welfare state?
We have always had increasing productivity in manufacturing through innovation like assembly lines and machine tools. The work force in the past moved to other higher-value added jobs created in a dynamic economy. But what we are seeing is American jobs move from higher value-added to lower value-added to government dependency. To be a prosperous country, we need to move workers to higher value-added, not lower value-added.
There have been millions of new jobs created in recent decades to manufacture engineered products sold in the US market. But those jobs were created in China and Mexico because of half-baked globalist ideology.
I’ve been saying this for years. When I first began my professional career there were about 10 clerical people for 40 managers, techs, and field people. Now, there are 1.5 clerical people supporting about 60 other employees.
It didn’t happen overnight. Better software, more efficient communications, teleconferencing, faxing then file transfers, it all added up. At the same time, previous clerical functions were transferred to both management and employees such as time-keeping, inventory, and even routine accounting.
All of those clerical people, accounting techs, mail room jobs, travel agents, and inventory people didn’t suddenly get great careers elsewhere. Their jobs were simply ended through attrition.
Now their young counterparts work part-time in call centers and retail.
I agree.
Lots of people were put ‘out of work’ when farm machinery started to become more common. Higher paid “desk jobs” are being affected today but it’s the same phenomenon.
I had 34 years experience and success in healthcare data mining and analysis. I was lucky that I hit retirement age one month before being replaced by an algorithm. The damn thing is the algorithm does my job better than I did according to my former coworkers plus does not cost the company benefits.
This is true.
Theoretically, the free market would reallocate the resources (human and material) freed up by automation into new productive uses.
But there are regulatory barriers to that, and if the technological change is too fast, the job market may not have time to change fast enough to accommodate the new economic conditions.
We’ve had a lot of technological change in the past 200 years, but never at this fast a pace.
There were plenty of new tech jobs to replace the lost ones, but those got relentlessly outsourced and swamped with H1-Bs.
Compare the USPS-related losses to the number of H1-Bs. Even if you’re generous with calculating jobs on the former, it is swamped by the losses to Americans on the latter.
My son in law was just hired by a German company in upstate South Carolina. Pay isn’t bad, great benefits. Seems like foreign companies are doing better than American companies.
>By the time 1/2 of America wakes up to it, it will be too late.
America has lots of sharp people who know how to make money from available resources. The un/underemployeed are a huge resource. If the government and left stay out of the way those entrepreneurs can get very rich while giving 10s of millions of people a good job. Jobs won’t look like today, but today’s jobs don’t look like they did a century ago or even 20 years ago.
That is a huge IF (gov and left stay out of the way) but it will happen eventually. The longer it takes, the more the entrepreneurs make and less workers make but it will happen when the government-caused pain and entrepreneur’s profit and worker’s needs balance out. The best thing for government to do is cause less pain for everyone.
Two college degrees that you should not get. Software testing AKA QA. Or Chemistry. Both of these jobs and several others are being replaced by $20 an hour foreign workers who hardly speak english and have only been in the country for a few months. While mostly from India these people are contract employees that are hoping for full time work but fear if they don’t get it they will be deported. These people are often graduates of colleges back in India. But they are not top students. Often they are family of foreign students or foreign workers who are here.
The two industries Software QA and Chemistry are now equal to Grocery store assistant manager. And other jobs are going that way. And boy is Tata Consulting and other Indian employee factories making a lot of money off of this racquet.
However, if Trump wins and we get significant tax and business regulator reform, watch for real employment levels to really take off as our middle class revives.
H1Bs are part of the problem, but many more jobs disappear due to the jobs going to people in other countries who can just email the work product where it needs to go. No need for any immigration processes at all.
The upside of this automation/mechanization is that the cost of goods can be kept low or made even lower, so that it takes less money to live at a higher level. The cost of a hand-made item might be prohibitive whereas its machine-made counterpart, produced 24x7 by the thousands every day, is cheap enough that almost everyone can afford it.
The same applies to food production. When a single operator can productively farm 5,000 acres, the cost of the food he produces stays low. But his farming 5,000 acres displaces 9 other farmers who used to farm 500 acres.
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