Automation requires support workers at an even higher skill and pay level. Sure not as many but every job saved in the USA is a job saved in the USA. Every industry is investing in automation, but as one who earned a living in that field for many years, I can tell you it’s not only, or often even primariy because of cost. The main reason is QUALITY. There is virtually no way to build products with manual assembly and achieve six sigma level quality, and that’s just the entry threshold for today’s expectations, at 3.4 defects per million. Automotive companies and others are pushing for 7+ sigma DPM levels, and you cannot achieve them without automation. The same is true across many industries.
That said, I’ll be the first to say that Trump and Pence accomplished something that was partially symbolic and the real work lies ahead. By giving companies some constraints on outsourcing while at the same time improving the US business climate through reduced taxation and federal regulations, the feds will at least be doing their part to encourage the reshoring and expansion of manufacturing in the US.
After that it will be up to individual states to compete for those opportunities, and as BCG has been saying for several years it will be the right-to-work states with the most attractive business climates that will benefit first and more often. A part of that climate will doubtless be intentives at the state level like Mike Pence gave Carrier. Nothing new, but also nothing really sustainable in that. But as long as one state does it, the others feel they must follow suit.
Thanks for the insightful post from someone who was on the front line of manufacturing technology. I have been making many of the same points on FR for years, but from the vantage point of an observer who is more interested in the complementarities of automation with human resources.
The people who build, program, and maintain automated machinery and equipment make little more than production workers. I don’t know of one US company that manufacturers an industrial robot. All of the ones that I used to work with came out of Japan, china, korea, or sweden.
Carrier, like a lot of companies in the manufacturing sector, have to source their input materials from foreign sources. And they have to compete against government subsidized foreign slave labor.
Also, how many HVAC equipment manufacturers still produce 100%
of their product in the US?
Or, how much of ANY US manufactured product has more than 75% US sourced component content?