On November 20, 2012, Adam Davidson writes in The New York Times:
Nearly six million factory jobs, almost a third of the entire manufacturing industry, have disappeared since 2000. And while many of these jobs were lost to competition with low-wage countries, even more vanished because of computer-driven machinery that can do the work of 10, or in some cases, 100 workers. Those jobs are not coming back, but many believe that the industry’s future (and, to some extent, the future of the American economy) lies in training a new generation for highly skilled manufacturing jobs — the ones that require people who know how to run the computer that runs the machine.
The National Association of Manufacturers estimates that there are roughly 600,000 jobs available for whoever has the right set of advanced skills. But still this is a drop in the budget in terms of JOBS CREATION. What is critical, at this juncture, is to address the reality that tectonic shifts in the technologies of production will continue to exponentially destroy and degrade jobs as the production of products and services is less and less dependent on labor (skilled or unskilled) and more and more on the non-human factor––productive capital embodied in human-intelligent machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computer operations, etc.
As the “machine age” matures to levels of sophistication never before witnessed, those jobs in demand to support the new sophistication will need to be filled. Today, there are many places where manufacturing wages are going up but employers still cannot find enough workers because the wage levels are still competitively low and do not attract workers to factory jobs. As a result, many skilled workers are choosing to apply their skills elsewhere rather than work for less, and few young people choose to invest in training for jobs that pay fast-food wages.
As full employment is not an objective of businesses, and companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum, the result has been that private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role. Industry is and has been moving jobs to China and other low-wage, low-cost operation countries, where even there companies are increasingly replacing workers with machines. If companies do not find ways to further reduce costs in America, they can’t compete on a global level.
Manufacturers, who face increasing competition from low-wage/low operational cost countries, can’t afford to pay higher wages. This effectively is causing potential workers to choose more promising career paths. No longer do we live in the 1950s or 1960s or even the 70s or 80s where the job destroying and degrading impact of productive capital had not so completely threatened good-paying jobs, and manufacturing workers could expect decent-paying jobs that would last a long time. But since the Free Trade movement and the subsequent weakening of unions, along with the confluence of human-inteligent machines, superautomation, robotics, digitalization and computers, the social contract has collapsed and employer owner “producers” no longer can compete in a global economy if they are saddled with high-cost labor.
As Davidson concludes workers and manufacturers now “need to recreate a system” — a new social contract — in which their incentives are aligned. But Davidson offers no platform of policies and programs to create that “new system.”
The solution is to significantly increase the number of producer interests in the non-human factor by broadening private, individual ownership of FUTURE productive capital economic growth whereby individuals have the opportunity to be productive as capital owners, as are the wealthiest producers/owners of business corporations, and as labor workers in jobs that are not make-work or contrived to sustain and prop up the economy by confiscating earned income through taxation and redistribution and by incurring unsustainable national debt.
