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Originally posted by johnny861
With the continual increase in technological innovations in the manufacturing industry, I think we are going to see down the road a new trend in the reduction of manufacturing staff globally... I think this shift to foreign workers is a temporary effect... The other day, I was doing a small contract for a company who manufactures cheerleading uniforms... And I got to see the demonstration of a ribbon making machine... computerized. And I thought to myself... how many people would it have taken to make x amount of ribbon in 1920's era shop as opposed to one person literally pushing a couple of buttons and letting the software and the machine do the rest...
it's one small example... but eventually, plants will acquire or develop the techniques to automate the things that workers still have to do today... I believe that is an inevitable reality.
I also remember a few year's ago, we developed a website and an application backend, that would automate pre-press production items and send them directly to industrial digital printers... previously.. they accepted an order.. then a staff of 50 for this division would create the pre-print layouts and the cells then set them up on the printers for their clients... now they just need 10 people to just offload the production pieces and pack them for shipping...
another tiny example, but its examples like these, that are happening EVERYWHERE and in every industry... |
There's some crazy political science stuff written that talks about how our country, as well as Europe, is moving away from manufacturing and industry to becoming a service economy. I don't know that I entirely agree or disagree with that. I don't know that I really think there's much written behind it as to why that is happening. But I agree, there's growth in service sectors and loss in manufacturing. But by no means is this country ready to be that reliable on others for manufacturing, and I would even say such a move would be disasterous for the entire world.
But you're talking about something entirely different. When technology advances and jobs get cut out, generally jobs are created by the advances that generally balance out the loss. But when you're moving jobs away, jobs that are still needed to other countries, that's another effect altogether, because there's no jobs coming back from jobs leaving. The two are not relation, as much Sowell would like to believe. Sending jobs to Tawain does not encourage Toyota to send jobs here.