Because the argument to justify outsourcing is that the prices will go down. This has never happened. The argument is that automation will allow the prices to go down. This has also never happened. The costs to produce the items may be going down but the savings aren't being passed onto the consumers. It's all free trade lies and people keep believing it.
Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'
I've been saying for quite awhile now that we need to start thinking about what to do when companies start ditching humans in favor of automation. Particularly with the advances in robotics more and more companies are going to go automated. So does anyone really believe anymore that this isn't going to happen? What do you think needs done to handle this situation?
The bulldozer put a lot of guys with shovels out of work and they all found something else to do.
Sometimes the sky only appears to be falling
Ok, so now we have 60,000 people that are now trained in robotics repair...how many of those 60,000 are going to be working at this company that just fired those 60,000?
And that's assuming that they don't have two robots that can repair each other because the odds of both of them breaking down at the same time is virtually nil.
well there would also be jobs in the engineering and programming and deployment of said robots. but your right that there will not be 60k jobs to replace the 60k lost.
As thousands of low-wage workers plan to protest at McDonald’s annual shareholder meeting in Chicago on Thursday the company’s former US boss has warned them: if the minimum wage goes up, McDonald’s is likely to replace them with robots.
“I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry – it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging french fries,” the former US chief executive Ed Rensi told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo.
All-day breakfast awakens McDonald's sales for a third consecutive quarter
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Rensi, who was the CEO of McDonald’s US in the 1990s, said a national minimum wage of $15 an hour – which is being pushed for by an alliance of labor unions and workers – was nonsense and would lead to “job loss like you could not believe”.
And there's the rub. When you replace jobs that people have with automation you are essentially removing that job from the job market permanently. Yeah, you can retrain people to do other jobs. But with everyone being replaced by automation that means that more people will be looking for jobs in a narrowing job market. Which means that: 1: Not everyone is going to get a job because there simply will not be enough positions to fill due to how many applicants there are vs actual jobs. 2: By increasing the amount of people looking for a job in a given field, such as the aforementioned engineering field, the wages for those positions will drop. Which means even more people making less... all due to automation. So what happens when engineers are now making minimum wage? (slightly hyperbolic admittedly....hopefully...) Those engineers will be doing the same thing that McDonalds employees are doing...hollering for a raise in pay. And maybe, while engineering is not easily replaced with machines, there are some engineering jobs that can be. Such as mechanical engineering or electrical engineering. And companies will do it because in the long run it is cheaper to automate.
Eventually we'll get to a point where people can do some things that automation simply cannot do. Such as the creation of things like art, study of science, etc etc. Maybe by then we'll have a society that isn't as dependent on money as we are now, I don't know. But between now and then, something is going to have to be planned and it HAS to be a long range plan. This is not something that a bandaid can be put on in order to kick it on down the road. We need to start considering this NOW and plan for it. The reason being is that if we are to do this properly then small changes need to be made over a relatively long length of time in order to not cause chaos and to get people used to the idea. Yeah, I know, "small changes?" ... yes, small changes. Small things always lead to big things. There isn't a thing in this world that isn't made up of small things. In other words, small things can, over time, make BIG changes when its all added up in the end.
right one of those plans is to give everyone a base allowance , forget the term for it. I don't know how well that will work though.
Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'
I've been saying for quite awhile now that we need to start thinking about what to do when companies start ditching humans in favor of automation. Particularly with the advances in robotics more and more companies are going to go automated. So does anyone really believe anymore that this isn't going to happen? What do you think needs done to handle this situation?
I think it should be handled by producing things that were formerly unprofitable because of labor costs. I see it as an opportunity.
Get some training in robotics repair.
right one of those plans is to give everyone a base allowance , forget the term for it. I don't know how well that will work though.
We need less consumption, not more, at least until we can get the population of humans on the planet down significantly. By the looks of it the microbes are about ready to help us with this big time.
Skilled trades generally. There's already a shortage in my area.
My brother, a marine engineer, used to say to my father, a sea-going tugboat skipper, "You can teach a monkey to ride a bicycle but you can't teach him to fix it."
I think that is a place to start. I think though that in the end we may just have to find a way to get away from the monetary system. People will need to become less materialistic. This is not going to be easy.
Ex-McDonald's CEO suggests replacing employees with robots amid protests | Business | The Guardian
It is going to happen. Now we need to figure out how people are going to get money to live when there is no where nears enough jobs. Get ready, cause this is going to get messy, maybe violent.
Sick people are not productive people. I will worry about population when Alaska has the population density of India.
Moderator's Warning: |
This thread isn't about a superbug or the end days or over population. This thread is about jobs and automation and what to do about it. Stick to the topic. |
What has worked for my career is identifying areas where cheap offshored labor fails then learn where you can mitigate those failures. The same strategy would work with automated tasks.
Adapt.
That's all we can do. Just as England transformed its economy from manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution to today's center of finance and service, so we will do - must do - as our world's economy becomes more automated. Instead of manufacturing, people will have to find their livelihoods in finance or service.
And this isn't to say that manufacturing jobs will go away anytime soon. Think about all the products we have - particularly the ones that are heavy on artistic design - that would be next-to-impossible for today's technology to reproduce through automation. Sure, that can - and very well might - be done as the decades go by...but we humans are pretty doggone good at adaptation - we'll find some other way to make money, I'm sure.
It's not like manufacturing is the largest industry in America anyways, only a minority will cry when manufacturing gets hit (which in the past decades, due to China alone, our manufacturing has declined a lot and has been replaced with other industries).