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The big issue is supply and demand. With increasing automation and global supply chains, there is a huge amount of labor available relative to the need. In the

• rapsey 6y ago
  Automation is a drop in the ocean compared to the effects of trade agreements that resulted in jobs being exported.
  • altvali 6y ago
    Could you back that up with data? I'm curious to know by how much and how you reached that conclusion.
    • scohesc 6y ago
      It's something that's so obviously common sense that you really don't need a study to back it up - let alone in today's culture any study that would even suggest this would be in the news with labels of 'racist' or 'alt-right'.
      • deleted 6y ago
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    • rapsey 6y ago
      I would like to see someone back up the data with regards to automation. Why is the burden of truth on the other side? Fact of the matter is Chinese factories that produce the world's gadgets employ millions. This is reality and not some mythical fully automated factories. Globalism made the very poor in China/Mexico/etc. richer, created their middle class and it made the very rich in US/EU even richer at the cost of US/EU middle class. Saying how that is irrelevant now because of automation just smells like new propaganda to replace the old one so that the rich can get richer and the rest of us arguing propaganda.
      • omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
        I don't think offshoring is irrelevant now. With that said, I think there was a bigger push towards offshoring in the past than there is today. Now automation is playing a larger role. As an example, the company I work for has been offshoring positions since the 90s, while simultaneously and incrementally automating other positions. There isn't much left to offshore, but we're still automating work.
      • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
        China is America's largest consumer of automation equipment. 25%. They, like America, are automating at a furious rate and have been for 2 decades. The end-game is, of course, little need for labor at all. Like America China will have to face this and find some way to keep millions from starvation. And soon.
      • AWildC182 6y ago
        While tangential, it should be noted that creating jobs in Mexico and Canada will probably always be a net good for the US even if it means some net loss of jobs in the near term. Being closely connected with populous neighbors whom you can enrich such that they can buy your stuff will vastly strengthen the US's position as well as the NA bloc. We want manufacturing in mexico because we're connected by literal rail lines and can ship products back and forth far more readily and in an environmentally friendly way. Further we have mutual interests in terms of policy and defense. This may sound controversial but it's likely the only way forward for the US to compete with China long term. Trying to ostracize our neighbors and go it alone against a country 4x our size is not a geopolitically sound move.
        • rapsey 6y ago
          > While tangential, it should be noted that creating jobs in Mexico and Canada will probably always be a net good for the US even if it means some net loss of jobs in the near term. Yeah the rust belt job loss is only temporary. They will come back any day now. > We want manufacturing in mexico because we're connected by literal rail lines and can ship products back and forth far more readily and in an environmentally friendly way. Yeah I'm sure those Mexico factories have all the environmental regulations that US/Canada does. > This may sound controversial but it's likely the only way forward for the US to compete with China long term. The US has given China it's growth. It has exported jobs and exported it's middle class along with it. It has also exported much of it's high tech advantage into China. All for the short term benefit of the investor class and it's billionaires. Competing with China could start by not giving away every advantage. > Trying to ostracize our neighbors and go it alone against a country 4x our size is not a geopolitically sound move. The only ostracizing I do is towards the billionaires who shape economic policy to their benefit and everyone else's expense.
  • hansjorg 6y ago
    Jobs exported to countries where the violent suppression of workers rights and of any kind of actual democracy wouldn't cause a fuss at home. What the US establishment refers to as keeping a country 'business-friendly'.
    • rapsey 6y ago
      And of course environmental regulation.
  • jerkstate 6y ago
    Another way to phrase jobs being exported is the rise in imports of partially completed goods for final assembly locally. This is how the USA "manufacturing output" continues to go up while employment goes down - we no longer smelt steel, cast parts, weave textiles, pick-n-place electronic components, etc in the amount that we used to. Those things are done overseas where environmental and worker regulations are laxer and then the parts are imported for final assembly, and then in many cases re-exported. Data to back this argument up is available on FRED if you're interested.
• nicoburns 6y ago
  I'd argue the underlying cause is poor wealth distribution. There's lots of demand for labour, just not from people/companies/industries that have the means to the pay for it.
  • danans 6y ago
    > There's lots of demand for labour, just not from people/companies/industries that have the means to the pay for it. I agree, but I think you mean income distribution and latent demand. The idea is that a lot of people would be consuming more goods and services if they weren't so cash strapped. Some of this is also affected by wealth distribution also, though.
    • neutronicus 6y ago
      Latent demand and wealth distribution interact strangely. There's a bunch of work no one wants to do that gets dumped on people who need the money by everyone who can afford it. Elder Care is an obvious examples in the US, along with Child Care to a lesser extent. Lots of people consume free or budget versions of these services with which they're dissatisfied, and the root of their dissatisfaction is often that they can't pay enough to get the people providing the service to accept micromanagement, either because there aren't enough of them to implement it, or because they don't need the money enough to put up with it. I guess the flat-wealth-distribution case is most people grudgingly using some economy-of-scale option leveraging the people with more patience for this kind of work, and a few control freaks either doing it themselves or economizing elsewhere to pay for a boutique option.
      • danans 6y ago
        > I guess the flat-wealth-distribution case is most people grudgingly using some economy-of-scale option leveraging the people with more patience for this kind of work, and a few control freaks either doing it themselves or economizing elsewhere to pay for a boutique option. That can be said of practically every industry. They are all segmented by cost/quality, whether that quality is real or perceived. That said, the goal behind reducing wealth and income disparities isn't to flatten them completely, it's to put a floor under the standard of living of those at the bottom of the wealth/income distribution. That doesn't mean everyone will be consuming boutique products and services, but it means that latent demand, currently repressed by lack of income/wealth, will become active demand, and money velocity in the economy will increase.
• staticautomatic 6y ago
  "In the past, a union strike at a plant would see a generous long-term contract and benefits for the workers." Based on what I've read about the history of blue collar strikes in America, this scenario is far more often the exception than the rule.
• supernova87a 6y ago
  I agree with this very much. Despite the observations (and people's incorrect intuition about tight labor, before this virus at least), there is a surplus of willing labor to do work. To the extent that part-time gig work has become a necessity for people to stay afloat. You cannnot fundamentally change the situation or get wages/labor power to increase by restricting who can work, artificially raising wages, etc. The mass action of people numbers is hard to counteract, and as long as there are way more people than required for the demand for labor, we will be in this situation.
• rmrfstar 6y ago
  Larry Summers is simply not credible. This is an "oh fuck things are about to get out of hand, let's try to insert ourselves into the debate so we don't get locked out" paper. Here is Larry Summers from his 1998 speech "The Challenges of Success". " The world looks very different than it did at the beginning of this decade, a time when America was said to be in decline. It is now clear that America will grow faster in this decade than Japan and Europe. Their four-decade-long story of convergence has ended and America is pulling further ahead. Why this success? A large share of the credit must go to the two forces that this conference brings together: technology and finance. The twin forces of intonation technology and modern competitive finance are moving us toward a post-industrial age. And if you think about what this new economy means - whether it is AIG in insurance, McDonald's in fast-food, Walmart in retailing, Microsoft in software, Harvard University in education, CNN in television news - the leading enterprises are American. " Edit: I tried deleting this, because it is an ad-hominem, which feels good but adds nothing. It is just endlessly frustrating that one of the principle architects of the current status-quo demands so much attention. Summers helped structure post-Soviet Russia, viciously attacked Brooksley Born when she sought to regulate the swaps market, among many many other serious lapses in judgement. And yet, when he and his students come up with another insane policy proposal we have to take it seriously and challenge it on the merits. It feels a lot like the allied strategy during WW2 of saturating enemy air defenses. [1] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-bill-clinton-and-american-financiers https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-bill-clinton-and-amer...
  • twic 6y ago
    I'm not hugely surprised that the OCR of the scan of the transcript of the speech says "intonation technology", but i'm mildly amused that both Stoller and you copy-and-pasted it without question.
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• ken 6y ago
  Unions are great, but strikes are actually pretty rare. In the short term, they’re bad for workers, too! Striking is always a last resort. Unions have been on a serious decline the past several decades, but striking isn’t their only power. It’s just the only one you see on the 5 o’clock news, or in Hollywood movies, because it’s the most dramatic.
• jtolmar 6y ago
  Labor is not as simple as supply and demand; a huge portion of a worker's value is in their knowledge and ability to train other workers. When they strike, they are unavailable to train replacements. Most of the people reading this are likely to be tech workers, so imagine what it would be like to try to join a company that was on strike[1]. How do you log in to your computer? Where's the bug tracker? What are the current goals? Where is the code stored? What part of this code base is actually relevant to what you're doing? What five year old architectural decision means that you can't just do this the obvious way? How do you deploy code? How do you roll back deployments? How do you find the metrics for what went wrong? Imagine trying to figure out the answers to any of these questions without senior engineers around, and in fact nobody around except other strikebreakers with the same questions. When I was at Google it was generally accepted that a new hire would take 3-6 months before the were productive, and that was with considerable help from the rest of the engineers. Tech is a particularly severe instance of this, but all labor is more complex than it appears on the surface. As any roboticist will tell you, the real world is overwhelmingly detailed. [1] Don't do this by the way, it's called being a scab, and it's against your own long-term interests. If a strike in your industry succeeds, it raises the average conditions of people in your industry.
  • missedthecue 6y ago
    "a huge portion of a worker's value is in their knowledge and ability to train other workers. When they strike, they are unavailable to train replacements." Which would make them more valuable to employers and more in demand. You're proving that wages are a product of supply and demand