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Low prices or well paid workforce...Choose one! This is a result of decades of regulations and labour laws. Paying Americans 10x more to make similar quality t

• chongli 4y ago
  You don’t have to choose one. With automation you can have a small, highly paid, highly skilled workforce do the work of a much larger, low skill, low paid workforce and actually produce higher quality products at a lower price.
  • happyopossum 4y ago
    So you’re picking low prices and an UNpaid workforce - cutting a workforce by 90% but doubling pay for the remaining 10% doesn’t improve a local or domestic economy.
    • 1123581321 4y ago
      That really depends on whether the skilled workers and automation tech result in product improvements, new products, new industries, etc.
    • LeifCarrotson 4y ago
      There's plenty of work to go around: workers today are no less busy but far more productive than they were before any automation. It's just that instead of a bunch of farmers and a handful of blacksmiths we've found more things to do and have careers that span the gamut from yoga instructors to robot technicians.
    • chrisseaton 4y ago
      Yes it does - those people can do something else productive, the US gets the tools it needs to build other things in their economy, and the US has resilience in case of future (extremely likely and possibly fundamental) supply chain disruptions.
    • chongli 4y ago
      Just a few centuries ago upwards of 90% of the population worked in farming. Since then, multiple revolutions in agricultural yield and automation have reduced this to less than 2%. Yet we do not have 80% unemployment. How is that?
    • randomdata 4y ago
      > UNpaid workforce Automation is far from unpaid. At very least it expects you to give it food (electricity, gasoline, etc.), shelter, and healthcare (repairs and maintenance). Generally the same things that humans expect from you. Automation is significant not because it is unpaid, but because it can often do much more work for the same amount of pay.
    • alkonaut 4y ago
      So long as you are producing consumer goods for the masses and not say hand-built sports cars, I don't think the alternative of a large well paid workforce to do what a large less well paid workforce can do is an alternative. Having 10 skilled people and 100 robots do what 1000 people would otherwise do isn't some defeat, it's fantastic. Productivity is what makes people rich in the long term.
    • xboxnolifes 4y ago
      That's like calling me unpaid because agricultural technological advancements have reduced the number of necessary farmers and allowed software jobs (and may others) to open up and pay me. Just because a single factory, company, or industry reduces the number of employed people doesn't mean they are unpaid. Technological advancement is not zero-sum.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • dwiel 4y ago
    And what about the highly skilled lower paid workforce also using automation in China? And with fewer safety requirements the machines are cheaper too.
    • collegeburner 4y ago
      problem is in theory it's "the same quality" but with the amount of shitty chinesium i seen i'm not convinced they're capable of producing anything more than a disposable.
      • ghostly_s 4y ago
        There are countless quality products produced in China alongside the cheap ones; apparently you're just no good at identifying one.
        • bluGill 4y ago
          More that they don't ship that here as most who care about quality were slow to move manufacturing overseas.
    • bluGill 4y ago
      Automation is so productive that the difference in wages is insignificant so who cares. The problem with automation is it is very hard to make it, but once it is made you can use it cheap. So you need to make many parts before it is worth it. 30 years ago it's was cheaper to pay a skilled lathe operator to turn a drawing into a single part, but if you needed 1000 it was worth writing CNC code to automate it. Today the state of CAM is such that many drawings can be turned into parts CNC directly, but assembly of those parts into a tool is often still manual unless they sell a lot of parts. (I don't know what Milwaukee is doing, but I expect cordless drills are assembled automatically, but their cordless bandsaw which is much less in demand is manual)
• abfan1127 4y ago
  Chips act doesn't fix this. we pay taxes. we pay people to administer these silly corporate welfare programs. Companies allegedly keep manufacturing here with cheap prices... but now the prices of those objects SHOULD include the taxes to do so.
• mc32 4y ago
  Agreed. It's not always straightforward but I also feel there is a disconnect when on the one hand people say the answer to worker's poor pay is "Unions!" and then on the other hand they want cheap things and also say that people have a right to cheaper things because that improves quality of life through increased purchasing power... Well, that's true if you have a professional white collared job. If you're in the lower middle class or in the working class... offshoring to cheaper locations is going to hurt the working class because now they are out of a job or have fewer choice jobs --their job market as a worker has no power --you want to get paid more, great, we'll ship production to Mexico or China. What, you want better pay for being a janitor? Great, we're getting cheap labor from unregulated guest workers and you're out of luck.
  • hayst4ck 4y ago
    Unions aren't about more wages. Unions are about checking owner/capitalist/CEO power. Why does the CEO get paid 10-100x more than the lowest paid worker despite working the same number of hours a day? That's the question unions aim to solve. This puzzle revolves around power. Power is the ability to execute force or inflict pleasure or pain. A CEO is clearly capable of painful force against their unskilled labor. A CEO can make it so someone has a harder time housing themselves, getting medical care, or feeding their children. But what power does unskilled labor have over their CEOs? Virtually none individually. So we see this reality reflected directly in wages. Unskilled labor gets paid the minimum because they have no power, and CEO's get incredible wages because they have the power to demand them. This "agreement" is not mutual consent, but fundamentally exploitation. It's even more so exploitation when labor is sent to these poor countries. Unions are the answer to the puzzle of "how does an unskilled laborer exercise power/prevent themselves from being exploited." Through collective action a union can cause the CEO pain and put a check on their otherwise unchecked power. In this way individuals are no longer powerless but have earned a seat at the negotiating table. China did exactly this. They became exploited, nurtured dependence on the exploitation, and now use manufacturing's dependence on China as well as state level collective bargaining as a cudgul to execute their imperialist will on countries like Taiwan. If you do not have the ability to commit great violence you are not peaceful, you are harmless. If you do not have the ability to execute power, you do not make agreements, you follow commands. I personally don't understand how unions are not seen as American as the 2nd amendment. Unions are as important to preventing capitalist exploitation as guns are to preventing colonial/fascist exploitation.
• gurumeditations 4y ago
  Just like climate change, allowing capitalists to invest in foreign countries to build their infrastructure, industries, and workforce all so you can then sell the end product in a fat market like the US for high profit, is fundamentally a political issue. Something that hurts us all long term but is so beneficial in many other ways to us at the same time, and makes lots of capitalists fabulously wealthy. It’s too late to tear down the current reality because there is no political will to build a new one. Perhaps giving away the long term professional knowledge core of the US to foreign countries so that capitalists could become richer and laborers could have cheaper goods will be what historians point to as the root cause of the decline of the American empire.
  • jprd 4y ago
    P R E A C H
  • eru 4y ago
    How does division of labour hurt you in the long or short run? Mercantilism and protectionism were never a good idea.
• wrycoder 4y ago
  Fair trading labor is also a terrible idea for our middle class. Not everyone is a technical wizard.
• rayiner 4y ago
  Or we could just ban importing of foreign tools. Maybe a tariff that ratchets up over time to give industry time and incentive to transition.
  • dmix 4y ago
    How long do you think it would take for automation to get to 75%+ of the way there in terms of price parity? It's mostly just a big initial capital investment it seems.
    • bluGill 4y ago
      Depends on the tool. Automation is cheaper than manual work when you make a lot of something, and so can spread the cost of automation of all the results. Some things are easier to automate than others, and automation tech is advancing all the time.
  • onos 4y ago
    I’m mostly pro capitalism / trade but would support moves like this for critical manufacturing and other production important for stability. Wars happen, see eg concerns raised around Europe and heating for this coming winter.
• hayst4ck 4y ago
  Paying another country to do something is a transfer of value and power (money). It creates a relationship of dependence. You become dependent on them for labor. Dependence is a base form of power. An entities power over you is proportional to their replace-ability. The individual business decision is sound, but the collective business decision is catastrophic. Not only does it create an economies of scale for adversaries instead of ourselves, but it gives them a lever to press to cause us pain. There is a national security disaster directly caused by the idea that paying Americans more is not a sound decision. Another country now has a say in what can be in our movies, and what our politicians, business persons, and celebrities can do or say. Add to this ambition, beligerance, and the prospect of war (a clear destroyer of value), and the picture gets even worse. The answer is not handing out wads of cash to businesses like Intel that have failed to be productive by choosing business first (extract all the money possible) rather than values first (make the best products possible) practices, but to unburden our businesses with costs like healthcare and housing costs. The minimum wage wouldn't have to be so high if there was cheap housing, good public transportation, abundant cheap healthy food, low debt policies, and government run health care. If you reduce the cost of living, you de facto reduce the cost of labor. Housing policy that ensures limited supply and therefore high rents transfers wealth from laborers to owners, which is a transfer of money from businesses to landlords because the cost of rent is passed on to businesses in the form of wages.
  • dnissley 4y ago
    > the prospect of war Are you claiming that trade dependence between countries makes war between them more likely?
    • hayst4ck 4y ago
      China sent missiles over Taiwan last week. To me that clearly invokes the prospect of war with our largest trade dependency. I am claiming that showing weakness by giving a powerful weapon (supply chain dependency) to an adversary invites them to see what they can get away with especially if they wish to conquer another country and you are their main blocker. Our supply chain dependency means China has a direct "cause pain" button they can push on America to cause political unrest or directly punish American involvement in China's "internal affairs." It is a tool they can use to try to make our elites present the Taiwan invasion, not as the conquering of a vibrant democracy, but as America's imperialist meddling in China's internal affairs. The supply chain can directly be used to extort our neutrality, just like Nord Stream was used to extort Germany's neutrality and corrupt Germany's elites. Is our defense posture better then that? Probably, but there is no denying Xi's China is getting more belligerent not less, which means they likely see the relative power shifts favoring them. It is not the trade that I view as making war more likely, but the hard to replace dependency, namely Nord stream and the tech hardware supply chain.
• hinkley 4y ago
  Milwaukee tools are not what you would call cheap. Most of their models rank fairly highly in reviews, but not for the bargain category.