Communications of the ACM
Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back
Robert Reich
Increasingly, machines make things, not people — and that should be great news for the U.S. Even if the U.S. were to seal its borders and bar any manufactured goods from coming in from abroad — something I don't recommend — we'd still be losing manufacturing jobs. That's mainly because of technology.
When we think of manufacturing jobs, we tend to imagine old-time assembly lines populated by millions of blue-collar workers who had well-paying jobs with good benefits. But that picture no longer describes most manufacturing. I recently toured a U.S. factory containing two employees and 400 computerized robots. The two live people sat in front of computer screens and instructed the robots.
Factory jobs are vanishing all over the world. Even China is losing them. They've shuttered most of the old state-run factories. Their new factories are chock full of automated and computerized machines.
From Forbes
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