07:30 – Regarding US manufacturing, this article (h/t to Derek Lowe) says pretty much what I’ve been saying for a couple of decades. Ultimately, all US factories will be staffed only by one man and his dog, or as close as doesn’t matter. The days when factories employed large numbers of unskilled and semi-skilled laborers are long gone, and the days are coming when even skilled specialists will be thin on the ground.
Efforts to maintain, let alone increase, manufacturing employment are futile and doomed to fail. Ultimately, US factories will become black boxes, with a chute on one end to receive raw materials and a conveyor on the the other end that delivers finished products, all with no human intervention. Some factories are nearly at that point even now. Manufacturing jobs? Good luck with that. There won’t be any.
As I’ve said frequently, human progress ultimately comes down to two things: new knowledge, which is produced by science, and productivity, which is produced by automation. Progress comes down to discovering new and more efficient ways to accomplish goals and then implementing that new knowledge.
Damn, I had my heart set on getting my old manufacturing job back again, wave solder machine operator. Either that or printed circuit board fabricator. The first was working with 500-degree solder by the gallon plus some other fluid the name of which I still can’t pronounce, that, when spilled, produced a floor as slippery as black ice. The latter involved a lot of fiber glass dust, which got on everything and itched like the dickens. Plus the frequent mandatory O.T.
My favorite manufacturing gig, though, was the ‘yard guard’ fencing deal; man, that was brutal. I was a spindle operator, taking the stuff off giant spindles at speed, and tucking the sharp ends in underneath before they got wrapped. Prior to the spindle they had gone through a tunnel where the paint was baked on. So nice and hot, sharp and heavy and two 15-minute breaks during the day and a half-hour for lunch and once again, mandatory O.T. By noon each day my hands looked like hamburger. Five bucks an hour, big money in them daze.
Agricultural jobs were replaced by manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing jobs are now being replaced by jobs in the service industry. Many (most?) people dislike change, but change happens, and these developments are what have led to the incredible standard of living we have today.
all US factories will be staffed only by one man and his dog
The dog mandated by the union to keep the man awake.
Brad says: “Agricultural jobs were replaced by manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing jobs are now being replaced by jobs in the service industry. Many (most?) people dislike change, but change happens, and these developments are what have led to the incredible standard of living we have today.”
Have you tried to live on a “service industry” wage? The service industry is where inexperienced workers got their first jobs, and was never meant as a career choice. Automating production sounds all fine and good, until you have over half your population living on the dole.
Give up manufacturing, or you must eventually give up capitalism for socialism. You cannot base your society on freedom without the freedom to be able to work your way up from the bottom. You end up with a Brave New World, where the Alpha elites clones the Epsilon workers, and uses pharmaceuticals to subdue the rest of the population into numbness.
Ray wrote: “The dog mandated by the union to keep the man awake.”
Actually, I think it will be the other way around. The dog will be to protect the machinery from the man, and the man is to feed and walk the dog.
I stand corrected Mr. Grigg.
Bill, it’s not optional. Increased automation and reduced employment is an economic imperative. As the article discusses, inefficiency is not an option, and using people where it’s cheaper to use machines is inefficiency writ large.
Ultimately, as I’ve said many times, it doesn’t matter. The cost of a thing nowadays is generally mostly labor cost. In fact, if you reduce it to the logical conclusion, the cost of a thing is nearly *all* labor cost. The only exception is the cost of capital and the necessary cost of profit. Materials costs are actually nearly all labor costs as well. That is, a ton of iron or or finished steel, if you track back all the costs, is nearly all labor cost as well.
So, if we can reduce labor costs to nearly zero, we get the same or greater outputs for much smaller inputs. The amount of human effort required to produce a given output declines dramatically, which means the cost of that item also declines dramatically. Or, another way of looking at, it costs less in terms of your labor or my labor to purchase that item.
Right now, the western world looks upon the 40-hour work week (or something very like it) as written in stone. It’s not. The “work week” used to be every daylight hour, seven days a week. It’s science and automation that gave us that five-day, 40-hour work week. If we can produce the same amount of goods with one tenth the amount of human labor overall, that takes the work-week down to four hours. (Well, maybe eight hours, with the extra four going to pay taxes…) If we can produce the same amount of good with one percent the human labor input, that takes the average work week down to 24 minutes. Call it an hour every other week.
Of course, that ignores the fact that a very large percentage of our population is currently economically useless, and that percentage will increase greatly as automation continues to increase. If this goes to its logical conclusion, scientists and inventors and engineers will work pretty much the same hours that people work now, but they’ll be extremely wealthy. The other 99+% will be on the dole, either as government workers or as welfare recipients. And it won’t matter, because everything will be so inexpensive that even those on welfare will have everything they need and most of what they want. And the 1% will be able to carry the 99% without even noticing.
The 99% won’t care. They’ll have as much as they want to eat, a nice place to live, plenty of games on TV, first-rate (automated) health care, and all the other trappings of what would currently be considered an upper-middle class lifestyle.
The 99% won’t care.
Unfortunately, this is not true. They will be jealous of the 1%, always. Today’s poor in the US have HD television, a heated place to live, and plenty of food. Only 100 years ago, they would have been looked upon with envy. But they see only what they do not have…
BGrigg said:
“Have you tried to live on a “service industry” wage? The service industry is where inexperienced workers got their first jobs, and was never meant as a career choice. ”
Not true. I have had several service industry careers and have always made a decent living. Doctors and Lawyers are, for example, service industries. Entry level service industry jobs may not pay well, but there are a lot of jobs that do. The order taker at McDonald’s may not make much, but he store manager, while not making huge amounts, makes much more. The successful McDonald’s franchise owner can make quite a bit.
Rick, the recovering Lawyer and current Geek in Portland
I realize that production will eventually become automated. My point is that we are not yet at that point where our society’s benevolence can be extended to one and all, and that we need to slow down the automation until we have the society to support all off the backs of the 1%. All we’ve done so far is to remove the jobs, by exporting them to China, and we didn’t replace them with good jobs. It’s kind of like Border Collies. You either find them something to do, or they will find something to do, and you won’t like it.
Doctors and lawyers, IMHO, are hardly your typical service industries. You can hardly take Joe off the production line, with his 98 IQ and turn him into either. And how many of each can be supported?
As for the McDonalds manager? He’s out of work, too. Doctors and lawyers don’t eat at McDs, no matter how upmarket they try to make themselves.
Eh? I sometimes eat at McDonalds. Nearly all of my friends and acquaintances have graduate degrees, most terminal, and nearly all of them eat at McDonalds at least occasionally.
Bill, you can’t “slow down” progress other than by government fiat. And look how well that’s worked any time a government has tried it.
As the Germans say (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?), you haven’t got an economy unless you make things. Bill is right: only a very few parts of the service sector pay a living wage. Lawyers and doctors in the US are self-regulating groups, and see to it that there is a terrific shortage of their numbers, so that they can price themselves well above what their counterparts in other Western countries earn. It is easy to prove that there is a shortage of them–talk to any lawyer, and you will find their workload to be oppressive.
As wages rise significantly in the developing countries, manufacturing will spread out more evenly through the world.
On the automation front, one of my friends who works for a big broadcasting chain, says that its goal is for each of its stations to have only one program originated locally (usually morning drive); the rest will be from pre-recorded computer material. And that just happened at the Tiny Town station. Three shifts were laid off, and only the morning drive duo remains. Not that they cannot afford to hire more; it’s that they won’t–management wants that money all for themselves.
The US lives for the moment and it’s every man for himself. And whatever you do, do NOT plan for the future. What a country!
I’ve always laughed at the man and dog story. I work for a company the builds industrial robots, by hand. The volume is not high enough to make automation cost effective. Automation requires integrators to combine equipment from several different supplier into a single functioning automation cell. Several cells are typically combined into a production line. even the most advanced production line still require operators to run. All machinery breaks down, requires maintenance, and needs to be adjusted. There are jobs for technicians, mechanics, and engineers.
Will there be fewer people required for the same amount of productions, yes. Just as there are fewer farmers who produce more food then in the past.
There already has been a migration of jobs. We have fewer people in manufacturing, and more people in government and legal careers. The race is to see if the productivity can increase fast enough to offset the penalty of having more people in nonproductive jobs.
I work around both lawyers and doctors more days of the week than not. I have never, ever seen either eat at McDonald’s. Furthermore, they come strolling in mornings with Starbuck’s coffee, not something from McDonald’s like me.
The largest service industry of all, of course, is public service. I’ve done my dues in every industry – agriculture, mining, manufacturing, wholesale, retail, entertainment, medical, public service. They all add value in some way to their society, although there’s damned few who recognise that it’s all based on primary industry. Yo’all should just be grateful that the public servants don’t assess you for stud fees when they service you.
I have been hearing this line that we will be working fewer hours for more money ALL MY LIFE. It ain’t come true yet.
It was definitely going to happen when we got desktop computers. The 35 hour workweek was right around the corner. Instead, I lost 2 of my assistants, and was told I could just type out my own scripts and schedules, because it was so easy to do on computers. The reality was that I ended up having FAR more work to do than previous. My cohorts who have continued in the industry, tell me that it is now far worse than when I left it.
There will never be a reduction in the individual worker’s job load due to automation, robots, productivity, or computers. Just as there will never be flying cars, as preposterously predicted in Popular Science all those years ago when I read it in the back seat of my dad’s ’46 Ford sedan. Actually, there was less work to do to live well back in the agrarian society previous to the Industrial Revolution. Since then, the trend has been the exact opposite of the 4 hour workweek pipe dream.
<The 35 hour workweek was right around the corner.
I have such a work week, just 35 hours. Along with 15 days of vacation and 15 days of sick time every year. Nice being able to come in after the rush hour traffic and leave before the rush hour traffic.
Pigs can fly! I’m glad I have my single engine land license.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46969099/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/#.T34AwL_Lzbw
I can image one in every driveway in Tiny Town. “Out of the way, mofo! I get to take off first down the street!”
Doctors, no. Lawyers, easily (and maybe beneath them).
During the last 10 years, I frequently have this dream that I am a pilot in a commercial plane. I have the co-pilot do everything, until it comes time to land, and then, to my utter amazement, I accomplish a perfect 3-point touchdown, and the co-pilot then informs me that he thought I was a fraud until that perfect landing, for which he congratulates me profusely..
Then I wake up and KNOW I am a fraud.
I also have this other dream that I am in the process of getting my pilot’s license (I never did finish that training), and am doing a solo flight, and amazingly find tiny airports, know what to do, but once I land, I wake up. Never do I fly back home in those dreams. In real life, I never got to the point of a solo cross-country flight.
I suspect this all came about because my dad had a pilot’s license, and used to take me on business trips around the state when I was in grade school. Later, his brother died in one of two B-47 accidents that happened the same day back in the 1950’s, and my grandmother extracted a promise that my dad would give up flying as long as she was alive. He did. B-47’s were grounded forever after my uncle’s death.
Raymond Thompson says:
<The 35 hour workweek was right around the corner.
I have such a work week, just 35 hours. Along with 15 days of vacation and 15 days of sick time every year. Nice being able to come in after the rush hour traffic and leave before the rush hour traffic.
Wow. I started in TV working 8 hours a day with no lunch. Somewhere along the line, I guess some law was passed and we got an unpaid lunch hour. After just a few of the new 9 hour days, the hourly people revolted, and it was decided that it was legal to put the lunch hour at the end of the workday–so we were back where we started. Moved to a new job in Minneapolis, where the hours were 8:30a to 5:30p, with an hour unpaid lunch. While I was there, the workday was shortened to 9a to 5p and lunch was paid.
Once I got into real salaried management in Chicago and Boston, I never worked less than 50 hours a week. We had cafeterias in both places, and most days, I took my lunch back to my office and worked right through lunch. Standard in my industry was 2 weeks of vacation after 2 years, 3 weeks after 5 years, and 4 weeks after 20 years. I only had 3 weeks in 2 places I worked, and only for a couple years before I moved on and started all over again. Never got any vacation in Germany, as I was freelance and paid only when I worked. Meanwhile, everyone fulltime around me was getting 6 weeks of vacation right from the get-go of every job. And somehow, Germans are known as workaholics. Never saw people take their vacations more seriously. Most had them booked years in advance.
I am always mystified by goings on at Walmart. They have 10 counters of self-checkout, and more people are using them than the manned checkout counters now.
The Walmart photography studio in Tiny Town is gone! Every time I was there, it was busy–often with people waiting in line to get their kid’s picture taken. No more, however.
Also, there have not been any greeters at either entrance for months, now. Strange. Practically every store in existence has followed Walmart’s example by establishing greeters, and now it appears Walmart is doing away with them.
Okay, in about 2000 I was doing a biochemistry lab class with a young woman who said her dog slept in her bed with her. I thought she was nuts, or a deviant, or trying to kid us, as I’d never heard of (normal) humans sharing their bed with animals before.
Turns out, sleeping with a pet is more restful than with your partner:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-06/sleeping-with-pets-better-for-rest-study-finds/3936712
My parents brought home our first Border Collie, Abby, when I was six years old. She usually slept on my bed, and continued doing so until I went away to college. Of course, by that time she was 12 years old and needed help getting up on and getting down from the bed. We moved my mother in with us in 1991, and Kerry moved in with her. At first, he slept downstairs in her apartment. Before long, he started sleeping on our bed. Duncan, Malcolm, and Colin slept on our bed from the time they were small puppies.
From college until I married Barbara, I had several girlfriends who had dogs, and nearly all of them slept on the bed. That wasn’t usually a problem, although there were a couple who weren’t all that happy at first about me sharing their mistresses’ beds.
It’s perfectly normal for dogs (and people) to sleep with their packs.
Great, an article that provides Aussies with excuses to sleep with animal, but enough about dogs and strange sleeping habits…
I’m not wanting to slow down PROGRESS, I’m wanting to speed it up. What we’ve been having is Technical Advancement, not Progress. They’re very similar, and I can understand how people confuse the two. The cotton gin was Technological Advancement. Progress didn’t start until education wrought change and provided the people displaced by the gin with new, and in almost every single case, better jobs. The first Industrial Revolution brought riches to many, and drudgery and debtor’s prisons for the rest. I’m concerning myself about the rest. I don’t accept that money is King, and economic imperatives only mean things to those who value money over people.
I repeat, all we’ve done is ship off our manufacturing jobs to China and India. Bob’s dream of buildings with resources going in one side, and finished products coming out the other is coming true. Too bad all the buildings will be in China and India.
Meanwhile, we’ll have an increasing amount of people living on the dole, or rooting like hogs to survive. Neither paints a pretty picture of the future. Those rooting will resent those who do not, and those paying for the dole will resent those who collect. What has progressed?
Is the future all Star Trekky, with it’s replicators and apparently free energy? I sure hope so. My fear is that it will look more like Bladerunner, since no-one is biting on my Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four references. And I can’t help but recall that they rarely showed life on Earth, other than from a Starfleet POV. A future where everyone must join a military organization isn’t very progressive!
Wow. I started in TV working 8 hours a day with no lunch.
I am also in a totally deadend job. No chance for advancement, no upward movement. I am at the pinnacle in this job. And I really don’t give a rat’s ass anymore. I pursued the status, the salary, the status. It was killing me and my family. Chained to a cell phone, calls at nights and weekends, working long hours.
Got into a heated discussion with my last CEO about the current IT system vendor and their handling of the system and he gave me a buyout to leave. I was originally depressed. But it was the best thing he ever did for me. (As a side note he got fired two years later by the board for incompetence.)
The job I currently have pays enough to pay the bills with a little left over. They match my 401K 100% on the first 6% of my salary. 15 days vacation plus 15 days of sick each year. Not too bad.
The biggest relief is that I no longer work long hours, nights and weekends. If a server goes down it is a problem but not an emergency. We lost a mail server on a late Friday night because it did not restart properly after a power outage. I just left it alone until Monday. At the CU I would have had to ruin my weekend to resolve the issue.
It is a small office with 11 people. I am the IT staff. I do the application development, server maintenance, desktop support, DB Administrator, phones. In fact if it has a power cord or battery I am somehow responsible.
Not an exciting job, but it does provide a reasonable salary. Travel once a year to the annual convention which is always in a different city. I only have 45 more months to work and then I am done. A deadend job ain’t so bad actually.
In Iain M. Banks’ Culture, a human-machine symbiotic society set about 10000 years in the future there is so much supply, for free, that people can have whatever they want, a fabulous living, and so on. They can change sex without operations, and essentially nothing is illegal. I’m kinda attracted to this, in a way. But on to reality…
I lost interest in climbing the greasy pole 20 years ago. I see my boss go to endless meetings, fill out reports no one reads, and am quite content with my job as a programmer. I’ve read of some companies that pay well but demand that there IT staff take a cell phone *everywhere*. Getting married on the weekend? Sure, but take your cell phone. If there’s a problem at work you drop everything and go fix it, whether your at a wedding, a funeral or anything. I’m not interested n o matter what the pay. I wouldn’t have made a good doctor, I hate having my sleep interrupted. 25 years ago I was called into work at 4.20 AM on Saturday morning. I was screwed for the rest of the day.
And I don’t buy this stuff about 99% unemployment due to technological innovation. The system will adapt, if only we let it. People who know there history know this.
*their history.
Back when I was thinking about going to med school, one of my doctor friends gave me good advice. He asked what specialty I eventually planned to pursue. I told him probably neurosurgery. He said that was crazy, because 99% of my patients would die. I told him my attitude would be to rejoice at the 1 in 100 that I was able to save. Then he pointed out that neurosurgeons’ lives are not their own and that I’d frequently have my sleep or leisure disturbed. He recommended dermatology because the patients seldom die and dermatologists tend to work standard hours.
He also asked if I was considering medicine primarily because I wanted to help people or for the (at the time) high income. I told him neither. I couldn’t care less about helping people, and I didn’t care much about money. I was interested in the challenge and in winning against implacable foes. He said that maybe neurosurgery was the way to go.
I’m very very squeamish so I wouldn’t have made a good doctor. If I had to be one I guess I would have wanted to go into endocrinology, immunology or psychiatry.
I’m with Mr. Grigg on how our future will look: much more Blade Runner and Mad Max than Star Trek. And I don’t want any dogz in my bed but I will take dibs on the blonde replicant if no one minds.
As for jobs and suchlike, I am a sys/net admin for a few thousand RH servers, both x86 and blades, and there are enough interesting little projects going on in addition to my regular drone duties, such as moving to Xcat2 soon and away from CSM for cluster management, plus rebuilding nodes and clusters from time to time, and trying to solve bedeviling little problems. I see the “people managers’ and higher-level IT manglers and I want no part of it, ever. Dead-end works for me.
That’s twice within a week you’ve agreed with me, and in that time Chuck has agreed with me, too.
Do I hear the distant hoofbeats of the Apocalypse?
Raymond Thompson says:
Got into a heated discussion with my last CEO about the current IT system vendor and their handling of the system and he gave me a buyout to leave. I was originally depressed. But it was the best thing he ever did for me. (As a side note he got fired two years later by the board for incompetence.)
Your scenario pretty much describes my experience. And it proves that incompetent bosses can do a lot of damage before they are shown the door. I worked in a place where I had a lot of responsibility. Came the day when the Hunt brothers drove up the cost of silver to the point that our corporate headquarters said they were selling our film processor and we would switch to videotape in a matter of weeks. Well, they laid out some insufficient capital to make the switch (about 50 grand) and told the stations (all 5) to deal with the problem (just to show you how management and ownership rakes off the major amount of money, our station alone was grossing 35 million a year–only 50 thousand for this conversion?)
It was decided that we would buy 6 cameras that were made by Sony for time-motion studies. They were awful, crappy cameras that made pictures so terrible compared to the film we had been using, that the difference was dramatic. Our other stations were buying 1 or 2 real broadcast field cameras with the money, arguing for more capital outlay, and continuing to shoot film, but having it processed outside the station. But not us.
At the point of the switch, we were a solid #1 in news at 11, and tied for #1 at the dinner hour. I fought the decision about the crappy cameras to the point that I was demoted and moved to the worst shift in the station. A ‘yes’ man replaced me. Six months later the news was DEAD LAST in the market–even behind the independent station with no network affiliation. Only a few months after that, the inflexible person above me left quite quickly and very unexpectedly.
FIFTEEN YEARS later, the station returned to #1. Which proved to me the axiom of a mentor: you do not attract an audience, you only drive them away. Any audience you get, is because your competitors drove them to you. We had VERY good competitors in that market. They did not drive their audiences away–we did. And those crappy cameras? They could not meet FCC specs, and the station was ultimately fined for technical violations. That forced them to buy real cameras. I really pissed off the head guy by referring to the crappy stuff as “tinker-toy cameras”.
Like you, the demotion was the best thing that ever happened to me. I found another job in a station that turned out to be the best place I ever worked. But I had a repeat of a similar situation later on in another workplace–where they had actually courted me to come work for them. I was shown the door there with a buyout (along with every other person that was hired by the old boss), but the whole enterprise went belly-up less than 2 years after I left, after blowing through more than half-a-billion dollars.
Now, I have no pressure: just babysit a camera while it shoots several hours of someone talking. Decent money that pays all the bills except US medical, which is truly out-of-control.
BGrigg says:
What we’ve been having is Technical Advancement, not Progress. They’re very similar, and I can understand how people confuse the two.
…
I repeat, all we’ve done is ship off our manufacturing jobs to China and India. Bob’s dream of buildings with resources going in one side, and finished products coming out the other is coming true. Too bad all the buildings will be in China and India.
I agree wholeheartedly. It is like that chemistry teacher I spoke of, in another post: people think everything has been done, and the world can now go ahead on autopilot. I see it every day in the work I do. A systemic thing goes wrong, and somebody sues. Lots of people are paid lots of money during the litigation, the jury awards lots of money, but the systemic problem is not solved nor changed, and another event happens and somebody else sues. Everybody thinks that because we have bureaucracies, procedures, laws, courts–that somehow all those together will solve the problems. They don’t. And it costs us all dearly–in ways we never see.
This is the one that gets me–and will most likely, get everyone living in the US of A. It is the challenge of being 150% reliant on oil. Shockingly, it has NEVER been addressed AT ALL–I repeat, AT ALL–since the first oil crisis WAAAAY back in 1974. Meanwhile, the race of gas and energy prices to the stratosphere, continues–for DECADES–with nothing done to solve it. The Prez’ solar energy program collapses around him as company after company he bankrolled goes completely bust, while he refuses oil from Canada, and that will now go to China. Damn that is impressive energy policy! Meanwhile I just paid more for a tank of gas than I ever have since returning over 2 years ago. What a country!