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Zalatix

(8,994 posts)
Fri Oct 12, 2012, 03:42 PM Oct 2012

There is no such thing as "Those jobs aren't coming back" in manufacturing.

A country with a population of hundreds of millions, and that doesn't manufacture anything, is doomed to collapse. Its currency will lose value and when that happens the jobs will come back because the goods coming from that country will be ultra-cheap on the global market. This is a certainty. The jobs will come back.

And for the sake of such a populace, like America, low-end manufacturing must come back. The low-end of the tech industry - the $20/hour QA and low-end programming jobs - must make a major comeback.

For populations of that size, nothing else creates the sheer number of good paying jobs that will support a middle class lifestyle. There will never be enough knowledge industry jobs or high-level manufacturing jobs combined, to supply a population that big with enough middle class jobs. The service industry that has grown to supplant manufacturing is, inherently, an industry of very low paying jobs, with a smattering of job types that pay a lot. The service industry cannot, inherently, create enough high-end jobs to make up for the middle class jobs that have been lost.

Furthermore, a resurgence of low-end manufacturing jobs also puts upward pressure on wages simply because of the increase in middle-class jobs. When low wage service employees can just up and leave for better-paying factory jobs, employers are forced to both raise wages and improve working conditions. Instead of a proliferation of Wal Mart work environments you'll see the reverse: things moving more in the direction of the fabled "Google campus" style of employee pampering. It's called an employee's labor market, and we have had that before. We can have it again. Everything I just said about manufacturing, also applies to low-end tech. We must have a major resurgence of both to bring back the employee's labor market.

We have 10 million unemployed Americans and ten million more who are underemployed, and we have an employer's market that suppresses wages and enables employers to treat their workers like crap. This is not temporary. It's structural, and if we don't put to shame the lie that "those jobs aren't coming back"... it will not only be a permanent situation, but it will get worse.

It is extremely unlikely that there will be any new industries that produce as many middle class jobs as manufacturing and low-end tech did. New industries are producing fewer jobs and only a sliver of those few jobs are well-paying. It's called bifurcation, and it is happening to a far worse degree than ever before.

When the horse and buggy cart industry went byebye, the auto industry replaced it with a massive wave of job creation. Nothing like that is emerging now, nor will it within even the distantly foreseeable future - distant, as in decades out. You can take that to the bank: we have at least one entire generation of Americans coming up to find that most jobs are low paying and not capable of sustaining the cost of living. The nightmare of age discrimination, unfair employment credit checks, fighting for job connections and getting one's low-paying service industry resume noticed among a pile of thousands, will all look tame compared to the stresses of job hunting a generation from now. Sure, you'll still have your Mark Zuckerbergs 1%ers, but unless we have a major low-end tech/manufacturing resurgence, America's 99% will have it a lot harder than the 99% have it today.

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