Rant: "People who work for a living; people who take a shower after work"...WTF is that?

[Moostache]

82. Do you recognize that money currently has no borders?

I am not trying to be snide or take cheap shots here, but you don't sound like you understand that international corporations are largely driving the money around the global board and it does not go where it will do the most good for you, me or any specific individuals or communities...it goes where they will get more for themselves and less for ANYONE else.

"jobs" is a meaningless canard and "good, manufacturing jobs" is another way of saying "jobs that good people like YOU should have but that have been denied to you by <insert target minority / out group here>". The issue has been politicized and weaponized for sure, but what is the true root cause for the hollowing out of American manufacturing? It is capitalism itself. Capitalism without tightly maintained regulation through government and unions is a freight train run amok. The jobs are no longer just being sent out to the other countries with lower wages...I know from first hand experience that automation and robotics are taking more jobs now that ever before, and it is a trend that is NOT slowing down.

I work in a medical device manufacturing company. I joined this company 10 years ago and our annual demand was around 40 million units per year. Our factory runs 24/7 and has a full production floor spread across multiple, over-lapping shifts. When I started, the shifts would all be 25-30 people strong, except for the weekend evenings, where a lot of the PM and cleaning was scheduled and fewer people were needed. Enter a surge in demand, we now are selling upwards of 125 million units a year and project to hit 200 million by the end of the decade. You would think that explosive sales growth like that would indicate massive hiring increases, right? Wrong. Automation of several steps of the process has meant that while output is stratospheric and rising, and demand is rising and forcing us to expand capacity again, the number of jobs is NOT rising with it. The total number of people per shift is DOWN to about 20-25 people, while output is maxing out at about 12 million units per month. In fact, we employee more engineers and research chemists to troubleshoot the production and improve efficiency and outputs than we do new line workers for the "good manufacturing jobs".

This is a company that treats employees fairly, provides a lot of jobs in the USA (despite being a foreign owner multinational) and does a tremendous amount of good in the community and across the globe. I am proud to work here and take added satisfaction from the fact that the product of our collective efforts saves lives across the world daily. But even, here, in a situation that is NOT looking to intentionally exploit workers or ship manufacturing jobs overseas, the situation is long term reductions in manpower in favor of increased use of automation. Our next production line is already in planning and pre-construction to meet the growing demand, but it is going to feature increased automation and out put with even fewer human inputs and line workers.

The point is, the idea that "making something in the USA" is going to be a Renaissance of manufacturing jobs is a falsehood, told to people as lies meant to manipulate them and make them nostalgic for a long-lost / never-was "good old days". The real problem society faces is far more insidious than just getting jobs back...it is wealth distribution and rising inequality that makes society more and more stratified year by year. It is capitalism run amok that leads to a CEO making 1,000 X the annual wage of the worker producing the good or service. It is capitalism run amok that leads to "externalities" like waste disposal and contaimination being sloughed off the corporation and onto the community that gives then "tax breaks" and "concessions" to "compete" for the factory in their area. It is the investors that no longer give a damn about the overall health of the corporation as long as the quarterly projections are beat for the next 90 days.

Companies that were once built with the idea of being around for 90 YEARS are now selling their souls and the very people that form the corporation's guts in the first place out based on the next 90 DAYS. This trend is irreversible without government action. The republicans KNOW this...they are doing yeoman's work for their paymasters. The democrats like Ryan fake it. They don't have a clue what to do or how to talk about it to people without being demagogued from the right and made to look like fools.

The first step to getting out of a hole? STOP DIGGING.
Capitalism is digging our collective grave with the current trajectory of the global economy.
The only way to get out of this hole is to first, take the shovel, break it and stop digging.

Then, and only then, can we start to have REAL discussions about what a post-job economy really looks like and what do people do in such a world. We are so far away from ready to have that earnest and necessary discussion that I think it is far more likely we will simply have a huge nuclear war and hope that something survives to start over...