Posted on 01/23/2013 2:03:09 PM PST by Kaslin
The federal Minimum wage in the US is $7.25 per hour. Ten states have higher minimum wages with Rhode Island clocking in 50 cents higher at $7.75.
Costs to the employer are higher of course, even if the employer ducks benefits by using part-time workers.
For starters, employer contributions to Social Security are 6.2% of hourly wages which adds another 45 cents to employer costs. That brings employer costs up to $7.95 per hour minimum, not counting training costs, vacation (if any), sick-time disruptions, and other such costs.
Of course, employers must also factor in the cost of Obamacare.
Small businesses do not have to provide health-care, but under employer responsibility provisions of the affordable care act, businesses that employ more than 50 workers will pay a steep penalty in 2014 if they don't.
Click on the preceding link to see a nice flow chart of the penalty process.
What IF?
What if companies, small or large, did not have to worry about Obamacare? What if they did not have to worry, about training, sick-leave disruptions and weather-related disruptions? What if companies only had to pay $3.00 per hour, rivaling wages in China?
Meet Baxter - The Automation Robot
MIT Technology Review discusses Baxter in Small Factories Give Baxter the Robot a Cautious Once-Over.
Chris Budnick, head of Vanguard Plastics, a small injection-molding operation in Southington, Connecticut is considering the use of Baxter for one process that is not yet automated: stacking and packing textured, plastic cups, which Vanguard sells for 2 cents apiece to a medical company.
It currently costs Budnick $9.00 an hour to have a staffer from a temporary agency to do the job.
Budnick is now considering Baxter to replace that agency job.
Let's tune in to the MIT story for additional details about Baxter and the job Baxter will replace.
Baxter was conceived by Rodney Brooks, the Australian roboticist and artificial-intelligence expert who left MIT to build a $22,000 humanoid robot that can easily be programmed to do simple jobs that have never been automated before.
Brooks’s company, Rethink Robotics, says the robot will spark a “renaissance” in American manufacturing by helping small companies compete against low-wage offshore labor. Baxter will do that by accelerating a trend of factory efficiency that’s eliminated more jobs in the U.S. than overseas competition has. Of the approximately 5.8 million manufacturing jobs the U.S. lost between 2000 and 2010, according to McKinsey Global Institute, two-thirds were lost because of higher productivity and only 20 percent moved to places like China, Mexico, or Thailand.
The ultimate goal is for robots like Baxter to take over more complex tasks, such as fitting together parts on an electronics assembly line. “A couple more ticks of Moore’s Law and you’ve got automation that works more cheaply than Chinese labor does,” Andrew McAfee, an MIT researcher, predicted last year at a conference in Tucson, Arizona, where Baxter was discussed.
Baxter comes with two arms, a vision system, and 360° sonar (which it uses to detect people nearby), but for the cup-stacking job it will also need a specially designed gripper, which Rethink is now developing. Rethink is also developing software so that the robot can communicate with other machines, such as a conveyor belt, telling it to move forward or stop.
So how important will Baxter really be to Vanguard? Budnick couches his answer in baseball terminology. “Baxter is a potential double,” he says. “Maybe a home run if it can use both its arms.”
Percentage of Americans with jobs is at a 20-year low
Email Exchange With Friends
Here is an interesting Email exchange I had with a few friends, one of which sent me the MIT article.
"Bob" writes "Buy American is a big theme with the robotics guys. My future son-in-law won't even buy his tux from a Hong Kong tailor. He refuses to buy anything from China. They view themselves as abolishing Chinese slave labor by making it uneconomic."
"John" responded "What do those people then do to feed themselves?"
"Bob" replied "The easy answer is that it isn't our duty or problem to keep a slave state prospering and fed. You are not going to wipe out China's slave labor overnight. If China's elite sees that its low wage slave labor will no longer reap profits, they will do what other slave masters have done: educate its people so that they can compete in an economy where there are no slave conditions."
In Praise of Cheap Labor
"Mish" says, I fail to see where the above line of thinking goes.
We have come to a point where the minimum wage is 200% too much. How does hiring Baxter at $3.40 per hour prevent slave labor in China? Is no job better than some job?
Baxter is a hugely deflationary force. Increasing the minimum wage only exacerbates the problem.
Oddly enough, Paul Krugman agrees, or at least he once did before he became the "Conscience of a Liberal".
Want proof? Please consider In Praise of Cheap Labor; Are Bad Jobs at Bad Wages Better than No Jobs at All?
Taxing Robots Cannot Work
Economist Paul Krugman and others are now pondering heavy taxes on robots. Is that the answer?
How can it be? Paying more people to do nothing (or to do jobs robots can do cheaper) cannot possibly solve anything. Such practices encourage the birth of more people when there are fewer jobs to be had.
Two Realities
Either technology creates jobs long-term or it doesn't. I believe it does, and on that score I am an optimist (I just cannot say when it will happen).
Let's assume I am wrong. Then taxing robots to meet some artificial living-wage standard can hardly be the answer. Encouraging the birth of more unneeded, unproductive people is a sure-fire way to start a major war.
In either reality, Krugman is wrong.
Fed Cannot Win a Fight Against Robots
The problem is not that wages are too low. Rather, the problem is expenses are two high.
The remedy then is certainly not higher minimum wages (which previously encouraged more outsourcing and now encourages more robots), but rather making the dollar go further.
In that regard, it's a mad world in which the central bankers and the Keynesian clowns are both hell-bent on forcing wages and prices up, when every attempt to do so accelerates the use of more robots.
There is nothing wrong with falling wages provided costs fall as well. Who (other than Keynesian clowns and misguided union activists) does not want lower prices?
Moreover, falling prices as a result of increasing productivity over time is the natural state of affairs. For example, one farmer today produces as much goods as 100 farmers a few decades ago.
Certainly the price of agricultural goods is up over that time frame, but far less than the corresponding increase in money supply and credit (the true measure of inflation).
Robots an Invincible Force
Central banks are powerless to stop the advance of technology. Robots in particular are an invincible force.
Resistance is futile.
The Fed, central banks, and governments around the globe need to embrace technology and its deflationary forces. Otherwise, the result will be a sad combination of fewer jobs, rising population, higher prices, and a ultimately a major war
Back in the mid 1970’s I was in toastmasters. One speech that I remember was by an engineer. It was about the increasing costs of labor because of government regulation. His closing line was, “but, I don’t care if labor gets more expensive. I design labor saving devices for a living.”
I could buy on of those to do my FR surfing. Then I have some time to really relax.
makes investing in companies a good idea for the slacker generation.
Baxter is probably 10 years behind the Japanese robotics giants.
The writer pretends or doesn’t know about the prevalence of Japan’s robot builders in global robotic manufacturing.
My mother was in the hospital for a week last spring. The hospital was using a robot to pick and deliver medical supplies from the stock room to the nurse's station. It was fascinating to behold.
Wouldn’t matter if the price point was below the Japanese robots. The point is that the robot is relatively cheap and thus accessible to businesses that want something at the entry level.
This is not a life message, but a Malthusian, ZPG, death-culture message. We'd better start pulling it apart and seeing where its advocates went wrong.
Positively wanting robots so they can fire people and throw them into the slums of Calcutta is a real clue that an anti-people, anti-life vision is at work.
Who wants to live in a sparkling, booming economy in which people are being shoveled into crematoria?
My thought of maintaining employment, was to be the one that could fix the machine that took away someone’s job.
I became a Service Engineer for an American machine tool company, working on numerical control, and then computer numerical control machine tools.
I figured I was safe, since I now could fix the machine that made the machine that took someone’s job.
However, the Japanese had a better business model for the machine tool industry, and the American business died.
A robot loaded up hundreds of these large sheets of translucent printed circuit board material. Each one was about 1 meter by 1 meter, and very thin, so that a stack of a couple of hundred boards in raw form went into the factory. It was an utterly bare board.
A wheeled robot rolled down the hall - loaded up with all these boards. It turned right through automatic doors into the manufacturing area. The doors closed automatically. FIVE DAYS later the printed circuit boards came out. They were all different sizes and shapes, all mass produced to exacting standards. The boards had the names of the end users embossed on them. These boards were going into some of the best known PC computer manufacturers from those day.
It took FIVE DAYS. And they were NEVER touched by a human for the entire time.
Welcome to the future.
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