Automotive related employment statistics from BLM.
Includes any automotive related job, being manufacturing or related to the manufacture of autos.
Will these ever come back to the 1990-2000 levels ?
Posted on 06/05/2016 7:26:05 AM PDT by expat_panama
For the last two years, we’ve listened as presidential candidates promised repeatedly to “bring back manufacturing jobs.” But they really didn’t go anywhere. As the data show, manufacturing output is near its all-time high. Since 1980, factory output has grown 114%, while the number of factory jobs has shrunk by 36%, or nearly 7 million jobs total. It was technology and productivity, not China or any other nation, that “took” factory jobs.
(Excerpt) Read more at services.investors.com ...
” He was traumatized enough when he discovered Walter Cronkite was a democrat.”
And that understates just how far left Cronkite really was.
Sure, nothing has changed. Indoctrinated free trade adherents will try to bend and manipulate any data they can find to obfuscate the extreme degradation One-Way free trade deals has done to our manufacturing and technology sectors...the prime cause for our economic woes today.
You see, automation and reclassifying service industries as manufacturing is not the point. The point is, America has lost many critical industries and thus has lost the skills needed to keep this country prosperous, strong and scientifically relavant in the future.
We are not going to lead the world by being the best in Insurance. You don't get it, and likely never will.
Good luck to to us if we ever have to fight a war.
That reminds me of something I heard recently about commercial fishing in the Atlantic, IIRC. It was cheaper to catch the fish in the Atlantic, ship them to China to have them fileted, and ship them back to Europe, than to do it all in Europe.
I of course couldn’t get the link to show anything, so I did a search using the headline and found some other similar articles. Most appeared to be good examples of how to lie with statistics. For example the charts and quotes for output were mostly in dollars not adjusted dollars which skews the charts upward. If you are selling 10,000 widgets for $20,000 in 1980 and the same 10,000 widgets for $100,000 in 2015, it does not mean that your output increased by 5 times. We all know that there are entire sectors of the economy which have been moved overseas. Trying to sugar coat it by lying with charts and statistics that are designed to mislead is not likely to fool very many people.
It never has made sense to me, how crossing the ocean twice in a container ship on top of labor can be cheaper than processing at or near the source. Beyond that, quality and freshness has to suffer greatly. When domestic capacity to handle this is gone or greatly diminished due to loss of business, there won't be any other option. Seems like a bad idea to me.
> candidates promised repeatedly to “bring back manufacturing jobs.” But they really didn’t go anywhere. As the data show, manufacturing output is near its all-time high.
Do you see what he did there?
If you believe that then it means you haven't done even the most basic research and I concur, we have little to agree on.
According to the Office of the US Trade Representative as it relates to exports to China:
"The top export categories (2-digit HS) in 2015 were: aircraft ($15 billion), electrical machinery ($13 billion), machinery ($12 billion), miscellaneous grain, seeds, fruit (soybeans) ($11 billion), and vehicles ($11 billion)."
From the article: “Since 1980, factory output has grown 114%”.
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Do you know how this number is calculated?
Is it the total number of widgets produced?
Is it the total retail dollar value of all widgets produced?
Or what?
Name 20 manufactured items made in the USA you bought in the last month. OK, how about 10?
I won’t swear to this part, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the fish were flown to/from China.
Cost of airing them over and back makes even less sense.
It appears to be the total dollar value of all widgets produced.
“Manufacturing output refers to the total inflation-adjusted value of output produced by manufacturers. Announcements of manufacturing output include month-over month and year-over-year changes in manufacturing production.”
Source:
http://www.wikinvest.com/wiki/Manufacturing_Output
Integrated circuits. Airplanes. Cars. All areas where massive automation and robotics have greatly improved quality and productivity, and dramatically reduced the need for blue collar workers.
Even agriculture - one farmer on a modern GPS-guided combine can do the work ten just 40 years ago.
For example, I worked on a cutting head for a french fry processing system. HUGE system, about the size of two boxcars, but capable of peeling, cutting, and sorting sixty times what a human-staffed line can do, per hour. And do it with defect detection rates around 99%, compared to around 70% for the human-staffed line.
And do it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with a 99% up-time. All controlled by three supervisors per shift.
The age of computing and automation is here and that means a lot fewer jobs for blue collar folks in the future. We are increasing our productivity per work exponentially, and now that robots build robots, and the price of those robotic systems continues to plummet, the pace of productivity per worker will continue to accelerate.
It’s no coincidence the productivity versus jobs curve took off in the late 80s as the era of affordable computing began.
“I buy a lot of clothes and shoes for my one year old granddaughter. I can assure you none of the items were made in the United States of America.”
Back in the ‘70s a friend of my parents was manager of a local mill that made clothing for several major labels, Van Heusan, iZod, etc. He lamented even back then, that after he bought the material for a pair of pants, he could ship it to a Caribbean island, have it cut, assembled, and shipped back for less than the cost of paying one American worker to install one zipper. That plant, along with all the other manufacturing in that blue collar town in a right-to-work state, is long gone.
How much BETTER would it be if we didn’t off shore a hug part of out manufacturing base?
Trying to tie automation and robotics to off shoring is a fools errand. They have nothing to do with each other. WHERE the factory is located is the important thing. It doesn’t matter if the factory employs 100 or 1000 it NEEDS TO BE HERE.
Increasingly, yes. In fact, that's the biggest worry for Beijing - how to deal with 800 million blue-collar workers as their economy continues to modernize and automate. Automation is exploding in China because of lower costs and higher quality.
The difference is, in the US you can go back to learn a new trade or skill. In China, once you're over the age of about 26, no university or college will accept you as a student. It's too late - you're options for switching careers is greatly reduced.
Few realize that average wages in China have tripled - yes, tripled - in the last 10 years. In 2005, the average worker made about 20,000 RMB per year - about $300 per month. Now it's at 60,000 RMB per year and still accelerating. The labor cost advantage that China had 10 years ago is gone - Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil - all have lower costs and millions of workers ready to go.
So China's turning to automation. Get the labor costs down, increase quality over what a low-automation production process creates (which is what you'd have in those other countries), and try to keep some of its factories rolling and the cash coming in.
But then, 800 million workers. What do you do...
Since we no longer ship jobs overseas and it doesn’t matter anymore then a 20% tariff isn’t going to hurt anything. Same with the wall, if isn’t going to do any good or work then why not humor us troglodyte nationalists and build it.
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