Those are part of the picture but the larger part is outsourcing through automation, including especially the computer.
Many higher paid jobs, any 'work' that can be transmitted over the internet are being outsources without actually having to move entire businesses overseas.
Computerization has been a wonderful thing but it has its dark side, like anything else.
All the leftist and offshoring has a dire effect. Go Green!!!
By the time 1/2 of America wakes up to it, it will be too late.
The Bank of America nearest to me got rid of ALL their drive-thru tellers months and months ago; ripped out all the machines for drive-thru transactions, and now still has the same 2 drive-up ATM’s and maybe 1 walk-up.
I can only guess there are less tellers working inside these days. Who has money to put in the bank? Certainly not me.
Still plenty-o-work here posting about headline rather than article content....
Humans need not apply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Nothing new, look at agriculture for example. Few would want to trade today’s farming productivity for a life of dawn-to-dusk hard work our grandfathers had to do just to subsist. As one grain farmer told me, he works like hell for a fewvweeks in the spring and fall, and sits in the coffee shop in between.
The challenge before us is how to harness the power of automation to create new value and new prosperity. The clock doesn’t go backwards.
For those who think that high tariffs are the answer that just raises costs to the consumer and results in a much lower standard of living and the unavailability of some products and services. Major producers would have to decide to be only offshore or only domestic. The domestic industries would exist and even proliferate to some extent but their costs must necessarily be higher and their profit margin would have to be higher to justify being domestic only. It would satisfy those who are uncomfortable dealing with anyone and anything foreign, but the standard of living would be lower for everyone. The wealthiest 1% would be a less affluent group because the very richest would all be domiciled offshore, themselves.
I need this guy's secret. My mailbox is stuffed daily with sales, sales, promotions, offers, real mail, catalogs, papers, etc.
All that said, automation requires and automation repairman, an automation monitor, and an automation seller.
Those can be very costly for small business.
For a nation, though, a huge army of unemployed is unhealthy. It is better to have them employed than to have them turn into an actual army.
Someone finds a solution or we have a big problem
Immigration is not the problem? Automation is the future of farming. How does it help us to import tens of millions of low-skill low-educated peasants from Mexico and Central America as a permanent addition to our workforce in our modern welfare state?
We have always had increasing productivity in manufacturing through innovation like assembly lines and machine tools. The work force in the past moved to other higher-value added jobs created in a dynamic economy. But what we are seeing is American jobs move from higher value-added to lower value-added to government dependency. To be a prosperous country, we need to move workers to higher value-added, not lower value-added.
There have been millions of new jobs created in recent decades to manufacture engineered products sold in the US market. But those jobs were created in China and Mexico because of half-baked globalist ideology.
I’ve been saying this for years. When I first began my professional career there were about 10 clerical people for 40 managers, techs, and field people. Now, there are 1.5 clerical people supporting about 60 other employees.
It didn’t happen overnight. Better software, more efficient communications, teleconferencing, faxing then file transfers, it all added up. At the same time, previous clerical functions were transferred to both management and employees such as time-keeping, inventory, and even routine accounting.
All of those clerical people, accounting techs, mail room jobs, travel agents, and inventory people didn’t suddenly get great careers elsewhere. Their jobs were simply ended through attrition.
Now their young counterparts work part-time in call centers and retail.
I had 34 years experience and success in healthcare data mining and analysis. I was lucky that I hit retirement age one month before being replaced by an algorithm. The damn thing is the algorithm does my job better than I did according to my former coworkers plus does not cost the company benefits.
This is true.
Theoretically, the free market would reallocate the resources (human and material) freed up by automation into new productive uses.
But there are regulatory barriers to that, and if the technological change is too fast, the job market may not have time to change fast enough to accommodate the new economic conditions.
We’ve had a lot of technological change in the past 200 years, but never at this fast a pace.
There were plenty of new tech jobs to replace the lost ones, but those got relentlessly outsourced and swamped with H1-Bs.
Compare the USPS-related losses to the number of H1-Bs. Even if you’re generous with calculating jobs on the former, it is swamped by the losses to Americans on the latter.
My son in law was just hired by a German company in upstate South Carolina. Pay isn’t bad, great benefits. Seems like foreign companies are doing better than American companies.
Two college degrees that you should not get. Software testing AKA QA. Or Chemistry. Both of these jobs and several others are being replaced by $20 an hour foreign workers who hardly speak english and have only been in the country for a few months. While mostly from India these people are contract employees that are hoping for full time work but fear if they don’t get it they will be deported. These people are often graduates of colleges back in India. But they are not top students. Often they are family of foreign students or foreign workers who are here.
The two industries Software QA and Chemistry are now equal to Grocery store assistant manager. And other jobs are going that way. And boy is Tata Consulting and other Indian employee factories making a lot of money off of this racquet.
However, if Trump wins and we get significant tax and business regulator reform, watch for real employment levels to really take off as our middle class revives.
But look at what you buy, see where it is made, and if it is some third world country, so if they can make it without automation then so can we. Keep the work force off the government payroll.
His food example is poor. Most restaurants don’t prepackage salad and baked potatoes. I don’t what that guy is smoking or where he eats but not even Olive Garden does that kind of crap.
A better example would have been printers. Newspapers employed a lot of printers to print those papers. Eventually these printing jobs got consolidated. For example the Boston Glob (tm) is now printed by the same compay that prints the Boston Herald.
A friend of mine used to be a newspaper printer. He now washes dishes for a living.
Automation is not always bad per se.
When building roads, we use bulldozers instead of spoons and shovels.
Read up on Milton Friedman.
What the HELL is wrong with us and so many so-called AMERICA corporations?? Have we forgotten that our new "friends" the Chinese sent us pet food laced with ethylene glycol (POISONOUS ANTI-FREEZE) that killed many of our pets and send us frozen fish fed on human excrement?? Yes, the same Chinese that support the insane missile launching man-child in North Korea, are building a new military island to dominate the sea lanes in their region and that have "bought" crooked political hacks like Harry Reid in order to scarf up thousands of acres in this country, etc. It goes on and on and on as the criminals in Washington continue to sell out our childrens' BIRTHRIGHT!!
It's GOTTA STOP!!!!
If we fail to elect Trump, IT WILL ONLY GET MUCH, MUCH WORSE!
Paranoid nutjob that I am I have this nightmare that we elect a president who actually LOVES America and China gets "frisky" and launches a serious threat to our strategic national interests somewhere in the world. We respond by initiating a rebuild of our obozo weakened military by placing orders for replacement parts for the grounded fighters, bombers and warships. Immediately, the word comes from the Pentagon that nearly all the required parts are no longer produced here. They are now "MADE IN CHINA" and China is refusing to sell to us!
THINK ABOUT IT!
I’m a tech addict and I keep trying to tell people that if we don’t do something to put the brakes on the rate of jobs lost permanently to automation there is going to be a big chunk of society.
We are very close to hitting the point where a large portion of the American populace is permanently unemployable no matter what their work ethic or criminal background or education is because there is just so little need for human workers. They’ll either become a permanent underclass or fuel a massive socialist revolution because there is literally no need for them otherwise. There is not room for all of them to go play Little House on the Prairie even if they wanted to and could.
They say “you can’t turn back the clock”...but actually you can.You just don’t want to think about that happening because it won’t be very pleasant.
Odd no one brought up H1b accountants replacing American workers at MacDonalds. Program was to allow skills that foreign workers have that Americans don’t to be available to our workforce. I mean D@mn! We have Wall Street, with accounting schemes so Machiavellian that even the Feds can’t understand. Donald Trump ought to pull this out and openly challenge Congress and MacDonalds to prove accounting skills used at MacDonalds are not available in the indigenous population.
While he’s at it, he might turn toward hILLbillary and ask why this country would consider electing an executive that is 6% effective. We’re speaking the Clinton Foundation ‘charity’ here, folks, and the 6% solution Clinton offers.