The biggest hope for US manufacturing repatriation is robotics. Unfortunately, it's not going to help with our unemployment issues. Even Foxconn made some noise recently about replacing their employees with robots, & if the math works for them over there, you can easily see why it would be a no-brainer over here.
I'd be curious to hear how many units those lines will produce & how many employees will be needed to man them.
There was an article posted here yesterday about General Electric moving home many manufacturing positions. Their plants which at their peak employed 20k people had dwindled to just 1,300 or so. In the process of moving the jobs back they've swelled up to 3k.
While moving these jobs home will never make the US a manufacturing giant again due to advances in productivity, robotics and other areas it certainly will create valuable jobs at home.
Though, that article argues that the real value of the move home is in the ability to get manufacturers, designers and others as close as possible.
While moving these jobs home will never make the US a manufacturing giant again due to advances in productivity, …
Not to pick on you, but this kind of statement is made so often that it's become received wisdom that "nothing's made in America anymore." But the US remains the largest manufacturer in the world. And while I don't have the numbers on manufacturing employment by country (anybody know where to look?), I'm sure the US is by any measure—including employment—a "manufacturing giant", even if it is more heavily roboticized and thus needs less labor for equivalent productivity.
Technically, China nosed ahead of the USA as the world's biggest exporter of manufactured goods a year or two ago. Which means we're not on the top anymore, but also goes way against the popular misconception that the US has had a weak manufacturing sector for decades.
Not that Americans should see China exporting more goods as a sign that the US economy has fallen apart. China has over four times the population, meaning it's exporting less than a quarter as much stuff per capita. China could grow to export four times as much stuff and that still wouldn't be a sign that the US's manufacturing sector is declining, only that it's holding its position.
And realistically, the US's manufacturing sector is incredibly strong - not just compared to other countries in the present, but also in comparison to itself in the past. I've got no idea why Americans get so worried that the country can manufacture so much stuff so profitably and with so little labor input that most their citizens get to work in the booming service and leisure economy made possible by that unprecedented level of efficiency, and feast on the luxury it produces, instead of grinding away on assembly lines. It seems nobody's quite capable of seeing the forest for this one particular infuriatingly backward-looking tree.
American manufacturing is large and sclerotic. The US numbers are reliant on large capital goods: aircraft, weapons, industrial equipment, etc. These industries are heavily subsidized and uncompetitive. Compared to Germany's network of small manufacturing firms, manufacturing in the US is structurally weak.
You're right. I guess what I meant to say is that we won't see the same kind of manufacturing we did in the past. As in we won't return to the "glory days" of manufacturing as a primary employment sector.
Robotic manufacturing doesn't mean zero labor. There are still many jobs involved that can't be automated. Ford, for example, uses a significant amount of robotic assembly, but still employs over 150,000 people.
So yes, it replaces some jobs. But if we brought all manufacturing of domestic products back to the US, even if they were 100% produced with robotic manufacturing, there wouldn't even be enough workers to fill the necessary non-automated jobs.
Not to turn political (And I'm independent) but Obama said something during the debates that rang really true to me. He said that the low level jobs in this country are going away for good and we need to focus on creating mid-level jobs.
It makes sense that as society and technology evolve, the low skill jobs will be replaced by automation. I think this is a good thing. In the long term, we shouldn't shun technology just because it keeps a real human from doing a mundane task 40 hours a week.
I think an increase in robotic automated manufacturing is a definite positive (than the alternative -- outsourced assembly), since it incentivizes companies that make the robots for those lines, and companies that make the robots that make the robots for those lines, etc.
Many of the industrial assembly robots are made by Asian and European firms, but there are definite advantages to being local to your customers -- a significant increase in robotic manufacturing in the US could fuel a surge in robotics companies here as a result, which is an exciting possibility in my book.
That's a good attitude, and I think we should decide our public policy with that assumption, but I have a hard time believing it is actually true.
Just as an example, a lights out factory is still going to need some people for maintenance but there is hardly any sort of "law of robotics" that suggests every manufacturing job lost is a maintenance job gained. Automation does replace people, in an ideal world the economy is strengthened by that automation and those people can therefore easily find new better jobs, but is there any evidence that is actually the case? I think the Rust Belt is evidence that it is not.
I'd be curious to hear how many units those lines will produce & how many employees will be needed to man them.