Why Trump Can’t Save Manufacturing Jobs — Unless He Confronts the Systemic Alliance of Capitalism and Automation
This morning’s NYT features an article about the Carrier plant’s move to Mexico, a move which Trump vowed to stop as part of his campaign against “free trade” agreements. The company is moving ahead with its plans, which will eliminate the well-paid jobs of 1,400 people, and another Indianapolis company employing 300 in Indianapolis, the Rexnord bearing factory, plans to emulate them and move 300 jobs abroad. This is part of a wave of companies moving their industrial operations out of Indiana to lower wage countries.
The key passage of the NYT article puts into sharp relief the real issue behind de-employment in America and the rest of the world:
Regardless of who is in the Oval Office, manufacturers are seeing relentless pressure, from investors and rival companies, to automate, replacing workers with machines that do not break down or require health benefits and pension plans. Wall Street hedge fund managers are demanding steadily rising earnings from Carrier’s parent, United Technologies, even as growth remains sluggish worldwide.
The Carrier plant here is plenty profitable. But moving to Monterrey, where workers earn in a day what they make here in an hour, will increase profits faster.
Not one presidential candidate truly questioned the viability of the economic model here: Erase living wage jobs by moving as many as possible to low wage countries, while you wait for automation to catch up and relieve you of having to pay any but a handful of engineers to operate the robots. Follow the orders of the hedge fund managers to maximize profits at all cost, even if that cost includes decimating the workforce that used to be able to buy your products.
There have to be at least two parts to an economy, the workers and the consumers.
We are on track to eradicate the consumer, and none of the political class is acknowledging the urgency of the situation. Countless articles, (here, here, here,) outline the inexorable path of automation, artificial intelligence, and the increasingly evident truth that this time is different. This time there is not a nirvana of new, easier, more humane and better paid jobs on the other side of mass layoffs. This time automation promises to cut across every strata, from the truck drivers displaced by self-driving cars, to the legal researcher, the news reporter and the teacher replaced by advanced computation and artificial intelligence.
Rather than focusing on the easy fruit of critiquing social media for causing the election of Trump by skewing our newsfeeds, why does no one ask the tech industry the harder question: why its relentless focus on technology that replaces people? There is an element of moral responsibility never raised as we marvel at each new “magical” intervention that moves us farther and farther from a functioning economy. At best people suggest we need to think about having a “basic income” — and I have never seen any proposal that demonstrates how this can be financed without a consumer class, or how the amounts suggested will keep people out of poverty.
We would not be talking about mass welfare if we took on the bigger structure: how the juggernaut of the stock market and high tech work hand in hand to maximize profit by de-employing everybody but the very top and the very bottom.
The increasingly technocentric bias of universities and the press rarely questions the evolution of technological innovations through a moral lens.
As we strip social studies, philosophy, art, political science and the rest of the humanities from the curriculum of schools of every level we are losing the language and the power to critique the monumental changes taking place in the workplace. Infrastructure projects to build roads and replace the electrical grid are necessary, but they are a band-aid, and no cure for the loss of steady well-paid and meaningful jobs. We can’t hector people to be nicer and more tolerant and stay off drugs when they have no hope of a personal future or a decent job. Employment is at the heart of our social structures as well as our economic structures.
I challenge Mr. Trump to look at root causes here if he wants to fulfill his promise to bring back jobs. Instead of bowing to the assumption that technology is “progress” and “progress can’t be stopped,” encourage a different kind of thinking that asks what is progress? Challenge universities to include social responsibility in the engineering curriculum. Challenge the start-up culture to ask if their newest app provides an actual benefit and a living wage. Challenge the hedge fund managers to question the need for ever higher profit at any human cost. If Mr. Trump wants to be a true disruptor, if he wants to make America great again, challenge the primacy of the algorithm and bring back the human being.
