Perhaps the good news about robots taking away manufacturing jobs is that the bad news applies everywhere.
Like China, for example.
China has long been considered the villainous star of the global low-wage drama, soaking up thousands of factory jobs once done by Americans and selling back products once made in the U.S.A.
Manufacturing, once accounting for one-third of all non-farm American jobs, has shrunk to just 8.7 percent of the total.
More troubling for the job picture, the resurgence of manufacturing after the recession – a burst of output – came with very few added jobs, thanks to greater use of computers and robots and other machines. The upshot seems to be that efficient factories are going to use automation, while labor-intensive work is going to be done overseas.
That’s good for productivity and profits and the overall economy, but not for job growth and middle class incomes.
Proponents of manufacturing have argued that if only the U.S. revised trade law or labor restrictions or cut taxes, at least some of the labor-intensive work could be lured back from all those Chinese factories that are getting by on cheap workers.
Well, guess what.
The robots, as Washington Monthly puts it, are coming for the Chinese jobs too.
Evidence turned up this week in a report by CCTV. The international news organization announced, in essence, that robots are all the rage in China.
“Efficient, working 24-7, no need to talk, eat, or drink, and best of all, you don’t have to pay them,” CCTV noted. “There are more benefits to having robots working for you. They don’t get hurt.”
Yes, well. Sounds great.
But it’s happening: They quote the International Federation of Robotics are putting the sale of industrial robots were sold worldwide at about 180,000 last year – and one-fifth of those sales were in China.
Or, as the happy optimists at Washington Monthly put it: “The reality is that there just isn’t enough high-paying work available in the private sector for the number of people that want to work, and that problem is only going to worsen over time.”
