What is the future of Labor in the technologized west?
Open question.
There was an interesting NYT article a couple of years ago about textile factories that moved from the US to Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s, and are moving back to the US in the 2000s and 2010s. The one they profiled now produces twice as much yarn as it did before, but only uses 15% as many workers. Welcome the robot overlords.
This is pretty much a pattern throughout manufacturing: the US produces more and more manufactured goods, and uses fewer and fewer people to do it:
(NB: output has recovered since 2010; mfg employment hasn't. Also, that's 2000 dollars throughout.)
This is largely emulated throughout the west: very high manufacturing output, decreasing manufacturing employment, and vast development of the service sector. Most of DU disagrees with me about whether that can be changed (I think it can't, nor do I think returning to high manufacturing employment would "fix" things), but that's not really the argument I'm interested in at this point; this is the situation of our economy now.
I'm pretty sure basically all of DU agrees that labor needs a larger voice in the economy than it has now. 60 or 70 years ago, that voice was provided by strong labor unions in labor-intensive manufacturing industries at large corporations. But labor-intensive large corporate manufacturing is a decreasingly pivotal sector of the economy (see above) -- both because of the automation changes that have made manufacturing less important, and the changes in fulfillment techniques that leave industry much less vertically integrated than it was before (Ford and GM largely made their own parts in the 1950s, for instance). Simultaneously, rates of labor organization in the US have fallen precipitously, with the only remaining real bastion of organized labor public sector or semi-public sector services.
Unions worked very well when you had a few thousand people who worked in a large central factory that was responsible for the entire industrial process of a widget's being made. Direct pressure applied there could
1. rely on solidarity due to proximity, and
2. effectively stop production.
Modern fulfillment methods make that much less feasible. Not only does automation mean there are fewer workers to strike (and replacing 150 workers is a lot easier than replacing 1000); modern fulfillment means that each individual site is much less critical to the industrial product than it was 60 years ago (back then, if you didn't make the brake pads, Fords didn't roll off the line; now, if you don't make the brake pads a different shop can just as easily). Manufacturing labor is not the concentrated (physically and economically) force it was right after World War 2.
60 years ago, it took 75% of the adult population working full time to produce the stuff America wanted to buy; today it takes much much less (and frankly there are a ton of office jobs that could probably disappear with little impact on the economy right now). Labor has less of a voice for many reasons, but one of them is that the economy doesn't need nearly as much labor as it used to.
The sectors where unions still thrive are service sectors that more or less emulate that concentration: teachers, postal workers, electricians, longshoremen, etc.: industries where you need a large group of people to be in a specific place at a specific time doing a specific thing (IBEW's main selling point is that it can man literally any job no matter the size). But all of these are subject to technological displacement just like manufacturing workers were: robots can unload ships; 3D printers can create cable and connections that robots can run; drones can deliver mail. It would not surprise me if within 10 years half of primary and secondary instruction was by some form of MOOC, at which point people will start to question why we need to transport students to a single central building that needs to be heated and cooled, rather than sending tutors to where students are as needed.
There are some obvious changes that are going to happen one way or another: a lot fewer people are going to do work for employers for money than we're used to over the next several decades. The results of this could be awesome or horrifying. (Equivalently, the same percentage of the population could work, but on the order of 15 hours a week rather than 40.) There are several ways we could make this a good thing. For instance, a universal social dividend (or "minimum income"
would mean people who didn't want to work wouldn't have to. Alternately, we could have funds that do some kind of grant system for socially useful work that isn't normally renumerated (child/elder care, community infrastructure building, etc.).
Are unions still the future of Labor? Europe seems to use them well, though union membership is declining there too. Germany also has a legal requirement that labor have a voice in corporate governance; I think that is probably the best thing we could do here at least in the short term.
TL;DR: because of technological changes, we face a drastic alteration in our relationship to "work" over the next few decades. What can and should Labor do to guide that process to the best (or least bad) possible outcome?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Dystopia . . . simply because we're not a country that does what's best for the country, but rather, what's best for the wealthy.
Joe and Jane Sixpack aren't going to invent their way out of this scenario . . .. really, in the 80s when not everything was created in a corporate lab, they didn't then. That was an anomaly.
To think that all of us are going to become our own bosses and serve each other is FOLLY.
To think that a gerrymandered bunch of selfish, "every person for themselves" borderline-theocrats are going to enact a Guaranteed Minimum Income is COMEDIC.
We're going to be left to our own threadbare elements and we're going to fail. MISERABLY. There are only so many hours in a day and we're not all salespeople, scientists, inventors, businesspersons or financial experts. Humans don't have the financial resources to pay for a sudden emergency, let alone years of expensive training for a career that's going to be obsolete as soon as they're done.
But really, it doesn't matter at all to the Creative Destruction set, who giggle gleefully at the prospect of millions out of work and then cry "PERSECUTION!" when you lay this inevitability on them.
Hey, don't listen to ME, though. I'm just one big Sam Sobstory. Everything's going to turn out just fine. Really.
