Tag: manufactur

GARY MACDOUGALL: Society’s right to work

GARY MACDOUGALL: Society’s right to work

A typical auto manufacturing production floor will have thousands of industrial robots lined up doing multiple tasks. ©(Submitted photo)

Many years ago as a young reporter I felt underpaid and overworked. I had a crisis of faith in terms of my chosen field of employment.

Looking back, I was likely being paid about what I should have earned, given my education and experience.Unlike myself, many young people in the 1960s had chosen the booming economy of southern Ontario to find employment. The cars they drove when they returned home for summer vacations made me chafe at my lot in […]

America Is Still Making Things

America Is Still Making Things

A manufacturing worker at an Eli Lilly facility in Indiana COLUMBIA CITY, Ind.—Big companies such as Rexnord and Carrier are closing down plants in this Rust Belt state and moving their factories to Mexico. But in some corners, including this rural patch of the state’s northeast, manufacturing is growing.

In a nondescript building set among the icy cornfields of Columbia City, Brian Emerick, the CEO and owner of Micropulse, employs 306 people who make millions of dollars worth of specialized medical equipment such as orthopedic implants and the surgical tools used to install them. That’s up from the 190 he […]

When it Comes to ‘Saving Globalization’ World Leaders are Still Missing the Point

When it Comes to ‘Saving Globalization’ World Leaders are Still Missing the Point

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it,” or so Karl Marx once wrote. As trade liberalization and globalization more broadly are called into question, G20 leaders could do with both interpreting the situation and changing it.

It is not an easy task for the G20, which is a diverse group of developed and emerging economies, accounting for around 80% of GDP. In spite of their great success in launching a trade and investment working group and agreeing on guiding principles of investment policy-making, G20 leaders failed to address the emergence of […]

Automation: The Real Job Killer of American Manufacturing, Part Two.

Automation: The Real Job Killer of American Manufacturing, Part Two.

In Part 1 , I stated that the real job killer of American manufacturing is robots, not the Chinese or Hispanics. Manufacturing is a good starting point to look at the impact of technology because manufacturing accounts for 12.5 percent of total U.S. GDP and nearly 9 percent of U.S. employment according to the most recent report from the Economic Policy Institute.

As innovation in automation and technology continues to develop, robotics will become cheaper, artificial intelligence will improve, and more sectors of our economy will experience similar transformations to those in manufacturing. A well-cited study from Oxford University analyzed […]

OPINION: Robots could put most humans out of work. What then?

OPINION: Robots could put most humans out of work. What then?

By Sean Welsh, researcher in robot ethics at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Robots will replace many humans: perhaps most humans in the workplace.

Automation has been eliminating human jobs since the Industrial Revolution. Human drivers will soon become obsolete, along with human bricklayers. Indeed even high-status “cognitive” jobs in law and medicine are threatened by robotic replacements.Oxford Business School writers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne predict massive technological unemployment over the next 20 to 30 years. Something like half to three-quarters of existing human jobs are “vulnerable to automation” they say.The question is: will new jobs be created […]

The real reason Ford abandoned its plant in Mexico has little to do with Trump

The real reason Ford abandoned its plant in Mexico has little to do with Trump

The frame of a 2015 Ford Mustang vehicle moves down the production line at the Ford Motor Flat Rock Assembly Plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, U.S. August 20, 2015. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook/File Photo Ford chief executive Mark Fields announced Tuesday the automaker was ditching its plans to open a factory in Mexico and instead expanding a Michigan plant, creating 700 more local jobs.

The next wave of workers in Flat Rock will build mostly self-driving and electric cars, including a hybrid Mustang. Unlike manufacturing roles of decades past, though, the jobs will likely require computer literacy and more than a high […]

Who Will Be Left Behind From The Factory Of The Future?

Who Will Be Left Behind From The Factory Of The Future?

Who will the future factory not need?

Most production workers and virtually all administrative, office and managerial personnel.

Automation takes out the production worker jobs, as has been the case over the last 40 years. Artificial Intelligence will take care of the rest.What will be different from the onslaught of automation which has progressively and at an increasing rate eliminated many jobs during the last 200 years is that new types of jobs will not be created in sufficient numbers to employ the unemployed. Nor will the unemployment occur spread by occupation in such a way as to distribute the pain […]

Routine jobs vanishing and it’s all technology’s fault? Hold it there, sport

Routine jobs vanishing and it's all technology's fault? Hold it there, sport

We’re being encouraged to do different work and not everyone can keep up, study shows

Routine jobs are disappearing, pushing less educated workers toward either lower-paying non-routine jobs, unemployment, or non-participation in the labor market.

The automation of routine work by technology is partially responsible, though its role is relatively small, according to a paper [paywalled] published last month through the US National Bureau of Economic Research.The paper, "Disappearing Routine Jobs: Who, How, and Why?", coauthored by Guido Matias Cortes, Nir Jaimovich, and Henry E Siu, attributes about one third of the decline in routine employment over the past four […]

John H Wolfe: Automation, globalization and Trump’s efforts

John H Wolfe: Automation, globalization and Trump's efforts

George Will’s column of December 29 (Making America 1953 again) sheds light on the United States’ diminishing manufacturing employment as well as the failure of government intervention to save manufacturing jobs.

Simply put, two factors are responsible for most of the manufacturing job loss since the 1950s. First, the U.S. was the only significant industrial economy that had not been devastated by World War II so there was little global competition for U.S. firms. Plants ran at full capacity and corporations were able to grant wage increases with the knowledge that they could pass on the cost to consumers. The […]

U.S. manufacturing expected to lose 2.1 million jobs over next decade

U.S. manufacturing expected to lose 2.1 million jobs over next decade

A recent study says it’s not cheap imports that are to blame as much as it is simple progress in how we make things.

While cheap imports have affected local steelmakers, the main culprit in overall factory job losses is increasing automation in factories, according to the study by Conexus Indiana and Ball State University.

"Overwhelmingly, the largest impact is productivity. Almost 88 percent of job losses in manufacturing in recent years can be attributable to productivity growth, and the long-term changes to manufacturing employment are mostly linked to the productivity of American factories," Ball State Professors Michael Hicks and Srikant […]