Tag: manufactur

They Took Our Jobs! Is Globalization Really to Blame for Job Losses?

They Took Our Jobs! Is Globalization Really to Blame for Job Losses?

There has been a long running debate about the loss of American manufacturing jobs over the last decade. Blame for job losses is largely laid at the door of globalization, specifically China.

The rhetoric was ramped up in the recent presidential election campaign when both candidates came out firmly against more globalization but Donald Trump in particular, strongly criticized China for stealing American jobs and vowed to return those jobs to the U.S., has placed the issue even more sharply under the spotlight. Is globalization really the culprit for moving jobs from the U.S. to elsewhere? Or is it merely […]

Ontario’s Gritville wins, while Toryland struggles

Ontario's Gritville wins, while Toryland struggles

Toronto has gotten the vast majority of new jobs in Ontario since the last recession, and in parts of the province the decline that started eight years ago has never ended, says a new report from the Fraser Institute that explains a whole lot about what’s going on in our provincial politics.

Liberalville is doing pretty well. Toryland’s pain is worse now than ever. A wildly uneven economy helped Donald Trump win the presidency in the United States and things don’t look that different here.

Yes, the study is from the Fraser Institute, the right-wing B.C. think tank. But the work […]

Trump’s Trickle-Down Populism

Trump’s Trickle-Down Populism

Last Thursday, President-elect Donald Trump triumphantly celebrated Carrier’s decision to reverse its plan to close a furnace plant and move jobs to Mexico. Some 800 jobs will remain in Indianapolis.

“Corporate America is going to have to understand that we have to take care of our workers,” Trump told The New York Times . “The free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing,” Vice President-elect Michael Pence added, as Trump interjected, “Every time, every time.”

So what’s the Trump alternative to the free market? Bribe giant corporations to keep jobs in America.Carrier’s move to Mexico would have saved […]

Job Automation And Universal Basic Income

Elon Musk thinks a universal basic income is inevitable. Musk doesn’t see plausible alternatives . I hope not. So here’s the optimistic scenario: On the one hand, manual and low skilled work will mostly get automated out of existence. So one could imagine why demand for people at lower skill levels and lower levels of cognitive ability could just evaporate. On the other hand, automation will cut costs and boost the wealth of those still employed. Even if the pay of manual laborers is low the goods a manual laborer will need to survive should become very cheap. So […]

Robert Reich: Trump’s Trickle-Down Populism – OpEd

Robert Reich: Trump’s Trickle-Down Populism – OpEd

Donald Trump. Photo by Gage Skidmore, Wikipedia Commons. Last Thursday President-elect Donald Trump triumphantly celebrated Carrier’s decision to reverse its plan to close a furnace plant and move jobs to Mexico. Some 800 jobs will remain in Indianapolis.

“Corporate America is going to have to understand that we have to take care of our workers,” Trump told The New York Times . “The free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing,” Vice President-elect Michael Pence added, as Trump interjected, “Every time, every time.”

So what’s the Trump alternative to the free market? Bribe giant corporations to keep jobs […]

How new manufacturing technology will impact jobs

How new manufacturing technology will impact jobs

Humans still have an important role to play in manufacturing and supply chain environments. The world is changing but what does this mean for the future of work? Pierfranceso Manenti, vice president – research, SCM World, explains.

There has been a lot of scaremongering about the future of workers’ jobs and the role manufacturing technology plays in this; the fear of being replaced by a robot has existed for decades and is one that the media loves to play on. Pierfranceso Manenti, vice president – research, The reality, however, is more subtle. Jobs in industry will continue to exist, but […]

Stephen Hawking: Automation and AI Is Going To Decimate Middle Class Jobs

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: In a column in The Guardian , the world-famous physicist wrote that "the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes , with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining." He adds his voice to a growing chorus of experts concerned about the effects that technology will have on workforce in the coming years and decades. The fear is that while artificial intelligence will bring radical increases in […]

David Rosenberg: Trump is pointing the finger at the wrong culprit on job losses

David Rosenberg: Trump is pointing the finger at the wrong culprit on job losses

If Donald Trump doesn’t carry out his protectionist threats, he risks being a one-term president, writes David Rosenberg. Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz delivered a terrific speech last week that is definitely worth a read, basically about how “creative destruction” is mostly at play behind this ever-declining share of manufacturing employment across the globe, no longer just confined to the developed world, either.

Here are some of the more lucid findings:

“Economists’ understanding of the evolution of economies is based on hundreds of years of history. Advances in technology lead to higher productivity and greater production, which in turn […]

Top Five Ways to Keep a Robot from Stealing Your Job

Top Five Ways to Keep a Robot from Stealing Your Job

by Kitty Testa

Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry has a current exhibit called Robot Revolution which presents the most recent developments in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). The exhibit showcases robots that demonstrate cooperation, social intelligence, superhuman precision in manipulating objects, and superior locomotion. Developments in robotics, AI and information systems over the past decade are extraordinary. These technological achievements elicit visions from a futurist’s Utopian dreams, as explained on the gateway to the museum’s web page for the exhibit. What’s interesting is that this intro includes the questions that every business is asking itself every day, “How could […]

Steve Rattner: US Manufacturing Jobs, Wages, Declining

The Obama administration is downplaying President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement that he and Vice President-elect Mike Pence had brokered a deal to save as many as 1,000 jobs at Carrier’s Indianapolis factory, but economic analyst Steve Rattner said Thursday thousands of manufacturing jobs have been lost over the past year.

Further, Rattner told MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" panel, Trump and other officials are not addressing the issue of continually declining wages.

"We created in this country 1.8 million jobs so far this year," Rattner told the panel, asking how many of those jobs were in manufacturing.His fellow panelists threw out several positive figures, […]