Tag: manufactur

Politifact: Obama Wrong on Steel Production

Politifact: Obama Wrong on Steel Production

By Greg Richter | Tuesday, 05 Jul 2016 07:13 PM President Barack Obama got it wrong when he said last week that "The steel industry is producing as much steel in the United States as it ever was. It’s just (that) it needs one-tenth of the workers that it used to," Politifact says.
Obama made the claim during a summit in Ottawa one day after presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump slammed manufacturers for moving jobs into other countries. Trump was speaking near Pittsburgh, where the once dominant steel industry has been hammered in recent decades.

Obama took issue […]

The Enemies of Economic Independence

The founders sought more than political independence from Europe. They also sought to secure America’s economic independence. To that end, the second bill enacted by the first Congress was the Tariff Act of 1789 , the stated purpose of which was "the encouragement and protection of manufactures." The end result of America’s reliance on the tariff was both prosperity and economic independence, as American manufacturing became the envy of the world and Americans ended up relying on fellow Americans for most of the goods they purchased. This happy situation was brought to an end by our elites’ fatuous embrace […]

Book review: The Rise Of The Robots

Book review: The Rise Of The Robots

The Rise Of The Robots—Technology And The Threat Of Mass Unemployment: By Martin Ford, Oneworld Publications, 334 pages, Rs.599. If the Industrial Revolution introduced the assembly-line production concept in factories, the 1950s and 1960s saw companies like General Motors introduce robotics on shop floors. These developments, however, will pale in comparison to what is in store for the human workforce a few decades from now, given the acceleration in capabilities of software automation and artificial intelligence (AI) driven predictive algorithms.

The Rise Of The Robots—Technology And The Threat Of Mass Employment by Martin Ford is a well-researched attempt to […]

Robots, Jobs and Productivity in the Manufacturing Industry

Robots, Jobs and Productivity in the Manufacturing Industry

Reprinted with Permission

The Association for Advancing Automation recently published a white paper discussing the impact of industrial robotics on productivity and employment in the manufacturing industry. We would like to share our thoughts about its main findings.

Figure 1 below illustrates the evolution of robot shipments and employment for almost 20 years. The relationship between those two is clearly visible. As the robot shipments slowed down (blue bars), like in 2001-2002 and 2007-2010, so did nonfarm employment (green bars). . The industrial robot shipments are linked with the growth in manufacturing labor productivity, as it can be seen in […]

Robots Don’t Create New Jobs For Us, Rather, Idle Human Beings Go Do New Things

We’ve yet another little report on what’s going to happen when the robots come to steal all our jobs. This one at least makes the point that while there have been hiccups before, interregnums if you like, past advances in technology have not left large parts of the population without work. So, why should this time be different? Entirely true that, although of course the claim from the other side is that robots are different and so therefore so will this time be.

However, I still think that the basic story being told here is wrong. Not entirely wrong, it’s […]

Job gap widens between college, high school grads

Job gap widens between college, high school grads

A new graduate proudly displays his diploma, May 9, 2009. Buy Photo A structural shift in the job market following the most recent economic recession has radically changed the composition of the American workforce, with four-year college graduates for the first time constituting a larger share of the workforce than those who got a high school diploma but don’t have a college degree, according to a report released Thursday by the Georgetown University Center on Education.

Researchers at the center found that out of the 11.6 million jobs created in the post-recession economy, 11.5 million went to people with at […]

If Your Job Hasn’t Been Taken Over by Machines Yet, Just Wait

If Your Job Hasn't Been Taken Over by Machines Yet, Just Wait

Don’t pack up your cubicle quite yet. Though robots and automation are probably already transforming your day job, you have roughly a 60% chance of not losing your employment to a machine, according to a recent report from Forrester Research.

Automation and robotics can be seen in everything from manufacturing to logistics to food services and retail, but what are the jobs most likely to be taken over by machines? The proof may already be out there.

SMALL INVESTMENT, BIG POTENTIAL. TheStreet’s Stocks Under $10 has identified a handful of stocks with serious upside potential. See them FREE for 14-days. […]

Politicians have no idea about future jobs

Last night, ABC Lateline aired a ripper segment looking at the future of Australian employment and the track record of Australia’s politicians a decade ago.

There’s a lot of interesting extracts from the segment, including that a decade ago, Prime Minister thought the commodity boom would be permanent, unlike Kevin Rudd: KEVIN RUDD, THEN OPPOSITION LEADER (2007): New leadership is about building long-term economic prosperity for when once this mining boom is over. JOHN HOWARD, THEN PRIME MINISTER (2007): Why does Mr Rudd keep talking about the end of the mining boom? Whoops!

There’s also the claim by both parties that […]

AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s vision improbably recalls past

AP FACT CHECK: Trump's vision improbably recalls past

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump laid out an economic future Tuesday that improbably resembles the past, declaring "it will be American steel" that once again builds gleaming skyscrapers and fortifies the bridges and American factories that broadly revive a manufacturing economy long gone.

In Trump’s nostalgia-tinted vision, the complex and diverse U.S. economy can be fixed by tariffs, factory jobs and forcing foreign partners back to the bargaining table.

But to achieve it, he would have to reverse not only globalization, but automation, a changing workforce and other seismic shifts of a U.S. economy that has become more dependent on educated […]

Five things we’re getting wrong about the future of work

HR needs to reframe its thinking on technology, millennials and data, experts tell the Future Works conference

HR has much to learn from the academics, policy experts and economists who gathered at last week’s Future Works conference, hosted by The Economist, where they collectively laid bare the host of challenges facing every leader – and employee – as the working world undergoes a transformation, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Here are five myths about the future of work that they collectively debunked during their discussions.

The relationship between tech and jobs is straightforward More automation means […]