Tag: manufactur

Dancing With The Robots

The increased use of robotics and automation in the manufacturing and logistics sectors will, over the next decade, limit East-West trade growth and lead to a reduction of supply chain and air freight personnel involved in handling and distribution, according to Wolfgang Lehmacher, Head of Supply Chain and Transport Industries at the World Economic Forum.
Lehmacher told FlyingTypers that the technological means and maturity to create autonomous supply and value chains was now almost here, and the adoption of new technologies could be seen in everything from flying shuttles to driverless cars and rolling robots. Citing Foxconn’s efforts to […]

Reversing Automation

Reversing Automation

Yesterday I asked what parts of NAFTA people on Ricochet would want to see renegotiated or abrogated. After reading the responses, I’m still not sure whether people here think that free trade is good, but NAFTA disadvantages the United States — that it’s not a level playing field, in other words — or whether we’ve got real support here for mercantilism.

I’m open to the idea that Adam Smith was wrong and free trade doesn’t, in fact, benefit everyone. I’ve been arguing, though, that it’s not trade that’s killed manufacturing jobs. It’s automation.

What if both are true? Here’s an interesting […]

No politician can keep a promise to bring back jobs – especially not Donald Trump

No politician can keep a promise to bring back jobs – especially not Donald Trump

‘Donald Trump was addressing widespread anxiety about the loss of jobs to globalisation, to downsizing, and other factors associated with the economic policies of the past 40 years.’ Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images Donald Trump ran for president with the slogan of “Make America Great Again”. Implicit in this was the idea of making America work again.

Trump was addressing widespread anxiety about the loss of jobs to globalisation, to downsizing, and other factors associated with the economic policies of the past 40 years, and he was telling people that he would bring the jobs back.

Two things about this: the first […]

Developing Countries, China and Advanced Countries are in robot and automation in a race to lower manufacturing costs

Developing Countries, China and Advanced Countries are in robot and automation in a race to lower manufacturing costs

A UN report outlines how the increasing use of industrial automation is impacting jobs in developing countries, and what strategies may help in overcoming the problem.

Advanced countries, China and developing countries all have to add more automation and robots and the supporting infrastructure and education in order to enable lower manufacturing costs

Key points • Increased use of robots in developed countries erodes traditional labour-cost advantage of developing countries. • Labor-intensive manufacturing in large developing countries with domestic production linkages is unlikely to be reshored to developed countries. • Whatever the impacts, outcomes will be shaped by […]

Automation May Undermine President Trump’s Jobs Reshoring Plan

Automation May Undermine President Trump’s Jobs Reshoring Plan

One of Donald Trump’s campaign promises was to bring back manufacturing jobs by renegotiating trade deals which have been disadvantageous to American workers and also by improving the business environment generally.

On Thursday, the Trump jobs strategy was discussed on the Fox Business channel, including renegotiating NAFTA and rejecting the Trans Pacific Partnership. Returning manufacturing can certainly be accomplished, and is already occurring to a degree (“reshoring”) due to a troublesome and growing trend that went undiscussed during the campaign — automation, in the form of robots and more advanced software . A robot-assisted American in a reshored factory might […]

Trump can’t resuscitate the Rust Belt, and his voters may well know it

Trump can’t resuscitate the Rust Belt, and his voters may well know it

So much for the new economy. Donald Trump’s path to the White House ran through a handful of old economy states whose voters are presumably now counting on the Republican president-elect to bring back all those auto, steel and coal-mining jobs that once powered their region.

What are the odds of that?

During the campaign, Mr. Trump identified the North American free-trade agreement as the main source of the Rust Belt ills. This struck a chord with working-class voters in Michigan, a state that hadn’t voted Republican in a presidential election since 1988, and which strongly backed President Barack Obama (who […]

Why Bringing Factories Back Won’t Save Manufacturing Jobs

Why Bringing Factories Back Won't Save Manufacturing Jobs

To working class Americans, President-elect Donald Trump offered an attractive vision for the country’s future — a pledge to restore factories that had been outsourced to foreign nations and, in doing so, bring back manufacturing jobs.

The issue is that, regardless of where the factories are located, they’re increasingly automated. The jobs didn’t necessarily disappear because the factories relocated or because illegal immigrants took them over; they disappeared because the jobs have largely been automated in the modern manufacturing world. This meme reveals the problem with Trump’s promise to workers in the manufacturing industry.

Though the manufacturing industry has experienced […]

Great Trump job hoax

US President-elect Donald Trump made his appeal to the electorate mainly based on how the US economy is treating certain classes of workers. For example, Trump dismisses out of hand the claim that global warming/climate change is being caused in a large part by the burning of fossil fuels and accuses China of perpetrating a great hoax on the world.

Hence he promises that workers who lost their jobs, say, in coal mines because of climate change issues, will be reinstated and the mines reopened. Also, he will build a wall between Mexico and the US to prevent illegal immigrants […]

Robots threaten 2/3 jobs in developing world, could save first-world economies – UN

Robots threaten 2/3 jobs in developing world, could save first-world economies – UN

Get short URL Donald Trump could realize his dream of bringing manufacturing jobs back to America if the country adopts the latest innovations in robotics. Yet the impact of “reshoring” on low-skill jobs in certain developing countries could be disastrous, the UN warned.

Citing World Bank data, a brief from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) claims that up to two-thirds of all jobs in the developing world could be replaced by automation, which is becoming increasingly prevalent in car-making and electronics. © Unctad.org Robots could put more than 1mn Brits out of work by 2030 – […]

Carl Wernicke: The Economy & Automation

Carl Wernicke: The Economy & Automation

Credit IHMC Last weekend I visited the clean energy festival downtown. I met the owner of a Tesla, the innovative electric car. He giddily described a phone app that opens his garage, starts the car and backs it out into the driveway.

But just wait, he said. Soon the car will be able to drive him to work, then head out on its own to work for Uber all day before returning to ferry him home.

That points to the economic challenge facing our new president.We are facing a rapid acceleration of a current trend: the replacement of human workers with […]