Wednesday, March 01, 2017
Sorry, But Those Jobs Aren't Coming Back
Say what he will, and we know by now that Donald Trump will say just about anything,Trump's promise of many hundreds of thousands of new, high paying jobs is nonsense. It ain't gonna happen. He's the wrong man at the wrong time.
Those outsourced/offshored jobs that he's promising to repatriate? They're not coming back because the place they left no longer exists. We've moved on.
Those jobs are for low-cost labour, not middle class American labour. The high priced help, well, they're already getting squeezed out by computerization and automation.
The Globe and Mail has a thoroughly depressing, 10-page list of nearly 500 job categories and the risk each will succumb to automation over the next 10 to 20 years.
Clerical accounting staff are hooped. They face a 98% loss of jobs. That's light years beyond just "screwed." Admin staff can expect to see 96% of their jobs rendered redundant. No great career future in those areas.
Those wonderful manufacturing jobs, the positions Trump is after? Sorry, 96% downturn. Overall, labour, skilled and non, is not facing a bright future. And, yes, that includes most trades.
Oh but there is good news. Lawyers are looking at a paltry 3.5% decline. Yeah, lawyers!
Remind me why our federal government still considers industrial-scale immigration to be a good thing if an unemployment tsunami is heading our way.
As for me, I don't believe all this doom and gloom. I don't think Trump will have much luck restoring all those offshored jobs. It's just that these projections don't take contingencies into account - plague and pestilence, famine, bio-error, climate catastrophes, revolution, even major war. Those can all be ways of hitting the "reset" button.
The Black Death is an inspiring example. From 1346 to 1353 it killed off some 200-million people. Paltry as that number sounds in a world of 7.5 billion today, humankind weighed in at just 370-million in 1350 so it was a pretty decent hit.
Studies have shown that, in the aftermath, the survivors lived pretty well. Everybody seemed to have plenty of everything - and at everyday low prices. Empty houses go cheap. Labour was in short supply, wages went up commensurately.
There's only one way to end this post:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
This has been known for many years; only no one listened.
In the same way no one is listening to the news of global warming.
Maybe a climate disaster will be our black death?
RE
Oh but there is good news. Lawyers are looking at a paltry 3.5% decline
There are, apparently , already algorithms to replace lawyers doing simple tasks.
TB
To be true the 'fake left' as you call it has pillaged the taxpayers but it pales miserably to the theft on a grand scale perpetrated by the 'fake right' in such instances as the BC Hydro being milked for $Billions in projects that are not needed.
Eventually you and I will pay for such greed and the once mighty taxpayer resource will fall into private hands so we will bleed yet again.
Whilst I use the terms left and right ; it does us no good to see life in such terms ; it only serves to divide us and steer us from debating real issues.
TB
Re
Their real existential horror is that they didn't contribute a godddamn thing to humanity. They just pissed everything away that was handed down to them.
Just like Jim Prentice and Allison Redford in Alberta??
Those damned socialists!!!!
TB
Well the rude little bastard was back. I think it's time to trace his IP address and track him down. Maybe his mom should know what he's getting up to while he's spending all those hours in her basement.
Yes, TB, I think the paralegal craft faces a bleak future. I was one of the first small firms to computerize when the IBM XT (8086) came out. From my years as a reporter I was a pretty good typist. With a word processor I was able to churn out documents by myself in a fraction of the time of the old system - dictaphone, review, edit, dictate changes, review... ad nauseum. Fortunately I didn't have to lay off anyone. I only had one secretary (although today they're called legal assistants).
Every time I hear Trump speak of restoring highly paid manufacturing jobs, I'd like to remind him that those of the jobs under discussion that actually still exist aren't so highly paid anymore. I'd have thought that he'd have become aware of that when the politicians and government bureaucrats forced him to get his Trump Ties made in China. That's right; they made him do it. Just ask him.
Maybe with a willing Congress he'll sort it out with national right-to-work-for-less legislation, state's rights notwithstanding. Then they could dig up that Puzder minimum wage proposal. That would be bound to take the grins off the faces of the union bosses who lined at his palace up for that photo op last month.
Post a Comment