Making Manufacturing Great Again Will Require A Two-Pronged Approach
Plus: Which Trump will the world see?
Reflections on 2016, with an eye toward 2017
Employment in manufacturing peaked in the late 1970s at over 19 million. Since then, despite occasional positive bumps, manufacturing employment has shown a long-term secular decline. Today, fewer than 13 million workers are employed in factory jobs. This long-run, large scale decline in employment is largely attributable to automation and the offshoring of jobs to low-wage countries. The workers most affected by these technological and global shifts are unfortunately those with the least skills, whose jobs are most susceptible to these causes of displacement. The Carrier deal that President-elect Trump pushed through prevented fewer than a thousand jobs from being offshored, but as the CEO of United Technologies put it to CNBC, many of these jobs will be automated anyway; hence the benefit to US workers is likely very low. Even a thousand such deals are not the solution to the displacement occurring in manufacturing. The correct response to this predicament is skill upgradation, so that workers can work with these new technologies, as complements rather than substitutes. Beyond that, manufacturing also badly needs an image makeover.
Περισσότερα εδώ:
Making Manufacturing Great Again Will Require A Two-Pronged Approach
Plus
Which Trump will the world see?
Reflections on 2016, with an eye toward 2017
Πηγή: American Enterprise Institute
