Employment of American Men in an Increasingly Automated and Globalized World
The disappearance of well-paid work for uneducated American men is a causation of the increased crime rates, single parent households, and welfare.
Two plausible factors that have led to this disappearance of work is the outsourcing of manufacturing and the replacement of human labor with automated machines. The first half of this essay will demonstrate how outsourcing and automation have reduced the supply of manufacturing jobs in the United States of America. The second half will analyze how society is affected by the lack of quality work (i.e. manufacturing jobs) for uneducated men. Outsourcing work is an lucrative for two reasons. By setting up a manufacturing plant in another country, companies can distribute their product to foreign markets with lower costs. Companies also benefit from the lower labor costs, which lowers the price of products for consumers.
In a study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, 3.2 million U.S. jobs were eliminated or displaced by China between 2001 and 2013. Of these jobs displaced, 2.4 million (three-fourths) were in manufacturing. [1] The rate at which companies outsource work to other countries may decline if the rhetoric of President Trump is true: "Since my election, Ford, Fiat-Chrysler, General Motors, Sprint, Softbank, Lockheed, Intel, Walmart and many others have announced that they will invest billions and billions of dollars in the United States and will create tens of thousands of new American jobs," he said on March 1st 2017 in his joint address before Congress. [2] However, the human capital needed to run the industry of manufacturing will continue to decrease as the automation of manufacturing increases. Take for example the innovations of the Chinese factory Changying Precision Technology Company. This is a factory that was once run by around 650 workers, but as of 2017 the factory employees 60 workers. The production rate has risen by 250% and the defect rate has dropped by 80%. [2] The replacement of human labor by a machine is nothing new to society. Each time a new invention enters society, it permanently eliminates a portion of the total work load required by the society. It is progress, undoubtedly. The workers who are replaced by the machine can move their human capital into other areas of society. And those that control the machine can save and allocate the capital which was previously spent as wages. The innovations can also produce different kinds jobs and can lower prices of goods produced. This information, however, does not negate the importance of keeping good employment opportunities open. If displaced workers are unable to find equivalent work, then the social structure of that community will begin to deteriorate. Knowledge of this has long been present in human history. Take for example the concern that Vespasian, a great Roman general who was elected Emperor by his own troops, had with a technological innovation of his time: "When an engineer offered a low-cost contrivance enabling the transport of heavy columns to the Capitol, Vespasian paid him handsomely for his invention but declined to use the machine, saying: ‘You must allow my poor hauliers to earn their bread.’ " - Suetonius The Twelve Caesars, Book Eight: XVIII There was a rational concern for Vespasian refusing the replacement his 'poor hauliers' with an innovation. Vespasian was known for spending money on public works. Bath houses, the Temple of Peace, the Coliseum, and much more were constructed or reconstructed from his will. (Much of the city was destroyed before he came to power in 3 civil wars.) These places would not only keep his populace entertained. The construction and maintenance of such public works would give men a means to provide for their family and 'earn their bread'. When the men of a community are without a way to 'earn their bread' or earn a livable wage that can support a family, they will move to a new community that has these opportunities. Such is the fate of Detroit. When the auto-manufacturing industry left for cheaper labor in other countries, many of the men and women left as well. Much of the populace that remained are wards of the state, either through welfare or through government employment. Without a large enough taxable private sector, the high amounts of government workers have increased the cities debt to astronomical amounts. [3] The absence of a fully occupied male economic libido results in undesirable outcomes for a community. According to the a paper by David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson of the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled, "Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage-Market Value of Men", a lack of male employment disintegrates the family unit. The paper's findings are that high-quality males in the marital market begin to become scarce for women when jobs disappear. The most productive members of the community are the first to leave the community behind and seek work elsewhere. Without a proper job that is accessible to uneducated men, men begin to participate in risky and damaging behaviors at higher rates. This results in increased incarceration, drug addiction, and homelessness rates among the men. These indicators dub men as illegitimate suitors because they are unable to raise a wholesome household. The paper begins with a quote from William Julius Wilson's book, "When Work Disappears": "The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which people are poor and jobless. Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghettos—crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on—are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work." In the proceeding 44 pages, the authors, "assess how adverse shocks to the marriage-market value of young adult men, emanating from rising trade pressure on manufacturing employment, affect marriage, fertility, household structure, and children’s living circumstances in the United States." "While economists and expert commentators have tended to downplay the outsized role assigned to declining manufacturing employment in the U.S. economic debate—what economist Jagdish Bhagwati dubs ‘manufacturing fetishism’—simple descriptive statistics support the contention that manufacturing jobs are a fulcrum on which traditional work and family arrangements rest." Technological innovations that have reduced the need for human labor combined with the mass appeal of outsourcing work has fumbled job opportunities for men in the USA. The effect is, but not limited to, higher rates of family and community dissolution.
The progress of technology should not be stifled to preserve job opportunities, but attention must be paid to communities that lose jobs in order to prevent economic disparity. |
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