Robots
Yes. And it is a good thing.
Although automation is not so much the cause, the cause is increasing prosperity and increasing labor costs. Automation really only makes the movement possible.
From a very old-fashioned idea of labor and workers, we tend to see this as a problem. As if this leaves fewer jobs for - in this case - Americans.
However, that is not the case, what is really happening is that the quality of work in the US is improving. Boring repetitive work is disappearing, but more diverse and better-paying jobs are returning.
In the Netherlands they already have a relatively large amount of experience with this movement: in the 1980s, relocated work in the industrial sector, such as textiles and shipbuilding, disappeared to Asia. At the time, this was accompanied by many layoffs, but less than a decade later, the Dutch Industry was bigger than ever: there were twice as many jobs and the profit that was made in it was even greater. However, the jobs were no longer on the assembly line, but in the office: product development, sales, administrative, logistics.
The development towards automation and robotization and the relocation of production abroad essentially increases the earning capacity in a country. Where for a small country like the Netherlands the limits of production capacity have been reached after some time, we can continue to grow in this way.
There are two things that are often seen as a disadvantage:
- But then those other countries have stupid work, right?
Yes, but they also develop. Shipping production first disappeared to Japan, but the Japanese are also too expensive nowadays. And in China we see the same development, the Chinese are already moving production work to countries where labor is cheaper. - But then there will be no work left for our own less educated people?
There is undeniably a certain segment of the population that will never be able to receive adequate education. But there will always be jobs left for these people, such as cleaning work, park service and postal delivery. It would be good if we put this work back into government hands in order to better guarantee the quality of these jobs, but that is a different discussion. For the rest, it is important to invest more in education, to train more people in higher education.
'Yes, but bicycle repairers should also be there', you often hear people say. First of all, this is not the level of jobs that will soon disappear, but more importantly, there are more brain surgeons who can repair a bicycle than bicycle repairers who can perform an operation. It doesn't hurt to train people too much. It's a false form of egalitarianism.
So: outsourcing production work creates room to earn more. Money is simply not earned continuously, but at the office. The only thing that the workers in the US should be more concerned about than workers in the Netherlands is that the system does not take enough care of them and that it is even more focused than ours on bringing those increasing returns to the benefit of the people. who already have more than enough money.