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A little off on numbers - according to Federal BLS stats, half of jobs in us is at $49.8K, and average "traditional service job" is $34.6K, not "under $30K". Lets not have facts get in the way of rants.
Professionals earn an average of $80.9K - if talking about 80% of US being service jobs, these probably need to be included - they are providing services, just different type.
Actually according to the stats - education is one of the biggest determiners of wage brackets - Average is $31.6K if no HS diploma, $39.9K with HS diploma, college grad $72K.
Yep.
According to BLS the service sector is about 129 million workers, and is very diverse including most of the highest paid professions. When people decry the poor wages of the service sector, they are usually referring to retail trade (15.8 million) and leisure/hospitality (16.3 million) which combined only make up about 25% of the service sector.
The largest subgroups in services are prof/biz services, health/soc, and state/local government.
A little off on numbers - according to Federal BLS stats, half of jobs in us is at $49.8K, and average "traditional service job" is $34.6K, not "under $30K". Lets not have facts get in the way of rants.
Professionals earn an average of $80.9K - if talking about 80% of US being service jobs, these probably need to be included - they are providing services, just different type.
Actually according to the stats - education is one of the biggest determiners of wage brackets - Average is $31.6K if no HS diploma, $39.9K with HS diploma, college grad $72K.
Again, this fails the math test. There are not very many $80.9K jobs out there. And $34.6K is hardly different from $30K that's less than $400 extra a month, so at worst $30K is recently outdated... and not even by much. Furthermore if you take every person earning $34.6K and train them up to a PhD Engineer do you even realize how many people that is who are now competing for a $80.9K job? Count it up. They will bring down the wages of those Professional jobs because too many qualified applicants. It has happened many times before. Even physicians (see: radiologists), with their limited student acceptance rate for medical school and then Match Day, have seen their wages drop. Why? Because more competition for said jobs.
Let's not have facts get in the way of your fantasy world, eh?
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Originally Posted by MrRational
You really need to work on not contradicting yourself.
No contradiction there at all. We do need a more educated workforce, because otherwise more jobs get outsourced, and unlike now it would be outsourced out of the country for good reason. But then that puts us in another bind: then we quickly amass a surplus of educated people.
It's called a death spiral. The less you struggle the more you sink, the more you struggle the more you sink.
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Close enough. But it starts much lower on the pay scale than high level engineers.
It'll work its way up the chain. When you're a worker and not a corporate tycoon, it always does.
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Mostly correct. But they'll be taking jobs everywhere... probably at a 10:1 ratio or even greater.
This fast coming reality is the idea behind shifting to a UBI ...at some point.
And in this country the UBI is seen as Communism so it won't happen. And as automation grows America will drive ever closer to the precipice.
Every factory or professional job created, has 4 support jobs created, has long been the standard in this country. Part of those will be well paid jobs, but a lot of those jobs will not be high paid.
I saw today, that FedEx is now so behind the demand for shipping due to on line shopping that for the first time they are now delivering on Sunday to our small town. A few weeks ago they added Saturday delivery and now I am getting packages delivered on Sunday. But alas, the 2 day shipping I used to enjoy, is now few and far between due to the overwhelming growth in shipping.
The new drivers they are hiring, will fall into the support category.
Industry will come back. It has to come back. Dependence on Asian manufacturing has backfired, impoverishing us and enriching hostile totalitarian regimes.
Millions of people without work, or underemployed, results in unrest, as we are witnessing right now.
We don't even need to encourage re-industrialization. Just remove some of the roadblocks -- high taxes, prohibitive regulations, NIMBY resistance, high schools focused on sending kids to college instead of teaching them practical skills.
Tear down these internal barriers, stop favoring cheaters like China like we have for the past 25 years, and manufacturing will come flooding back.
There are hundreds of thousands of people who are sick of service jobs and hungry to do good industrial jobs. I know some of them; they're out there. Unfortunately they're not sophisticated people unlike the smooth talkers who have sold out our industries, so they can't really advocate very well. But they can vote.
The problem with using automation to bring back manufacturing is what do you do with the people that were replaced by the machines? Don't say train them to be programmers of the machines. Many of them aren't capable of learning that. They are hard workers, could be trained to do repetitive tasks and performed those tasks well. But not as quickly or as cheaply as a machine that can run without breaks or shift changes. They were the people that performed tasks like stocking the supply room, driving the forklifts. Remember when every department had an admin or secretary who typed up reports, kept the files organized? (many of you probably don't) These people were worth the salaries they received as they gained experience because they knew how the organization ran. Now every engineer does his own reports (no matter how bad his spelling and grammer is) and many of the supply systems are managed automatically with robot systems delivering the parts from the receiving dock to the starage bin or even directly to the point where the robotic assembler uses them.
This is all great but what happens to the people that were replaced? They now do not have a job that keeps them gainfully employed and have to scramble to get one of the lessor paying jobs further down the food chain that pays less. Of course that displaces someone else. And so it goes.
I am beginning to wonder if the definition of 'Full Time Job' needs to be changed. Maybe a standard work week should be cut from 40 hours to 35 or 32 to spread the available work to more people while making sure they have the protections and benefits that go with 'full time employment'. It sounds radical but so did the 8 hour day/40 hour week when it was first adopted in an era when many industries worked on 10 or 12 hour days and 6 day weeks.
The problem with using automation to bring back manufacturing is what do you do with the people that were replaced by the machines? Don't say train them to be programmers of the machines. Many of them aren't capable of learning that. They are hard workers, could be trained to do repetitive tasks and performed those tasks well. But not as quickly or as cheaply as a machine that can run without breaks or shift changes.
The problem's even worse than that. With the swift development of AI, increasingly machines even THINK better than we do. It's not just people of average or below average intelligence who are at risk of being displaced - and the number of new jobs created is usually less than the number lost.
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I am beginning to wonder if the definition of 'Full Time Job' needs to be changed. Maybe a standard work week should be cut from 40 hours to 35 or 32 to spread the available work to more people while making sure they have the protections and benefits that go with 'full time employment'. It sounds radical but so did the 8 hour day/40 hour week when it was first adopted in an era when many industries worked on 10 or 12 hour days and 6 day weeks.
I think that's the first needed step. Eventually it will lead to Universal Basic Income. (And why not? If the purpose of automation and AI is to decrease the amount of work we humans must do, why shouldn't everyone share in the productivity gains AI is making possible?)
Of course the USA could increase the percentage of manufacturing in its economy. It's a matter of tax incentives, tax penalties, and trade policy.
There would be benefits and disadvantages.
But there's no question it can be done.
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