FiveThirtyEight: Manufacturing Jobs Are NEVER Coming Back.

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11. I agree. Automation has helped but also hurt.

I think it started when the Japanese car companies began manufacturing in the US, and brought their automated robots to do most of the work that human US autoworkers were doing.

I believe at one time there were a million if not several million US autoworkers. Now, we measure them in the low hundreds of thousands as auto manufacturing is mostly automated.

Let's say an auto-worker robot costs $100K to implement. It can work 24 hours a day, every day, for a year. It can also work at 3 or 4 times the pace of a US worker.

That means that $100K robot, in a year's time, can perform the same work of at least 9 human autoworkers. Let's say each human autoworker gets a salary of $50,000 per year. The auto company is faced with one robot costing $100K, with say, $20K in maintenance and electricity, versus $450K or more in human labor. It isn't difficult to see which one the company would choose.


The same thing happened with a lot of manufacturing. It became automated.

It helped because they could manufacture items much more efficiently, with much fewer defects.

However, it hurt, because at least half the manufacturing jobs in the US were lost due to automation.

Automation has also decreased the influence of unions, because machines can't unionize.


Yes, a lot of people like to blame NAFTA for the loss of manufacturing jobs, but it really was automation that was the "killer" regarding US human manufacturing jobs.

NAFTA was simply the cherry, or whipped cream, on top of the automation cake/pie.

NAFTA doesn't explain the loss of manufacturing to Asia which is where most of the manufacturing was exported.