Are Workers Too Productive?

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/are-workers-too-productive/246454/

We all know about Moore's Law; Gordon Moore's 1965 prediction that the number of components making up an integrated circuit would double every two years for at least ten years. Indeed, semiconductor industry output grew at approximately that exponential rate for the next 45 years, and semiconductor manufacturers flooded the market with transistors and memory bits.

There's mounting evidence that Moore's Law applies to commodity work -- labor that can be produced by many different individuals with a minimal amount of training. It's difficult to distinguish the output of one commodity worker from another, just as it is difficult to differentiate wheat grown on one farm from wheat grown on another. If Moore's Law applies to commodity work, commodity workers are in big trouble.

As economies in many advanced nations struggle to create jobs, I worry about whether Moore's Law is spilling over into the job creation process. I worry that computers, smart phones, and robots are making us so productive and enabling us to leverage inexpensive labor so effectively that we are in a steep uphill battle.

To understand why, you have to understand some of the subtler implications of Moore's Law. I have a lot of personal experience with those implications, because I worked at Intel, the world's largest semiconductor company, founded by Moore himself, Bob Noyce, and Andy Grove.

[greymattermom]

1. then work requires technology and not labor

and wouldn't that bring the few jobs that are left closer to consumers, as eventually the cost of transportation has to be a factor. If one person can do the job of many, it doesn't matter what that person is paid, 2 vs. 20 an hour is not a great difference if the person is making 1000 widgets an hour.

[valerief]

2. As long as rich people get richer, nothing else matters. Rich people getting richer is the most

important thing in the world. Nothing else matters. They prove it over and over and over again.

[exboyfil]

3. Actually this whole process has been going on for a very long time

Going back at least to the Roman small farmers getting pushed into the cities.

This comes back to the old joke when an efficiency expert goes to China and sees shovels being used on a road construction crew. He observes that heavy equipment would make the process more efficient and quicker. The Chinese responded then what about the jobs lost. He replied I thought this was about doing things more efficiently rather than employing people. In that case you are doing the best thing you can do except perhaps take their shovels away. Then even more people can be employed.

[fasttense]

4. Bill Davidow seems to think that the market price of an item

Is its true cost. He assumes that no manipulation by monopolistic corporations and government corruption are involved in that price and cost. He assumes that the cost of making that item is equal to the price a corporation gets for it. But it is NOT.

He says it himself when he refers to "leverage inexpensive labor". That means children in Bangladesh are able to make shoes for Nike at a lower costs than adults in America. Factories have been so simplified that even a first grade child can operate the equipment. But what is the real cost of those children working 12 hour days 6 to 7 days a week to Bangladesh? What is the cost of the pollutants being dumped by Nike because they don't have to protect the environment as they would in the US? There are many hidden costs a corporation and factory creates that are picked up by a nation or society as a whole.

When child labor was legal in the US a saying went around "Children need factories and factories need children." Big business loved child labor and most of the factory labor was done by children in the 1800. But the costs were not carried by big business. They merely exploited the unregulated labor market and got cheap (sometimes free) labor. But costs, such as ever higher illiteracy rates, (as children went to work in factories they didn't have time to learn to read), social unrest, starvation and unchecked diseases, were never covered by the businesses. If they had to pay for the true cost of child labor, the price of the items they sold would be huge.

In most cases today it's not that technology has made things cheaper to make. It's that corporations have found a way to push the true costs of manufacturing and selling an item onto a nation or society.

[Blue Meany]

5. Part of the problems is cheap oil, which makes the energy

to run machines cost-effective in comparsion with labor. Since in business, and often in government and non-profits, cost-effectiveness drives decisions, working people are getting the short-end of the stick.

[fasttense]

6. Just look at the hidden costs of that cheap oil.

Millions of children develop asthma from the pollutants in the air from the cheap oil. Pollutants rain down on crops, requiring more fertilizers by farmers to compensate for the polluted air caused by the cheap oil.

But cost effectiveness for business is NOT cost effective for the rest of society.

A corporation can make cheap widgets if they dump their caustic pollutants into the river. But for the people living down river it will cost them a lot more for clean water. But the corporation up river isn't picking up that cost. Each of those people who want clean water are picking up the cost to make that widget.

The cost to make an item is not being paid by the factory owners or the corporation. What right did that corporation have to pollute the water of all the people down stream who wanted clean water?

[xchrom]

7. and it's the things you are mentioning that are consistently left out of the conversation

for citizens when trying to determine their fate.

[The2ndWheel]

8. That's still not taking all those costs into account

"The cost to make an item is not being paid by the factory owners or the corporation. What right did that corporation have to pollute the water of all the people down stream who wanted clean water?"

The same right people gave themselves to privatize the profits of the planet for a single species, and socialize the costs to the rest of life. In the web of life, human beings are the unelected elite, who don't want to pay their fair share.