Factory Jobs Aren’t Coming

No Humans Need Apply

So I saw in an article in Fortune that “U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick says factory gigs are the ‘great jobs of the future.’” This is part of the Right’s drive to return manufacturing to America.

That’s fine. It’s even laudable. We need more manufacturing to be done here in the United States. We need to claw back the factories that our business elites happily offshored so that they could get “low-cost labor” … and to crush unions in the process. 

But the idea that Americans are going to get jobs in those new factories is another matter entirely. Let’s face it, in the future factories are going to be automated. It’s going to be mostly robots that are going to be working in them. Even the “robot technicians” working to fix broken robots are going to be robots.

I find it fascinating because the Right seems to be obsessed with the idea that Americans need to get back to “real work” and that “real work” means factory work. Not namby-pamby white-collar office jobs. We need tough guys. Doing tough jobs. You betcha.

And, maybe that’s right. I don’t know. But I do know that huge numbers of humans working in gangs on assembly lines are not in the cards. And not all the Executive Orders from the White House are going to change that.

Which means…perhaps…that the country the Right is building has no real place for people in it.

Kind of disturbing, don’t you think?