AFP, Paris :
Donald Trump has been crowing as companies including Ford renounce plans to move factories to Mexico. But the main beneficiaries of this shift back to the US aren’t saying much by way of celebration-industrial robots don’t tend to speak.
While globalisation’s detractors blame countries such as China and Mexico for stealing the factory jobs of the West, experts point to less obvious culprits which are harder to scapegoat and to overcome in an interconnected economy with complex supply chains.
Since US manufacturing employment peaked in the late 1970s, according to Michael Hicks of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Indiana, “95 percent of job losses were due to productivity improvements including automation and computer technology, rather than trade”.
Indiana is one of the rust-belt states where Trump triumphed in November, and the president-elect has promised a punitive border tax against outsourcing companies as he bids to become “the greatest jobs producer that God ever created”.
But while the US economy is pumping out manufactured goods in record volumes, it is achieving that feat with 7.3 million fewer factory hands than in 1979, government figures show.
Automation has transformed the productivity of manufacturing since industrial robots first started painting, cutting, welding and assembling in the 1960s.
And experts point to more recent innovations such as artificial intelligence, management apps and 3D printing as new threats to shop-floor workers as well as to white-collar staff.
Donald Trump has been crowing as companies including Ford renounce plans to move factories to Mexico. But the main beneficiaries of this shift back to the US aren’t saying much by way of celebration-industrial robots don’t tend to speak.
While globalisation’s detractors blame countries such as China and Mexico for stealing the factory jobs of the West, experts point to less obvious culprits which are harder to scapegoat and to overcome in an interconnected economy with complex supply chains.
Since US manufacturing employment peaked in the late 1970s, according to Michael Hicks of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Indiana, “95 percent of job losses were due to productivity improvements including automation and computer technology, rather than trade”.
Indiana is one of the rust-belt states where Trump triumphed in November, and the president-elect has promised a punitive border tax against outsourcing companies as he bids to become “the greatest jobs producer that God ever created”.
But while the US economy is pumping out manufactured goods in record volumes, it is achieving that feat with 7.3 million fewer factory hands than in 1979, government figures show.
Automation has transformed the productivity of manufacturing since industrial robots first started painting, cutting, welding and assembling in the 1960s.
And experts point to more recent innovations such as artificial intelligence, management apps and 3D printing as new threats to shop-floor workers as well as to white-collar staff.
