The biggest challenge we face over the long term -- beyond the current depression -- isn't how to bring manufacturing back. It's how to improve the earnings of America's expanding army of low-wage workers who are doing personal service jobs in hotels, hospitals, big-box retail stores, restaurant chains, and all the other businesses that need bodies but not high skills. More on that to come.
Earlier in the article, Secretary Reich had noted that supermarket checkout clerks were being replaced with self-checkout machines. I'm not sure why one would expect big-box retail labor to fare better. In fact, we're starting to see how they won't fare better. Automation is coming to retail. Right now, it's mostly visible in self-checkouts. However, think about Amazon: I'm sure their warehouses use a very high level of automation to minimize labor. There was a posting on HN a while back about robots that went around a warehouse bringing the products all to one person which eliminates the labor of fetching products. Is it that outrageous to think that a store like Walmart or Target will be able to stock their shelves in an automated fashion in the future? How about a retail store where you can go around and look and play with things and then you just note the product numbers of the things you want and punch them into a computer at checkout. Then an automated system bags up all your stuff and delivers them to you. No labor needed at all.
Likewise, I yearn for the self-making bed. Roomba is already vacuuming floors and while one can argue that it isn't as good as a hotel might need, it's not hard to see that it will continue to get better. Is it that hard to see those service jobs seeing less labor as well?
The problem, in my mind, is that we simply don't need much unskilled labor anymore. Skilled labor can create things that do unskilled labor better than unskilled laborers can. If it isn't happening now, it's not hard to believe that it will in the future.
The question then becomes, how do we as a society deal with the fact that there might be some people who aren't able to be skilled laborers? What happens when the only jobs available require more skills and intellect than the unskilled jobs of today? Do we just let their salaries languish and let them be impoverished on the streets? I don't think that would be a good thing. Job retraining is definitely a possibility, but to what end?
It seems like the skills required in the world today are changing at a much faster rate than they have in the past. Where change might come after many lifetimes, today one might have to learn many new skills in a generation in order to stay relevant.
It's friday and I skipped lunch so I might not be so coherent, but it does seem like there might be a point at which all low-skilled work is automated and we possibly can't educate a portion of the population high enough that they can become part of the class that creates capital goods (rather than those that simply use capital goods like a cash register). How do you take a cash-register user and turn them into a cash-register designer/maintainer/troubleshooter? How do you take someone that stocks store shelves and make them someone that designs robots to do that task?