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From: rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
Subject: Re: Does Automation Take Jobs Away?
Organization: The Armory
Date: Sun, 24 Jul 1994 16:42:47 GMT
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In article <CtC8yr.D07@vcd.hp.com>,
Thomas O'Connor <toconnor@vcd.hp.com> wrote:
>lundberg (lundberg@expert.cc.purdue.edu.) wrote:
>: I am a student at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.  I am
>: doing a research project on Automation.  Any opinions on the following
>: points would be very much appreciated.
>
>: 1.  Does Automation Take Away Jobs from Blue Collar Workers?
>
>No! It does however displace Blue Collar Workers.  It is a minor
>point, but I think an important one.  There are not many companies
>that invest millions of dollars in automation with the intent of
>"taking away jobs."  They automate to save money, improve quality and
>consistency, just to name a few of the many reasons.  The result is
--------------------------------
The result is that they lay people off and don't have to care who has to
pay for their "readjustment" or for their new corporate structure which
hikes up their profits!!!
-Steve

>: 2.  What should be done with these workers after automation is
>: implemented?
>
>"What should be done with these workers?"  You ask this as these people
>had no indepent decision making capability.  I may seem cold in my
>answer here, but I am speeking as a fairly recently "displaced"
>worker.
-----------------------------------------
You're just "inconvenienced" slightly, not displaced. 20% of Americans
cannot even read a story to their children!!! And they used to!!! You can
analyse and refocus your skills, they have none!!! You have some savings or
credit to get retrained, or to take a position at a lower wage and work
your way into it!!! They have no savings, no credit, nor any ability to take
less than they are making now or they'd have to turn to crime!!!
-Steve

>You will often hear economists speak of the economy as being in a
>period of adjustment.  This is a fancy way of saying resession.  It is
>in adjustment because the economy, including the labor is dynamic and
>
>The whole basis of the free enterprize based economy, which we so
>grandly congradulate ourselves, it its ability to adapt.  Our recent
>"victory" over certain communist nations is not based on a superior
>political system, as some of our polititions would have you believe,
>but the ability of our economic system to addapt in a way that
>centrally controlled communism cannot do.  
------------------------------------------
That's not true. We just had a more advanced and sooner industrial
revolution than Russia had. They have more untapped resources, except
established infrastructure for manufacturing and housing and training.
We got the brand new untouched farm land with two FEET of top soil, and
they got a lot of land which was occupied by farmers MUCH longer, and had
about two INCHES of top soil!! A much greater proportion of their GNP had
to go to defense to hold US at bay. WE built the iron curtain around them
out of paranoia and in a turn of the century fit of pique at our robber
barons not being allowed to scourge their people like we did ours. WE cut
off trade and made alliances against them when they wanted trade and
openness after the revolution. Instead WE invaded the central USSR with US
troops as part of a desparate thrust to defeat the red army by bolstering
the greed ridden whites!! We failed, and they didn't forget!!! Look it
up!! A centrally controlled system which cleans up after the assininity of
the robber barons is what we finally and Europe finally had to start
building, as well as legal curbs on them, but our socialism didn't progress
as well as Europe's because we seemed to have all this illusion of
"freedom" and a seemingly inexhaustible land and timer resource in a good
climate!!! They average 15 degrees latitude north of us. Not as easy to
plant and build and accomplish out of doors. And their people didn't have
the bounty of America which allowed schooling the young except through just
a few weeks of harvest!!! Nor did they have the machinery!!! They were cut
off, and have now finally folded. But when you talk about some capitalist 
"victory" over them, remember that we started the bad feeling and that we
have paid a huge price for it, and yet we are going to become socialist!!!
Our enormous military debt was all accumulated in response to the ever
hugely increasing arms race with them, and which ruined them and almost
ruined us!!! We HAVE no money now to pursue space! We HAVE no money now for
either prisons OR schools, (those eternal pay me now or pay me later
costs!). We have no money now for national health care, while Europe made
good from our help with their "defense" while they were taking that
opportunity to even trade with the USSR!!!! They built strong and
sustainable economies of scale, while we were one boom then bust after
another, and we don't know how to do it any other way!!! AND we have No
money to really begin paying our national debt to our children!!! And so we
build cheap prisons and hire cheap guards, instead of teachers in the inner
city, and we think we are wonderful, while we have more homeless on our
streets that many third world countries!!! 
-Steve

>Now for the cold part.  If we accept the proposal that our econimic
>system is superior to others, then we must accept the fact that our
>economic system requires periodic adjustments or changes.  This is
>true from the highes order to the lowest.  The Mega-corps must be
>flexable or they get stomped on, and individuals must be flexable or
>they get stomped on.
---------------------------
Flex-"i"-ble. And individuals at the bottom end of the pay scale have no
such luxury!!! Only the more affluent do!!! If we paid hard-working people
equally all this time, instead of that fiction of whatever the market (or
the government) will bear, then they could afford that, but instead we
create poverty among people who work the hardest because they are the
least organized and the most replacable, just because we intentionally
KEEP a number of them sick and desparate and out of work to do the shit
jobs!!! Ever actually see a time in this country when we had overemployment
among the poor and people wanted a slow down?? Not during THIS century!!

A person's productivity cannot and should not be measured in the
market by how replaceable they are but by their actual handling of the
product and its construction!!! But that's what we let business get away
with, blackmail!!!: Work for nothing, or as close to nothing as we can be
allowed, and then when we fire you, pull yourself up, that's not OUR look
out, even if we paid you nothing toward that cost of you doing "business"
as a laborer, and just because we could get away with it!!! 
-Steve

>In other words, it is no me who decides what to "do" with displaced
>workers, but me the displaced worker that decides what to do.  That
>means that I am always expecting the inevitable layoff.  I am always
>financially preparing for it.  I try to practice life long learning, I
>keep current, and just one step a head of the next guy.
----------------------------
Yeah, and you're a lucky shit who's blind to poverty, shut up and sit down!
-Steve

>What can others, including the government do to help this process.  I
>would suggest that the single biggest thing would be universal health
>care, and better education oportunities.
---------------------------------
Finally, the punch line!!! What you have just expressed is what everybody
says, but nobody wants to give up anything to accomplish it!!! There's NO
MONEY left to do these "other things", as JFK said in his moon speech,
because "they are hard!" (-JFK, ibid). And nobody wants to simply be
deprived to prevent themselves from a mob someday cutting their throats and
taking it away from them!!! They don't think that can happen, so they put
it on the rich, when if you took all the money of the multi-millionaires it
wouldn't do that job!!! The people who will find that THEY have the lion's
share of wealth in this country are the upper middle class, the ones who
own the rentals and enough in their IRA's to actually retire!!! (A luxury
which will be denied to over 2/3rds of Americans because they have less
than two month's savings for hard times!!!) (Look it up, damnit!!! Get a
damned Almanac and see it plain!!) At some point we are going to have to
just isolate and repair our own damage internally, and let the rest of the
world look out for itself and simply drop a nuke on them if they look too
crazy at us!! Or else, or maybe both, we will HAVE to do what a voting
majority doesn't WANT to do in this nation, and that's vote themselves such
a big tax increase that they won't be advantaged that much any more!!! It
WILL TAKE THAT MUCH!!! If you don't believe me, look it up and stop
flapping your meat with your keyboard!!
-Steve Walz 

>[Please note the the opinions expressed here are my own.]
>Thomas J. O'Connor
>Email:          toconnor@vcd.hp.com          
-----------------------------------------
Heaven knows we wouldn't want OUR opinions to be sullied by the influence
of anything like FACT! (Just poking you, Thomas. You're probably as worried
as the best of us.)
-Steve Walz   rstevew@armory.com

