Believe it or not, there is a current resurgence in the US manufacturing industry. The sad part is that we haven’t really seen any of the effects that this revival should have brought since the alleged drop in unemployment rates.
The onshoring of the manufacturing sector is due to the seemingly increasing salaries of workers in China and in the Far East. Labor isn’t as cheap as it once was especially with China increasing its wages by 16% over the past 10 years. So should this equal to an increase in manufacturing within the first-world countries?
Unfortunately, this is not true because there are other less expensive countries such as Vietnam or Indonesia and because of the possibility to automate tasks which requiring the use of more machines and much less labor.
Consider this - even with semi-skilled Chinese worker salaries amounting to only an estimated $6,500 a year, it is far less by the time you have included healthcare costs and other expenses for an identical year that a US worker would receive, around $50,000. It is now considered to be more expensive to hire a worker than to make a robot do the work. If a $6,500 a year worker is already being replacing by a machine then just about how much automation will be undertaken if the labor is $50,000 annually?
Regardless of the growth in US manufacturing, the days of this sector providing mass employment has come to an end. We are now entering the rise of the machines.
© 2017 Jobs & Hire All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
