The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future by Ford Martin

Author:Ford, Martin [Ford, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Acculant Publishing
Published: 2009-10-04T14:00:00+00:00

The Future of Manufacturing

Recent years have seen a mass migration of manufacturing to developing countries. Low labor costs have clearly been the primary incentive underlying this trend. In the future, however, factories of all types are likely to become increasingly automated. As the years and decades progress, labor costs will comprise a smaller and smaller component of manufacturers’ cost structures.

To get some insight into how automation is likely to continue impacting manufacturing, it may help to look at a sector which has already been heavily automated: agriculture in the United States. In her book Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy, economist Pietra Rivoli tells the story of cotton farming in West Texas. Up until the 1920s, every aspect of cotton farming was highly labor intensive. Fields were ploughed with mules, and once the crop was planted, a constant backbreaking vigil was required in order to keep the weeds a bay. Harvesting required the availability of large numbers of workers at precisely the right time—before unfavorable weather conditions destroyed or reduced the value of the crop.

Over the decades, however, the process has become increasingly mechanized. Today cotton farming in West Texas is almost literally a “one-man show.”41 A single farmer with access to tractors, specialized machinery and chemical herbicides can now function almost entirely alone. No workers are required, and the labor content of cotton produced in West Texas is essentially zero.

Obviously, not every agricultural sector is as automated as cotton farming, but there can be absolutely no doubt that the mechanization of agriculture in developed nations has resulted in a massive and irreversible elimination of jobs.* The reality is that the manufacturing sector is following the same path. In her book, Rivoli also cites evidence showing that many of the jobs lost in the U.S. textile industry are in fact due to machine automation rather than globalization, and that China, in spite of its low wage workforce, lost nearly two million textile jobs to improving automation technology between 1995 and 2002.42

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