On Friday, February 21, 2020 at 4:04:11 PM UTC-8, John B. wrote:
On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 11:14:17 -0500, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 2/21/2020 8:54 AM, AMuzi wrote:
On 2/20/2020 9:49 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 2/20/2020 10:38 PM, AMuzi wrote:

When I was young, one might easily travel the country,
always confident of finding a day or two of work
everywhere and anywhere (As I did. Everywhere.) .

Interesting. I did some of that too, when I was young. I
also did it while not traveling, just to get spending money.

But my success rate while on the road was pretty low. It
seemed I'd have to spend many hours waiting inside a
Manpower office to have a chance at getting anything at all.


This is no longer true, to the greater loss of the
nation's wealth and productivity, no more painfully felt
than at the bottom of society, those who suffer most.

I really am sympathetic to those people. Say what you will,
many have very high barriers in front of them.


And changes in work itself. It was once possible to show up at any truck
terminal around midnight and to transfers (truck-to-truck,
dock-to-truck) which was badly paid unskilled manual labor. Now, almost
everything is palletized and moved (more efficiently) by machines. There
are no mason's helpers (really crappy job and very hard work). Even
dishwashing has a much lower labor content. In the larger sense these
are improvements but, again, a closed door to the marginal human.

Another example: I was once doing robotics work at a large manufacturing
facility. A problem we were trying to solve was orienting components.
Injection molding machines were spitting out thousands of components,
but their orientation was random. The robotic assembly operation
downstream needed perfectly consistent orientation and location.
Vibratory bowl feeding is the most common solution, but couldn't work
with these parts. Oh, and there was a similar problem on a different
line, where the parts were larger but had to be consistently oriented to
pack them for shipping.

The company was trying all sorts of cutting edge technology, up to
multiple machine vision systems controlling multiple robots just to get
the parts oriented.

At one point, I asked why we couldn't just hire people from one of the
local "developmental disabilities" programs, and give them jobs
orienting things. It was my understanding that some such people welcome
work like that. It would give them fulfillment, pride of work, a bit
more independence, etc.

Nope. Not permitted. It would violate a union contract, and nobody had
any interest in wading into contract modifications.

When I left there, they were still wrestling with the orientation problem.

In contrast, Thailand has, effectively, more than 100% employment with
some 2 million registered foreign workers employed and probably nearly
another 2 million unregistered foreign workers. And, yes, some of the
largest factories have robots but work is essentially still done by
hand.

Of course, we don't have labor unions either. Minimum wages are set by
the central government and actual wages are set largely by supply and
demand.

For example, my wife's "woman who comes in to help with the heavy
work" (free translation) gets paid about 30% more than the minimum
rate simply because there is a large demand for her services and she
can charge that much. Which somehow seems pretty fair to me.
--
cheers,

John B.

That is what is known as a Free Market Economy John. This is what the Democrats hope to destroy in the USA.