“According to Google there are 11 million manufacturing jobs, 40 million skilled trades jobs, and 88 million so called professional jobs in the United States. There are 260 million adults in the United States. There are 43 million retirees and 11 million full time college students. That means there are roughly 67 million adults in the U.S. workforce who are left to rely on “unskilled” jobs outside the manufacturing sector. That means retail workers, food service workers, delivery drivers, unskilled construction labor, warehouse workers, etc.
So are 67 million trade jobs and professional jobs going to magically be there if all those people do what conservatives say they’re simply too lazy and unmotivated to do, and learn a trade or get a useful degree like in engineering or medicine? And who is going to do those other jobs if that is the case?”
- Charles Steel, some random guy on Facebook who made a great point
For this take and reply, I’m going to wax philosophical for a moment before diving into what I think would be the optimal solution, in a market socialist society. This helps you to understand where I’m coming from in my opposition to the service industry, as well as give you an idea of how this problem would be addressed in a socialist fashion. I’d address it in a surplus statist fashion but the truth is that since most readers aren’t caught up on that economic model, it’s better to just use an example based on the pre-existing knowledge of everyone here.
The service industry is an interesting industry for me to think about, as a blue-collar tradesman. I feel that people should be involved in the means of production, and that a society oriented around just distribution and sales alienates people. Carl Sagan put it perfectly when he said that America would be in a state of decline, if America outsourced its manufacturing and its people grew more clueless year by year about how things worked and were made. Carl Sagan thought that the wealthy would have a lot more power in such a society, that technologies would be unfairly distributed, and so on. I believe Sagan is completely right about that, so in a way, I see the service industry in an antagonistic light. The service industry does not provide room for people to develop and refine their skillsets to the same degree that the trades do. Similarly, the service industry doesn’t allow people to learn about the world in any meaningful way. The service industry is mostly a dead-end for people, that at best just pays well, and we should fight against the growth of such an industry, when it leaves so many careers at a standstill. I believe that in developing your career, you develop as a person, so being able to shift people from more dead-end industries into others that develop and train people more is really valuable in my eyes. I can say for myself that being able to travel for work and learn at work has been amazing for my personal development.
In some European countries, people can become waiters and waitresses and do that their entire lives, making a middle class living. Personally, I think people are made for more than doing just that, and while I believe every job should pay a living wage, I also feel that every job should provide purpose. Part of the reason I’m excited about automation is because, historically, automation has liberated humans from a lot of monotonous and dull jobs. Hersheys Kisses, cigarettes, and more were hand rolled at a certain point in time. While that sentence may sound flat on the surface, imagine working in a humid factory before AC was invented hand-rolling Hersheys Kisses all day. FUCK THAT! Countless manufacturing and agricultural jobs have been automated, freeing people to work in more intellectually engaging fields generated by the new surpluses created by technology. The service industry, as well as many jobs in the manufacturing and professional industries, should continue to be automated as quickly as possible in order to liberate people from these dreary careers. While automation is scary for us, that’s only because we live in a capitalist society, where there’s no guarantee of employment and where a lack of employment leads to a lack of food, shelter, healthcare, and every other thing we need to thrive. If every time someone was automated, they were just given the opportunity to just attend a work college and get their credits or certifications they needed to get work elsewhere, while receiving a stipend equal to their former income, it wouldn’t be a bad outcome at all besides a slight reshuffle in your commute and schedule
For those in the service industry, obviously a living wage is in order, but I’d prefer the wage scale and job duties worked like an apprenticeship program. That way, until automation does away with the necessity for that kind of labor, we instill a sense of craftsmanship and pride in your work into these jobs, allowing people to find purpose in what they do. I think if retail operated more along the Costco model, while restaurant workers worked in facilities similar to cafeteria kitchens, we could take a lot of the undue pressure off of these workers by utilizing the economy-of-scale found in these larger systems. Similarly, if we got around to actually creating a social credit system, Karens couldn’t get away with verbally abusing retail workers on a whim and Angry-Americans couldn’t get away with leaving no tips on a whim. In my opinion, the best way to address this problem in regard to service jobs not paying living wages is by nationalizing any business that doesn’t or can’t pay those wages. In doing this, we could socialize the profits and reinvest them back into the automation of the service industry, transferring service employees into other industries like the manufacturing sector and the trades. If we brought back manufacturing jobs from overseas, to the point that everything we consumed we made, while automating a great deal of the facilities, we’d generate so many millions of jobs that we could easily start the process of transferring people out of the service industry into other occupations.
Factories generate so many trade jobs that it’s hard to fathom and oftentimes, those jobs are awesome. A Budweiser plant in my hometown pays almost $200,000 a year for industrial electricians that only work on the weekends, just to give you an idea of how great it is to be an in-house tradesman at an industrial facility. I could list off more of these examples, but the point is that, even if we automated a great deal of the manufacturing jobs that came back, we’d still have a very solid middle class just due to the amount of machinery that needed to be tended to. It’d most likely cost the consumer here even less than the current situation does, if we didn’t have to build and maintain supply chains across continents and oceans to get the exact same product we could make here. The average manufacturing worker today in America makes $60,260 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is a great wage in many parts of the country and at $30 an hour, is a thriving wage in every area outside certain big cities. If we just developed plants in a grid-like pattern throughout the country, building towns around these hubs of manufacturing in low-cost areas, where workers could build larger houses that could allow them to have kids, we’d solve so many problems at once. Giving adults the ability to earn living wages, while giving them a stable income, while letting them go back to school when their job was automated, all the while allowing them the ability to live in spaces large enough to have kids, would easily let America ride off into the sunset during the “terrifying” age of automation. Automation doesn’t have to be scary, and work doesn’t have to be a dull chore.
In summary, let’s look at the two questions Charles Steel poses below: “So are 67 million trade jobs and professional jobs going to magically be there if all those people do what conservatives say they’re simply too lazy and unmotivated to do, and learn a trade or get a useful degree like in engineering or medicine? And who is going to do those other jobs if that is the case?” The answer to the first question is that, as automation begins to take hold and differences in labor costs grow small enough between different countries to not justify the international supply chains, manufacturing is most likely going to become localized in the future. This will result in a great deal of facilities being built, which will require great deals of labor to maintain, renovate, update, and upgrade. Right now, humanity is handicapped by what we can produce, but in the future in such an arrangement, humanity will be handicapped rather by what we can consume. At the point that manufacturing returns to America, at the point that we start centralizing the means of distribution (retail, restaurants) while automating as many roles as we can, while providing training programs to outmoded workers to get new relevant skillsets, we will reach levels of post-scarcity that are hard to deny. To the people that work in boring jobs, the future is your friend.
