Productivity

I am going to introduce a new argument to the jobs debate. The
problem is not outsourcing it is rather increases in
productivity and the rush of illegals.

Productivity is the measure of product produced per man hour.
There is a very real limit on the amount of production from an
individual. We get around this by having lots of labor saving
machines.

Historically the US has been a country very short on available
labor. To make up for this, all sorts of inovative machines were
built to let a man do the work of 10. In some fields this has
resulted in layoffs (or job realocations) such when the cotton
gin eliminated the problem of removing the seeds. The slaves
were put to planting and picking more cotton while in factories
skilled jobs just ended up putting the worker on the street,
where he quickly found someone else to hire him.

IIRC, the projection is that layoffs tend to be about 80% due to
workers being replaced by machines and 20% due to the foreign
competition (weither from true foreign competition or from a
plant owned by the same company).

Excessive labor bills combined with insufficient skilled labor
force is what drives the general replacement of workers by
machine. Now this replacement is not limited to the shop floor.
The vast secretarial pools to type letters died with the
computer, as did the need for vast levels of middle management
to analyse the production and planning. It also is what
happened to the long distance opperator for the telephone
companies.

The difference now is that the jobs that are eliminated do not
provide workers who shift to other jobs. Yes the workers are
made available, but what is created in the job force tends to be
service jobs (most of our actual physical production is now
abroad).

But even these service jobs are not going to Americans.
Government figures are correct in that significant numbers of
new jobs are being created -- mostly in low pay service areas.
But the numbers of illegal aliens streaming across the border
exceed the job creation.

Earl...

Lets do the math.

210k per month job creation implies about 2.5 million jobs a
year.

As I recall we have an estimated 12 - 25 million illegals in
this country currently..

We restarted the tally several times since the big 1983 amnesty
so this number represents probably 10 years worth of wetbacks.
The growth is not linear, it has been predominately in the
recent years because of economic conditions in Mexico, etc.

But notice that the high end estimate is already 10 times job
creation rate, and the average over the 10 years refects the
slower starts.

So, it does seem that the numbers bear out the proposition that
the net jobs that have been created were filled by illegals.

So the net effect is that most "new" jobs are picked up by
illegals, and the newly unemployed American gets unemployment
benefits and then drops from the workforce.

So our troubles involve outsourcing only a small portion of the
time. It is usually because of robots that are put in place to
compensate for high US salaries to equalize world production
costs. Yes world prices end up costing Americans jobs - but only
because the capital cost of a robot is cheaper than salaries and
benefits.

What few replacement jobs that are created then end up going to
the flood of illegals.