TRUMP IS LYING TO AMERICAN WORKERS

….This unemployment line is what we could be seeing more of under President Donald Trump

 

Trump is wrong.  We are NOT losing jobs to global trade or an international conspiracy.

 

Yes, I of course watched the president’s address to the joint session of Congress and he was about as presidential in his presentation as is possible for Donald J. Trump.  But, the bigger question is, what did he say that can be believed?

 

Trump won the American presidency mainly because he voiced the real anger of American middle-class workers about lost jobs and stagnant wages. But in doing so, he basically misled the country by saying that free trade was the major cause of US job losses.  In addition, that his renegotiating of trade agreements would save the middle class. 

 

Sorry, that dog don’t hunt.

 

What Trump is offering is a claim that has raised the false hopes of those same American workers. Trump is also saying that a few good trade deals will refurbish the whole Rust Belt and that it will bring back the good old days of US manufacturing. This will not happen, and to say otherwise is a totally bogus and a lie.

 

President Trump boasts that his “America First” trade and economic policies is bringing well-paid manufacturing jobs back to America.  Nice thought, but it’s time to look at the facts.  The reality is that even though the country has lost millions of manufacturing factories and jobs since the 1960’s, the United State has since become a growing manufacturing nation, and I will show you the proof.

 

The issue is that through increased automation, there are many US factories that have doubled or tripled their output, but their numbers of workers has been greatly reduced.  In other areas, the education required for today’s work force is much different from those that graduated high school back in the 1950’s and 60’s.  That high school diploma that was all you needed to get a good paying union job is pretty much history in today’s America.  In the 1950’s, over 30% of all the jobs in the US were good paying Union jobs.  Today, only ~7% of the US jobs are Union jobs.

 

Trump campaigned on a basic lie that global trade was taking away American jobs. That was why he killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during his first week in office and he is now looking to make changes in NAFTA and other trade agreements.

 

Trump is also blowing smoke about some US corporations saying that their manufacturing plants are being saved and that jobs are “already starting to pour back.”  Sorry, but yes, there have been a few companies making some statements about more investments in their US factories.  But once again, due to automation, computerization, and new technologies, where 3000 employees were once needed, now only 30 to 300 are going to be needed.

 

The problem is that Trump and his chief strategist Stephen Bannon, they are trying to slay the wrong dragon.

 

Both Trump and Bannon have inflated their economic nationalism into an ideology that pits the battle between those workers being hurt by globalization and the wealthy 1% that reap the benefits.  Bannon said at the annual  Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), that Trump “got us out of a trade deal [TPP] and let our sovereignty come back to ourselves.”

 

Sorry again, but that’s another dog that doesn’t hunt.

 

The numbers show that Trump and Bannon are in fact, still fighting that same wrong dragon. Manufacturing employment has indeed declined in America over the past decades.  But as I said, the major reason is automation, not trade.  Robots, not foreign workers, are taking most of the disappearing American jobs. Rather than helping displaced blue-collar workers, Trump’s promises of restoring lost jobs just encourages them to sit and wait for the return of jobs that aren’t coming back.  This will just leave the workers unprepared for what they will need for dealing with the next wave of automation and the job losses that come with it.

 

The proof of all this is demonstrated by a 2015 study by Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devaraj at Ball State University.  Their numbers showed that manufacturing has actually experienced a revival in the United States. Despite the 2008/9 Great Recession, US manufacturing has actually grown by 17.6%, or about 2.2% a year, from 2006 to 2013.

 

Even as manufacturing output has increased, jobs have been shrinking.  From 2000 to 2010 we saw “the largest decline in manufacturing employment in US history,” the Ball State economists concluded. So, what killed those jobs? Well, it wasn’t trade, but it was mainly from productivity gains due to automation. Over the last decade, per the report, productivity gains accounted for 87.8% of lost manufacturing jobs, while trade was responsible for just 13.4%.

 

Sorry Mr. Bannon, it is not a conspiracy by the global 1% elite.  Automation has allowed American manufacturing to do more with less.  In addition, the newer technologies and the latest software improvements are also killing jobs in finance, law, and for making Mr. Trump happy.....even job losses within the mainstream media.

 

As more proof of this, to see all of Trump’s mis-information, just look at job losses due to productivity gains in the various industries. In motor-vehicle manufacturing, 85.5% of job losses came from productivity gains; in steel and other primary metals, 76.7%; in paper products, 93.2%; in textiles, 97.6%.  And today, the focus is for making even more improvements in productivity.

 

Trump continues to yell the we need to “buy American”.  But what is an American product?  Does a Toyota made in Kentucky count if it’s parts come from another country?  Is a Jeep assembled in Indiana an American car if some of its parts were manufactured in Mexico?  Global manufacturing is why auto makers like Ford and Toyota are staying healthy and profitable.  How does Trump propose to untangle this situation?

 

I believe that Trump really does believe what he preaches.  But he is seriously misleading his Rust Belt supporters that believe in him and that are responsible for putting him in the White House.

 

The worst part is that Trump is giving people reasons to avoid their job re-training that would prepare them for the next wave of automation.  And the consultants I trust, they predict that automation wave could destroy more than half of the current jobs for working Americans.

 

“I am now wondering how long the president is going to continue to lie to those workers who have believed in him, and that those old manufacturing and mining jobs are coming back?” 

 

As the new, old saying goes, “That dog still don’t hunt…and it surely won’t fly!”

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017