Robots and Outsourcing Killing Middle Class Work Force

[Guest David]

The disappearance of the middle class is ongoing automation and off-shoring of middle-skilled ‘routine’ tasks that were formerly performed primarily by workers with moderate education (a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree). Routine tasks are ones that “can be carried out successfully by either a computer executing a program or, alternatively, by a comparatively less-educated worker in a developing country.

 

[Luke_Wilbur]

Owners want profit and do not want to pay labor for jobs. Automation and Robotics are slowly replacing humans in various business assembly functions. What hardware and software cannot do are more and more outsourced to foreign countries. The actual flow of outsourced goods and services with only brand name here is mind blowing.

 

Americans need to do the tasks that are being outsourced. This Holiday Season buy American. Look online for American made goods.

 

For those that work in a warehouse environment take note.

 

 

[Guest Richard Heinberg]

we can’t outsource more than 100 percent of manufacturing, we can’t transport goods with zero energy, and we can’t enlist the efforts of workers and count on their buying our products while paying them nothing.

 

http://richardheinberg.com/222-the-end-of-growth

[Luke_Wilbur]

This article makes total sense. People abroad are just not in touch with our reality.

 

Company reverses outsourcing to grow

By Gulf Coast Business Review - Tuesday, December 21, 2010 Several Gulf Coast-based manufacturers have gone away from outsourcing production work overseas in recent months, concerned about quality issues.

 

The trend could now spill out to customer service-focused companies that do most of the work over the phone. At least that's the case with Vengroff, Williams and Associates, a Sarasota-based commercial debt collections and management consulting firm.

 

In fact, the company recently won two new debt collection contracts with Fortune 500 companies through a business pitch that included replacing jobs in India with Sarasota-based employees. "In reality, the performance [in India] just wasn't there," Vengroff, Williams and Associates CEO Mark Vengroff tells Coffee Talk.

 

http://www.review.ne...ng-outsourcing/

[Guest Cleve Meater]

Consumers are given the illusion of "choice", yet its gazillions of products are themselves manufactured and owned by a small handful of global monopolistic suppliers. Want to buy some toothpaste at Wal-Mart? 80 percent of that market is controlled by Procter & Gamble (including seemingly independent "health" brands like Tom's of Maine.)

 

Pick up a six pack of beer? Tsingtao, Corona, Beck's, "independent" microbrews like Redhook? All owned by Anheuser Busch, MillerCoors, or InBev.

 

The same is true for Campbell's, Frito Lay, etc. Consumers think that these big box monstrosities offer them "choices". What they are getting are simply different flavors of Soylent Green manufactured and marketed by similar global monopolies.

 

The production of virtually every product we buy today has been concentrated into the hands of global monopolies. Then it's sold to us in fraktastically enormous warehouses by other global monopolies.