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To: Knighty Tin who wrote (271982)	12/26/2003 11:09:41 AM
From: Pogeu Mahone	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

from Dolinar Janko on BBB thread no future for human work By Jeremy Rifkin For many years one could hear reproaches from some German politicians and trade unionists, that foreign immigrants were taking away jobs from German workforce. Now that more and more German enterprises have been moving their manufacturing plants abroad, China has lately been accused of stealing German manufacturing jobs. It is true that in Germany in the last seven years eight per cent of the entire factory jobs have been lost. At the same time China's manufacturing industry is booming. Can we not put the equal sign between the two? No. China does produce and export a substantially higher percentage of industrial goods, however, according to a new study by Alliance Capital management, the jobs in the industrial manufacturing have been disappearing there faster than in any another country. Between 1995 and 2001 China factories have lost more than fifteen million jobs. This corresponds to 15 per cent of Chinese workforce in this sector. But there's more bad messages. The same study comes to the result that in the twenty largest national economies of the world about 31 million factory job have been eliminated between 1995 and 2002. The employment in the industrial manufacturing has been decreasing continually during the last seven years in each and every region of the world. This dismantling of jobs is happening parallel to the increase in the industrial production, which rose world wide by more than 30 per cent. At the same time the manufacturing jobs have shrunk by eleven per cent. If this trend continues - and it will probably even accelerate - then the present 164 million jobs in factory production will by 2040 shrink to a few millions. This means the age of the world-wide industrial mass employment would be over. In the service sector and at the desk jobs a similar dismantling is taking place, since intelligent technologies are replacing workers more and more frequently. In banks and insurance, in wholesale and in retail, smart technologies are getting introduced everywhere, making auxiliary personnel redundant. During the next four decades, as enterprises, actually whole industries and the world economy globally interlace with each other, market watchers expect a similar drop as the one happening in manufacturing jobs. Why are so many jobs disappearing? Dramatic productivity increases enable the enterprises to produce with substantially fewer coworkers ever more goods and offer even more services. That technology advantages and productivity improvements destroy jobs, but on the other hand create as many new ones - this old logic is outdated. The United States experience at the moment the steepest productivity rise since 1950. In the last quarter the productivity of the country increased by mind-boggling 9.4 per cent and still the unemployment remains high. The productivity has always been considered as the engine of employment and prosperity. Experts in economic policies have long argued as follows: high productivity makes it possible for companies to offer more goods and services at lower prices. These attractive new supplies would stimulate the demand and jobs would have to be created and filled in order to satisfy the risen demand. Supposedly it is a cycle, that's kept running by a constant productivity growth. The point is that this principle, held for a long time for an irrefutable cornerstone of capitalistic economic theory, is not valid anymore. Despite rapidly increasing productivity the numbers of laid-off workers in the USA and in the remaining world continue to increase. According to a recently published report on the productivity in the one hundred largest American enterprises nine workers today produce the same quantity of goods as ten workers in March 2001. Richard D Rippe, leading economic adviser with Prudential Securities, comes to the following conclusion: "Today we can increase the output without having to stock up considerably on personnel." The enormous meaning of this change can be understood best in the example of one individual branch of industry. The steel industry in the United States of America is typical for the current process. During the last twenty years the annual steel production in the USA rose form 75 million to 102 million tons. In the same period, that is from 1982 to 2002,the number of the steel workers went down from 289,000 to 74,000. "Even if the proportion of the production volume in the gross domestic product remains unchanged, becomes we will nevertheless still lose jobs due to the productivity increase", explains Donald Grimes, economist at the university of Michigan. Professor Grimes regrettingly admits this development can hardly have be stopped: "It is like fighting strong head winds." That's where the problem lies: who'll take care of the consumers' demand, if the manpower becomes increasingly replaceable ? When more and more people will get laid off, because drastic productivity increases can only be achieved through more effective and labor cost-cutting technologies as well as improved labor organization methods? Who is to buy all those new products and services, which will become available with rising productivity? At this point we have to face the contradiction which lies in the nature of our free-market economy. It has existed from the very outset, but it is only now, that it is turning into an incompatible conflict. The capitalistic free-market economy is based partially on the logic, that in order to maximize profit margins the production costs including the labor costs need to be kept low. It is constantly searching for ways to decrease, via even cheaper and more efficient technologies, its labor costs or to make manpower completely redundant. The new intelligent technologies can today to a large extent replace manpower - both physical and mental -. The productivity rise, caused by the introduction of these technologies, however, has its price: ever more employees are pushed away into partial time jobs or even laid off. Shrinking work force however means smaller incomes, reduced consumption and a stagnating economy . This is the new structural reality, which government, corporate leaders and many experts of economic politics are hardly willing to acknowledge. View from the outside - SZ 295 p2 - 23.12.2003 - on the subject of jobless recovery. Wonder what our good Doktor R would say to this... He'd probably switch to net investment argument right away...