The vast majority of Americans believe in capitalism, competition, free enterprise driven by profit motive, economic Darwinism and minimum regulation. Most everyone shies away from actions they feel are socialist even though they may be the most effective solutions to problems. The problem is that the American people do not want to live with the consequences. A lot of people worry about unemployment, but tend to forget that one of the rights the Constitution guarantees is not employment. The same people forget, too, that a healthy unemployment is one of the keys to capitalism. It allows labor competition.
At the best of times, there will be unemployment. Sixty years ago, 7 percent was considered normal. More recently the rate has been 9.5 percent, probably too high, but we are not likely ever to go back to 4.5 percent. And this rate doesn”t include all of those workers who prefer welfare to working. In Dickens” time there was no real problem. People placed a much lower value on human life, life expectancy was far less and infant mortality was frightening by today”s standards. A large part of the population was lucky to be alive at all and it was understood that if you could not provide for yourself, you died. Someone who was unemployed did not live long and did not become a burden to the rest of the people.
For most of my working life, as an industrial engineer, consultant and teacher, my goal was to eliminate jobs. Improved methods, tools, facility layouts, work measurement ? efficiency engineering, if you will, is aimed at lowering the product cost of labor and materials. As an example, clerical operations were gold mines. Before they were improved, usual workforce was, almost always, found to be producing about 67 percent of what they should.
A few months later the same force, although now fewer, would be at 90 percent and that is a substantial savings. That manner of efficiency work is still going on.
Labor cost is a prime motivator and labor is a lot more flexible and controllable than capital equipment. An example: Caesar Chavez made a number of my equipment designer friends rich. It was he who started the development of picking machines. The effort to replace costly human assets is going faster and faster as companies seek lower labor costs. Think about it. All of the computer controlled machines, the assembly robots are not there by accident.
Over time, sewing machines have displaced hand seamstresses, we have cotton goods because the cotton gin replaced hand labor and so on. I suspect that people who see for example, Lowes and Home Depot ads stressing DIY seldom understand that when you do-it-yourself you are taking jobs away from professionals.
Low-cost labor has been an issue since people began. Probably slavery was the first move. Then we started to use animal labor instead of people. People could pound grain into flour, but it is a lot cheaper to use air and water power.
Steam engines really got things going. Remember the English Luddites and their campaign against power looms and spinners? Then came electric motors, cheap power and locatable right at the place of need. When you cannot avoid human labor, you find the lowest cost, it is called off shoring. And all of this based on satisfying buyers who want lower prices. A major motivation of a lot of science is lower costs.
And people still worry about unemployment. If one wishes to count welfare recipients as state employees, even if they produce nothing, there really is no unemployment problem. At least they spend their stipends and it keeps the economy going to some extent. Somewhere a lot of people have lost the concepts of being responsible and earning their pay and, if they are asked to do so, some social group steps in to prevent their being harassed. Besides, to conservatives, such a move would be both growing government and socialistic. Personally, I feel our government should spend its funds on infrastructure improvement, whether directly as WPA or by giving out contracts to private firms. Today”s workforce is not as shovel ready as 70 years ago, but I”ll bet the results would be positive. But probably socialistic and who cares if the result is good for the country.
As an ending, let”s consider the nature of unemployment itself. Some is called structural, where jobs are not all that available in a specific area and where an applicant needs to relocate because of the nature of the specialized requirements. Or, perhaps the job has been radically changed. Regular unemployment is largely the result of a lack of demand for a company”s products or services. Each capable supervisor in a firm has a listing of his subordinates from most valuable and ready to promote on down to the least valuable who are the first to be laid-off or fired. In general, the unemployed are the dregs of the labor pool. Each individual may not be a dreg, but he has to face the fact that he wasn”t as valuable as the person who was kept. Except, of course, where union action has made seniority and tenure more important than capability.
Guthrie “Guff” Worth
Lakeport
