You’ve seen films of Ford or Chevy plants.. The cars move down the assembly line, and men and some women along the line are installing doors, welding fenders, adding seats, working hard and fast as the cars keep coming.
Have you seen the line recently? Almost no humans. Giant arms come down, pick up parts, weld automatically. Those arms are robots, not like the ones you see in science fiction movies, but robotic machinery that does the work.
In many ways this is an improvement. Assembly line jobs were repetitive and soul deadening. On the other hand those were union jobs paying good wages and allowing the workers to own houses and cars and send their kids to college.
As automation has increased, fewer and fewer of those jobs exist. When is the last time you paid a toll booth operator when you got on the turnpike? The “gig” economy is growing; steady work is decreasing. What happens to the millions of employees when self-driving trucks become commonplace, when robots stock the shelves, when clerks are replaced by smart machines.
Only one candidate was addressing this issue. Only one candidate talked about a guaranteed annual wage for millions of soon-to-be displaced workers. That was Andrew Yang.
Now that he has dropped out, I fear that this issue will be ignored, much like climate change or economic inequality or health care reform had been downplayed for decades and still is downplayed by our president. Yang was smart, personable, and thoughtful. I didn’t think he would be nominated, but I wish we could have heard more of his ideas.
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