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Jammer, blame the machine you fingers are touching as you make your next post for the decline of the union auto worker.
My father flew all over the country installing computer systems in US air force bases to computerize their payroll systems in the 1950s and 1960s. The people were so worried about loosing their jobs they hired prostitutes to try to get him in a compromising situation so they could blackmail him and postpone the inevitable.
The auto manufacturers did the same thing. Repetitive redundant operations were taken over by computer controlled robots that need no compensation of any kind.
Do you want to go to the old telephones where you dialed operator and had her connect you to someone across the country and it cost you an hours pay to talk for 5 minutes.
Myrtle the operator is long gone.
Technology will replace every manufacturing job on this planet, if it can be done cost effectively. What is your plan for success?
You must find a niche where you can use you mind and hands in such a way that it is simply not practical to automate the process, or you will become obsolete like the telephone operator and assembly line worker.
Pittsburgh Pennsylvania was a steel town, a dirty cesspool of pollution that fed the manufacturing industry. Coal mines measured productivity in human life.
Look at Pittsburgh and the Coal mines today, compare the life expectancies of the steel workers and coal miners to life expectancy today.
If you do not evolve into a valuable productive commodity in today's technology intensive labor environment you are doomed to a slow economic death.
See anyone spray painting cars in a factory recently?
How about running a panel press?
Drilling holes?
Most auto workers today are more of an inspector to make sure the machines are running properly. Go to a manufacturing plant and see how it is done, then compare it to the old moving pictures of assembly lines of the twenties and thirties.
They are almost all gone, replaced by the infernal machines.
Post office manual sorting gone.
Payroll check writing gone.
Steel mills gone.
Traffic cops gone.
The milkman gone.
Telephone operators gone.
This thread demonstrates a sad principle, that we will sit here and argue about whose fault it is when jobs disappear, but do nothing to make a job appear.
People run around to local auctions and buy cheap local stuff and sell it on ebay an make a fortune. That's a job.
Build a house and sell it, that's a job.
My point is simple, look around you and see where there is a potential for income and use your talents to make money. Waiting for someone to do that for you makes you dependant of them and they will use you until they have no more use for you.
I didn't like the way my employers treated me so I opened my own business.
It was the toughest job I ever did in my life, and two years of self employment made me less than 1 dollar an hour, even as late as 1987. While I was busting my arse for nothing how much were the union workers at GM making? I lived in an unheated building without hot water of a place to bathe. Where were the GM workers then? I had to work 12 hour days and join a health club to take a shower at 8:30PM, after starting at 7:00 AM for 1 dollar an hour in 1987. It took years for it to pay off.
They rode that horse into the ground and management did the same thing. Now it's time to pay the piper for their lack of understanding of the larger picture which is they drove their own customers away. No amount of animosity towards any foreign country or their more intelligent approach to customer service will ever bring back home delivered milk, the telephone operator, the traffic cop, or the auto worker.
regards
Mech
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