Jesse Jackson, Jr. Pins US Job Losses On iPad

theodp writes "Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. went on an anti-technology rant on Friday on the floor of Congress, blaming the iPad for eliminating thousands of American jobs. 'Why do you need to go to Borders anymore?' asked Jackson. 'Why do you need to go to Barnes & Noble? Buy an iPad, download your book, download your newspaper, download your magazine.' Jackson continued: 'What becomes of publishing companies and publishing company jobs? And what becomes of bookstores and librarians and all of the jobs associated with paper? Well, in the not too distant future, such jobs simply will not exist. Steve Jobs is doing pretty well. He's created the iPad. Certainly, it has made life more efficient for Americans, but the iPad is produced in China. It is not produced here in the United States."

Comments

Not anti-tech necessarily

[orkysoft]

His rant can also be interpreted as against globalization instead of against technology. All the people who will become lose their jobs now that more and more brick-and-mortar stores are being obsoleted by websites, they're not getting jobs in electronics factories, since the electronic devices are almost all made in low-wage countries these days.

Even more strange

[alvinrod]

Even more strange. Just last month he wanted to amend the constitution and give an iPad or similar device to every kid in school in the country. Wonder what made him change his mind.

Re:Even more strange

[tripleevenfall]

He's a politician, he says what benefits him the most in that moment.

But his complaints are not totally without merit.

If he were smarter his point would be that all jobs have life cycles, and we need to develop and innovate so that we can place people in jobs that are ahead of the curve instead of behind.

It's like everyone clammoring to bail out GM and save a bunch of low skill jobs that are going nowhere but overseas in the future anyway. It's a losing battle with the wrong objective.

But from the left, his policies are reactive rather than proactive. Proactive would be getting out in front and stopping things that stifle innovation, like hostile business environments. Instead, he wants us (if he could expand, I'd wager) to outlaw things and restrict things and tariff things after the fact.

Should we want to be one step ahead, or one step behind?

Re:Even more strange

[NetNed]

So are you saying that you don't understand a need to keep low skill jobs in the US? Sounds like you need a tour of a local high school to understand that not all students are destined for upper management these days. Maybe if you said the days of high paying low skill jobs are not sustainable anymore, that would make sense. But to say this country doesn't need a lower level working class seems to indicate you have little grasp of what our economy needs.

I don't think the GM bailout was the best thing, but many good things have come from it, far more then other industries that the government has bailed out in the past.

Re:Even more strange

[williamhb]

It's like everyone clammoring to bail out GM and save a bunch of low skill jobs that are going nowhere but overseas in the future anyway. It's a losing battle with the wrong objective.

Actually that's not true in two ways.

First, I always think it's remarkably arrogant that we label manufacturing jobs "low-skill". My grandfather was a toolmaker in an aeroplane factory in World War 2. Imagine a job swap between us and see think which would be the bigger disaster: him trying to do some academic research and put a paper into a conference, or me trying to actually physically build an aeroplane good enough that your life could depend on it while the luftwaffe try to shoot you down. But for some reason it's his job that would be classified as "blue collar" and "low-skill".

The second is that labour costs are much less of an impetus for moving "low-skill" jobs than they used to be. Wages in China have risen such that many companies have thought about moving manufacturing away to lower-wage countries like Bangladesh, etc. But the skills and infrastructure needed to run serious industrial scale manufacturing are not present there making business to difficult. It's no longer worth the saving. As globalisation equalises costs of living, the factories are going to stop playing musical chairs with countries, and start sticking where the capacity and infrastructure has been built up. And right now, regardless of costs, that is China because the US has been slashing and burning its manufacturing skills and capacity.

It's not an anti tech rant! Watch the f'in video!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not anti technology! The guy loves the iPad! He's just upset that the US is losing jobs to creative destruction and outsourcing and the GOP is worried about debt!!

He's bang freaking on.

Re:Why go to Barnes & Noble

[TubeSteak]

Just because we've moved from brick-and-mortar distribution to digital distribution doesn't mean ANY jobs were lost, they were just MOVED.

Uhh... moved where?
The number of people required to run a datacenter 24/7 is a fraction of those required to run a bookstore, much less the supply chain that feeds the bookstore.

The bookstore industry is facing a serious contraction/consolidation.
They aren't going away, but there won't be as many bookstores around.

Re:I'm sorry Mr. Jackson

[Joce640k]

"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Heinlein, Life Line, 1939

(Actually read that story yesterday. On real paper.)

Indeed

[SmallFurryCreature]

The US turned into a service economy, now even the service jobs are being taken away.

Another poster above complains about the saving of GM for the low skill jobs... but that is what the majority of people do. The majority is NOT working on the next generation chip technology or moon rocket (oh wait, that is China isn't it, my bad).

There are several key industries in which people work:

Food production, read farmers. This was once the mass employer but also a poor employer. Crops especially needed massive amounts of labour but only in certain times of the year. Seasonal labour is not all that great to have. But it still employed a great many AND also added some extra cash for people with tiny farms suitable only for feeding themselves. But now, food production is left to a handful and employment in the sector itself is very low.

Food preperation. Quick, when did you last buy bread (US people, read on, I ate what you think of as bread, go stand in the corner and be ashamed and remember this, bread does NOT bounce!) from a baker who had his hands involved in the process? Wanna bet most bread comes from a factory paying very low wages? Luckily enough people still out so some people still make their money from food preperation but the time every few thousand people had their own bakery, butcher and grocer is long gone.

Resource gathering. Often not really represented as a seperate group, I am talking about the miners and loggers here. Well, you can watch swamp loggers. A dozen men hauling of a dozen truck loads of wood in a day. Very impressive but not exactly going to put the masses to work is it? And very dependent on everyone else, if nobody is using wood to build houses, then no trees need to be cut down.

Production. Factory work, either heavily automated or shipped abroad. Try to find anything in your house that is not made in China. Can you? Was on a US bus recently, most used ropes to call for a stop (looped through a metal thingy labelled marked in China) but one used buttons, grey bulges of smooth plastic with a red button. Exactly the same as in use in many Dutch busses... wanna bet their origin? Yes, this is low skilled work most of the time and it doesn't pay much. But millions upon millions once employed funded the moon landings with their taxes. A termite mound stands tall on the back of countless tiny worker backs. With the industrial revolution, this was the backbone of the economy.

Service. This was the great new hope. What people who favored outsourcing thought would keep people employed when production went away. Sure, the iPad is not produced here but it must be sold here (how people are going pay for it if they don't have a job was never answered, or maybe it was seeing the recent crisis with debt). And now those jobs are indeed going away as well. Amazon does not employ the same number of people and certainly not at the same wage as the bookstores it is so busily replacing. Sure, it means cheaper books but also more people unable to find a decent job or indeed a job at all.

?????. What else is there? When farming went away as a mass employer, industry took over. When industry left, service took over. If service goes away... what is left? Government jobs? The army? Sex? No, these "industries" can only exist on the back of an employed society making enough money to afford them.

But slashdot is a very bad place to discuss this. Most here have higher level jobs which are not YET affected all that much. Except, who is going to pay you in the future? Game developer? Who can afford a new console and 60 bucks per game if they got to combine 2 jobs or more at below minimum wage to just make ends meet? Regular developer? Your jobs are already being outsourced. IT support? Cost cutting already outsourced those jobs as well.

But we still think we are safe. Somehow, magic new tech development is to employ around a billion people (the entire "west" is affected, not just the US) with no new line of work in sight.

IF the high street really gets replac

Re:Evolve or get out of the way

[uofitorn]

I'm an avid reader. Occasionally I'll dip into fantasy or sci-fi where trilogies are more likely to be found. I've never been so impatient that I couldn't wait an "hour or so" to get to another title.

To me, the BIG disadvantage of an e-reader is this:

When Amazon goes belly up in a few (or 45 years) where will my books be? Next to me I have a 1887 4 volume edition of Les Miserable and I am confident that no matter what happens to the Little, Brown and Company publishing house, my book isn't going to go poof on my nightstand while I'm brushing my teeth.

Simplistic lecturing

[happyhamster]

Thanks for simplistic high school level economics lecture. You are conveniently omitting the factor of scale. One or two orders of magnitude of manufacturing jobs are lost for every "mechanical/electrical/computer/systems engineer" job created. Also, manufacturing jobs can be made attractive again if you slap punishing tariffs on chinese dumping and corporations that facilitate it.

I don't think anyone argues about complete halt of technological progress, but making it orderly and less harmful to society is certainly needed. Instead of blindly throwing people on the street by the million and giving them the moronic advice to "adapt", we should provide those people with a few years of social support and "useful" job training, paid for largely by the companies doing the firing. We are supposedly living in a human society and not in the jungle.

The world is not run by dumb people.

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> I don't think people, overall, are that smart. the world seems to be run by 'the people of walmart'.

Some people are good at what they're trained for. A lot of people are "smart," or at least effective, in at least a few specific tasks. And don't make the mistake of assuming people working or shopping at walmart aren't intelligent, sometimes in their own way at their own tasks, sometimes like Dilbert's great garbage man.

The world is definitely *run* by smart people. They may not be as smart as engineers--it depends on the particular "runner" and the engineer--but they are much smarter than your average bear. The people on the Hill and in the White House were in the top 10% of their high schools. A lot of them are assholes. A lot of them are nice people. They all have learned certain skill sets. The elected ones have to develop skill sets that make them seem stupid to smart people. They also, mostly, have do mean things because empirically, mean things WORK. Lying to the public--spin--works. Going negative in campaigning works. If you don't do it, you're at a huge disadvantage. Without consensus not to do it, pretty much everyone does it.

Businesspeople vary in intelligence. The best are usually quite intelligence. Again, they can be good people or not. They tend to think differently than you or I.

"People, overall," don't run the world--they accept the world, or they rise up. Their needs have been catered to for millenia by those running things. The Romans for control of the senate--panem et circenses--the nations following the infantry revolution at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, and the gunpowder revolution.

There are also thugs. A lot of thugs in power. Warlords, torturers, thieves and brigangs and thugs who somehow have nations behind them. Not so much in the West. But in Africa, in Chechneya, many places. And of course local crime lords.

Some of them are quite personable. Some are quite intelligent. Others are puppets of other people who are intelligent. They may not have formal schooling, or they may. And of course, sometimes they're just a bully. But it usually takes a bully with intelligence to get a nation behind him. Even a crappy nation.