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Just 14 People Make 500,000 Tons of Steel a Year in Austria (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg Businessweek feature: The Austrian village of Donawitz has been an iron-smelting center since the 1400s, when ore was dug from mines carved out of the snow-capped peaks nearby. Over the centuries, Donawitz developed into the Hapsburg Empire's steel-production hub, and by the early 1900s it was home to Europe's largest mill. With the opening of Voestalpine AG's new rolling mill this year, the industry appears secure. What's less certain are the jobs. The plant, a two-hour drive southwest of Vienna, will need just 14 employees to make 500,000 tons of robust steel wire a year -- vs. as many as 1,000 in a mill with similar capacity built in the 1960s. Inside the facility, red-hot metal snakes its way along a 700-meter (2,297-foot) production line. Yet the floors are spotless, the only noise is a gentle hum that wouldn't overwhelm a quiet conversation, and most of the time the place is deserted except for three technicians who sit high above the line, monitoring output on a bank of flatscreens. "We have to forget steel as a core employer," says Wolfgang Eder, Voestalpine's chief executive officer for the past 13 years. "In the long run we will lose most of the classic blue-collar workers, people doing the hot and dirty jobs in coking plants or around the blast furnaces. This will all be automated."
The problem with this argument is it assumes that owning an automated factory = profit. When everyone is unemployed, they stop buying cars. When they stop buying cars, automated factories have to stop making cars. When they stop making cars, they stop buying steel. When they stop buying steel, the steel mill from this story stops making steel. Etc. at some point, they either have to pass some of their savings on to the consumers or close shop, as the consumers will be making next to nothing in the scenario you describe.
It is better to let someone else make it, and just buy what we need.
Let THEM deal with the pollution, costs, etc?
If a steel plant can't be built and operated in the US as they are in China, then no one in the US should be buying steel from China.
What is considered inhuman working conditions here are inhuman working conditions there. What is considering environmentally damaging here is environmentally damaging there. Etc. Etc.
Just because it's "over there" doesn't mean that working conditions and environmental impacts are magically made acceptable
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I wasn't referring to automated steel making "everyone unemployed". I was referring to Freischutz's scenario: "how will the economy work when 90% of the jobs are automated".
If it's dangerous and/or boring, it's better to have a machine do it.
Machines are getting better at a lot of things. My first time through college, I got a decent amount of PLC training, but those units are now entirely obsolete. Machine vision was a thing back then, but you needed a highly-specialized $6,000 ISA card just to grab frames and analyze them. Now, you can do it with a potato-grade webcam and a Raspberry Pi.
I went back to school to get updated on as much as possible since I want to do maintenance now that Electronics and PC Repair have both taken a massive shit with everything moving toward being disposable. The maintenance guys I've met are all retiring and companies are aching to hire young blood. On top of that, industrial control boards still use through-hole components for durability reasons and I can repair that stuff in my sleep.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Just go look at the older coal towns.(or mining) I've seen many through out the US.
They've dried up, the place remains a sad shell dependent on outside help. Many state and other officials try making deals with move in other industry, but it's never enough.
For example: Here in Utah, Price was a once such a town. They got Sorenson Communications to build a TTY(a deaf text to phone service) it still dries up.(w/ text being replaced by video)
Jobs don't materialize just because there are people wanting work. And not every person can be trained to do every position.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Also, in such environment --- nobody will get rich selling the spoils from their factories, unless there's an economy of people to buy their products (If not, then the price will go down, until it approaches the now lower marginal cost of production which has been reduced due to the lower labor requirement).
Agreed. So, where will all these people with ready cash for buying the products get their cash from? You no doubt understand that there must be a significant volume of people making purchases so it can't be the 1% which sustain these factories. How will a significant portion of the 99% be able to make purchases when we reach this "next level" of which you speak? What is this next level? How does the transition to it begin and how do we all get the signal that we need to move to it? What or who makes the first moves?
Only I can judge you.
even if it is a trade war instead of a shooting war.
That is not how trade wars work. In a trade war, countries cut export prices, while raising tariffs to keep imports out. In a trade war, you can still buy whatever you need, you just can't sell what you have.
60% of steel produced in America is recycled from scrap, not forged.
If international trade in steel stops, that will hurt China far more than it will hurt the US.