Why Do We Like Manufacturing Jobs, Again?

Prompted by President Obama's emphasis on manufacturing in his State of the Union address, Matt Yglesias has been questioning the apparent embrace of manufacturing by left-wingers. If we want generous universal health care, a vastly improved educational system featuring early childhood education, smaller classes in elementary and high schools, and widespread higher education, a better physical infrastructure, and more sustainable/non-factory/organic/local agriculture, then we presumably want people to be working in those fields, none of which are manufacturing, and therefore we clearly don't really want the manufacturing sector to gobble up too many workers. Apparently various other internet liberals are taking some issue with his presentation of these issues; I have not honestly looked at their responses, because what I'm about to write does not really concern any of the specifics of this debate. Rather, it just strikes me that there's no good reason to like manufacturing jobs at all.



I think we can broadly categorize types of work or employment three ways. First, we have those jobs which are fulfilling, enjoyable, pleasurable, and generally attractive on their own merits. Second, we have those jobs which could easily be done by a non-human, (presumably) non-sentient machine, and which would be unpleasant for a human to do. Finally, we have those jobs which, on the one hand, must be done by a human, and on the other hand, are unpleasant for a human to do. Note that I'm only talking about the form of the work itself here; many unpleasant jobs could have enough compensation attached to them that they would appear to be "good jobs," but for my purposes I'm still counting those as unpleasant.

Now whenever a job of this third variety is vitally necessary for society to function, then there's really no getting around the fact that someone will have to do that job, and find it unpleasant. But clearly any work which would produce discomfort or misery in a human who performed it, and which could be performed by a robot instead, should be performed by a robot! This is a welfare-enhancing measure! Society gets the product of the labor all the same, and the worker is spared the unpleasant experience of doing the work. Moreover, I think many manufacturing jobs are in this category. In fact, people will often explicitly talk about this fact, but will typically criticize the automation that leads to producing things without making people do unpleasant work.

As best I can tell, this is because our society is deeply committed to a world in which no one is allowed to maintain a decent standard of living except as the result of some sort of modern capitalist employment, wherein an employee performs services and is in exchange granted money, and perhaps other benefits, by their employer, according to a more-or-less mutually voluntary contract. One either must be so employed in the present or be dependent upon some employed person, either a relative or other close friend who is currently employed or one's own past self who was employed and saved their earnings. Otherwise, one is more or less left out in the cold. Obviously in this world there are major problems with turning unpleasant human jobs into robot jobs, because society insists upon impoverishing the displaced human worker. Moreover, many manufacturing jobs, perhaps because they are so unpleasant and perhaps because unions have been relatively strong in that field, have quite nice compensation packages attached to them: a reasonably high salary, job security, a good benefits package, etc. They are, in other words, "good jobs."

But there's no particular reason why us left-wingers should settle for this world of, as one rather famous thinker termed it, wage slavery. The solutions he envisioned, to the extent that he envisioned them at all, seem not to work, or at least to be unattainable given political realities, but that doesn't mean there aren't problems, or that there might not be solutions to those problems. The basic reality is that much of the work of manufacturing is nasty and/or dangerous. Meanwhile, there is no shortage of other work that could be done which would benefit society. Do we have too many doctors? Or scientists? Writers? Artists, musicians, poets? Too many good, ordinary folk running for elected office? A world in which many perfectly decent people are compelled, because the laws of capitalism decree it so, to spend their lives doing manufacturing work that does nothing to enrich their lives and could easily be done by robots instead is a world where those people cannot do any of these other things, the kind of thing that people actually want to do.

And if it turns out that, when we've fully automated every factory we can automate, and every other function which a robot or computer can easily perform, and we've filled up our entertainment industry to its bursting point and stocked the hospitals and science labs full to the brim, that our society is simply capable of producing everything it needs, everything it could possibly want, without employing the labor of all of its people, then the only humane thing to do would be to let those whose labor is not required live good decent lives at society's expense. But don't worry, because I don't think that would be the problem.