From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to modern day, there has been a resistance to automation and mechanization that replaces human labor by Luddites and their intellectual decedents, or or innovations such as the the assembly line that Henry Ford used to make the automobile increasingly affordable to more and more Americans.
Today, many pine away for a past utopia where highly skilled blue collar Unionized workers arise as a purported ruling class. They seek to create this, at your expense by eliminating the alternatives. One such example is the wishing to abolish such assembly line jobs at meatpacking plants by starving companies of lower pages workers, including illegal aliens with the presumption that automation and/or robotics will not take their place. In effect, we must all pay the price of economic inefficiency and cost to subsidize the market for highly trained artisan experts.
Meatpacking used to be a stable, middle-class union job, with multiple generations of families working at the same plant. In 1960, the industry was 95% unionized, paying wages that were comparable to those in the auto and steel industries. Meatpacking was skilled labor. A… pic.twitter.com/dioF8Pc7It
— Jay Fivekiller (@JayFivekiller) February 2, 2025
And yes, the complaint, ironically enough, is about jobs that Americans purportedly won’t do. Specifically the specialization where a less trained persons specializing in certain cuts could replace a more expensive expert in the entire process. All this in the name of eliminating “a job that destroys the human body and spirit” as if massively hiking prices for regular people is a noble sacrifice for the not-so-common good of the few. Indeed, these sentiments are often under the assumption that we’d become a rich nation of highly trained proletariat laborers who reclaim the wealth that the bourgeoisie has been stealing via illegal aliens or automation.
The underlying assumption, as it is with claims of foreign warmongering and non-domestically made narcotics, is that some blue collar utopia is the default and that nefarious forces are to blame for why we don’t have the fantasy workers paradise of mid-20th century America when such laborers didn’t have to face any real global competition, again ironically enough, from a world devastated a the Second World War.
There is a certain elitism that dovetails with derision for more formally educated white collar specialist and experts. And for whatever truth there is of the perceived elitism of the white collar class, this is an example of the pot calling the kettle Black.
Perhaps nothing better explains this elitism than the following sentiment:
“Yes, prices of meat will certainly rise, but you already shouldn’t be eating factory-farmed meat and you shouldn’t be patronizing corporations that are actively wrecking America.”
So much for the “Common Good”. At least they aren’t claiming that business owners are swimming in three cubic acre money vaults.
This is the equivalent to demanding that automobile assembly lines be abolished and cars be made more expensive in order to revitalize the master mechanic who could build a car completely by hand. It is the assumption that, protected from competition, a new ruling class will be the bulk of the population and the costs only born by those “elitists” who benefited from their Capitalist system of oppression.
Rather than the Rule of Law and the free market, we see calls for a command and control economy where some benefit at the expense of the rest.*
A little mood music:
* Nomenklatura excepted, of course.
If one intends to miss a point it is best to do it wildly.
I’d like to mix with the people the author references and learn some inner wisdom they have I don’t. Those are the same characters that crowed incessantly about the happy transformation of the US economy from a manufacturing base to a service base. “Good far (for) the Uhmur-uh-cun (pause) PEople” so said the like of scoundrels such as WJ Clinton and his band of merry Leninites after one of many transformative deceptions.
No, the past does not hold a uniformly pleasant place of halcyon yearning in our hearts nor was any of it Utopian. I say that as a member of the haloed elder class with the scars and calluses to show for it, but also as an amateur student of history and the mangled memories that accompany it. A clear look at the employment mix of previous generations and of the depth of income categories will shed light on the topic; removing sneer and contempt from arguments will assist clarity as well.
Find a cultural or societal metric that has improved since 1980. And do everyone a favor and do not go to that same well from 1950 or you will become rigid with a frightening reality. Is it the cost of flat-screens, abundance of video games, mind-numbing streaming services, a harvest of alt-language illiterate high-schoolers, or the enrichment of military powers bent on our destruction that is gilding the present golden age?
Yesteryear was dotted with boredom and dreary employment, and a ringing lack of counselling for escape. But there was an escape and that was via the manufacturing jobs readily available to to the middle class, a middle class evaporated by an overseas registry of lower costs and generally lowered quality. There is value in that, of course not every item we touch can be a work of an artisan’s skill, but at what cost to the society within our borders?
I don’t hear the argument that the US should return to the agrarian and pre-industrial past, despite the tone of your piece. I do hear there is no future in everyone doing everyone else’s’ laundry; how many lawn care trucks, nail saloons, and discount mattress outlets can we absorb? Where is the value added in any of that? GDP numbers do not account for the missing steps from entry- to improved employment. The present-day economy is feeding from the pantry stores of prior generations’ work, and the phony financial garden of fiat currency. A correction is best planned or one will be created by circumstance.
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