There is a wide plected perception that trade with China has caused an increase in US employment. This is false. Imports from China reduced employment in sub-industry, but this did not affect the overall unemployment rate as more jobs were created in other industries.
Last year, China’s trade surplus rose to nearly $1 trillion. If the heavy merchants are right, the Chinese should have experienced a boom in manufacturing employment. The opposite is actually happening – millions of manufacturing jobs are lost, and China’s unemployment rate is higher than ours.
The Financial Times reports jobs are lost across a wide range of manufacturing industries.
FT points out that while subjobs have migrated to other East Asian countries, the main problem is automation.
However, manufacturing is dead in China. At a Panyu factory on the outskirts of Guangzhou, humans synchronize with machines to create new electric vehicles every 53 seconds. . . .
However, in some parts of the line, such as when seven robots lift and rotate the driver and fit the windshield of the chassis passing through the conveyor belt, humans are very numbers covered by machines.
Other tasks like dangerous welding and coatings in the car’s DOORS are automatically automated, but the overall automation rate for the final assembly process is around 40%.
That’s because of design, says engineer Li Xiaoyu: The factory aims to reduce the human labor force by 10% per year.
Automation was also a major cause of unemployment in the US manufacturing industry. Unfortunately, politicians are stopping trade unemployment, which has helped you to increase the global rise in nationalism. If trade is truly a problem, China’s vast trade surplus will generate much of the manufacturing industry. Interad, they have lost over 7 million such jobs since 2011:
Between 2011 and 2019, an analysis of 12 labor-intensive manufacturing industries between 2011 and 2019 by scholars from Yang Chen Teacher University and Henan University found that the industry had contracted by 40% over this period.
The same 12 sector FT analysis between 2019 and 2023 brings us to an additional 3.4 million jobs.
