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Originally Posted by fjtorres
Or the idea that if the pay for manual labor were much higher it would only make alternative practices or locations (like robots or african labor + air shipment) more viable.
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As for Africa, google:
Africa is booming
Impoverished African nations need to go through the same economic development as impoverished nations anywhere. I'd love to buy more goods made in Africa.
As for robots, there are good jobs fixing them, and better jobs deploying them. I read that Foxconn is planning on US factories. I expect them to be highly automated. That's fine. Warehouse workers aren't the only employed people in the current bad economy. There also are engineers in need of jobs.
But there still will be manual workers. Some companies will take the Trader Joe's/Wegman's/Overstock.com approach of careful hiring and treating those people well in order to get high productivity. Other companies like Amazon will take more of a race to the bottom approach.
Amazon's profits are not impressive, even for a discounter. We don't know how their warehouse labor costs per unit of output compare to well-managed companies with higher employee satisfaction. My guess is that Amazon's controversial warehouse practices are a little due to the nature of warehouse work, but more due to mismanagement. I realize others feel it is the opposite, and there is no way for us to prove it one way or the other.