You don’t have to choose one. With automation you can have a small, highly paid, highly skilled workforce do the work of a much larger, low skill, low paid workforce and actually produce higher quality products at a lower price.
So you’re picking low prices and an UNpaid workforce - cutting a workforce by 90% but doubling pay for the remaining 10% doesn’t improve a local or domestic economy.
Yes it does - those people can do something else productive, the US gets the tools it needs to build other things in their economy, and the US has resilience in case of future (extremely likely and possibly fundamental) supply chain disruptions.
So long as you are producing consumer goods for the masses and not say hand-built sports cars, I don't think the alternative of a large well paid workforce to do what a large less well paid workforce can do is an alternative.
Having 10 skilled people and 100 robots do what 1000 people would otherwise do isn't some defeat, it's fantastic. Productivity is what makes people rich in the long term.
Automation is far from unpaid. At very least it expects you to give it food (electricity, gasoline, etc.), shelter, and healthcare (repairs and maintenance). Generally the same things that humans expect from you.
Automation is significant not because it is unpaid, but because it can often do much more work for the same amount of pay.
There's plenty of work to go around: workers today are no less busy but far more productive than they were before any automation. It's just that instead of a bunch of farmers and a handful of blacksmiths we've found more things to do and have careers that span the gamut from yoga instructors to robot technicians.
Just a few centuries ago upwards of 90% of the population worked in farming. Since then, multiple revolutions in agricultural yield and automation have reduced this to less than 2%. Yet we do not have 80% unemployment. How is that?
That's like calling me unpaid because agricultural technological advancements have reduced the number of necessary farmers and allowed software jobs (and may others) to open up and pay me. Just because a single factory, company, or industry reduces the number of employed people doesn't mean they are unpaid. Technological advancement is not zero-sum.
And what about the highly skilled lower paid workforce also using automation in China? And with fewer safety requirements the machines are cheaper too.
Automation is so productive that the difference in wages is insignificant so who cares.
The problem with automation is it is very hard to make it, but once it is made you can use it cheap. So you need to make many parts before it is worth it. 30 years ago it's was cheaper to pay a skilled lathe operator to turn a drawing into a single part, but if you needed 1000 it was worth writing CNC code to automate it. Today the state of CAM is such that many drawings can be turned into parts CNC directly, but assembly of those parts into a tool is often still manual unless they sell a lot of parts. (I don't know what Milwaukee is doing, but I expect cordless drills are assembled automatically, but their cordless bandsaw which is much less in demand is manual)
problem is in theory it's "the same quality" but with the amount of shitty chinesium i seen i'm not convinced they're capable of producing anything more than a disposable.
