Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'
I thought I would end up quoting one poster to address what I thought was their main point in retooling the populace, but it seems pieces of my total takeaway were written by multiple posters.
Anyway, what I think would be helpful, in addition to the usually-stated industrial revolution dynamics, is to take a look back at vocational rehabilitation and vocational education history for those with disabilities, whether for veterans who acquired disability from combat or those who acquired it through the their previous civilian jobs.
Since the 1920s, individuals in the field of vocational rehabilitation had been a federal effort, driven not just by the veteran problem as in decades past, but through a growing economic awareness. If one delves into their texts and even their self-created histories through the 1960s, it is quite clear that they thought they were contending with a macro-economic development that was putting these people at risk. That development was the noticed increased reliance on skilled labor and the gradual removal of non-skilled labor as the backbone of the economy. For the time, the definition of skilled labor was often the manufacturing jobs that today we recognize as being in short supply or in a twilight phase in the global economy.
What did they do since then? They pumped energies to do what many of you and others suggest: re-tool them to serve another purpose, given the biological (or later the addition of intellectual) limitations. Those who had previously been skilled labor and acquired a disability were to be reeducated and trained for another skilled trade. However, most ambitiously, there was a multi-decade attempt to take those who were previously non-skilled workers to be skilled workers. To a large extent that effort succeeded in getting them technically prepared to join or rejoin the market. The problem later came that those gains often faded due to discriminatory practices, the need for services creating a disincentive to work because of penalties accrued for working, and so on. But in many respects they had successfully altered how this population was trained and educated. We have the data to prove that entrance into postsecondary education of any sort and all sorts had substantially increased since the 1980s. Nevertheless, there are huge swaths of individuals in sheltered workshops making far less than minimum wage while the contracting agency or state agency has a financial incentive to keep it that way. Further, the employment figures largely haven't budged since the early 1980s.
But despite these meta successes and failures it always brings up the most troubling question: is there a breaking point in what would be expected of individuals in order to have not only a satisfactory economic existence, but one that doesn't substantially impoverish them?
If the requisite skills, education, and social connections become so overwhelming for a substantial percentage of the population, does society have an obligation to find a mechanism to ensure that they are not living in dire straits?
