JOB KILLERS!

One of the stale fish Donald Trump is sure to slap Hillary around with is the fact she, as Senator from New York, voted in favor of this or that international trade agreement.

Trump, who never voted for anything in his life, is free to criticise—and he will. Loudly and constantly.

Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders made the same argument: Bad trade agreements kill American jobs!

The thing is, this position holds little water.

Economists largely agree that recent trade deals were a wash, as far as jobs were concerned. Some jobs were lost; some jobs were gained. Net effect: zero.

So let's look at two of the biggest job killers out there: automation and unions.

The first is a no-brainer. The very point of automation is to eliminate human jobs. A company makes a huge capital investment and installs machines in the factory so they can lay off a swarm of pesky meat-buckets.

That's progress, right? That's the Future squatting down over us all and letting loose her splattering load. And buddy, you can't fight the Future.

Remember the Luddites? They went away long ago. (Maybe some of them got jobs oiling the machines.)

Are we all hoping for some post-apocalyptic future grubbing for what scraps we can find in the corners of old tuna cans at the dump? I don't think so.

(Incidentally, if we fail to mute the roar of religious zealotry, there might not be much of a future, automated or otherwise.)

Machines will replace men in factories. Not to mention, machines will be building those machines in the automated machine factory.

Humans will still find work designing those machines...until some smirking designer throws in the capacity for machines to improve their own designs.

And if you want to avoid the sort of anti-machine world depicted in the movie A.I., we'll have to figure out what to do with the excess humans, aside from sending them home to add to the excess human problem.

If we manage to have a future, the excess human problem will be near the top of the list, along with a drooping supply of fossil fuels.

(In the Matrix movies, the excess humans—and they were all pretty much excess, as far as the overlord machines were concerned—became the fuel supply.)

After automation, unions kill the most jobs.

In the beginning, unions were great. They kept the factory owners from effing over the workers.

In the old days, every factory had a vacant lot across the street packed with hopeful men, all scheming to take the place of the unlucky factory worker who dropped one too many lug nuts or spent an extra twenty seconds in the bathroom.

Image that: a whole crowd of unemployed men eager to get into that factory and enjoy the risk of losing a arm in the hydraulic press or of going blind in dim light with fiddly bits of metal spread out over a table.

The early unions got to work making life livable in factories. They got those men shorter hours, better wages, benefits, and so forth, and they did it by the power of strikes and the threat of strikes. They did it, all right, but not before guys got their heads caved in by company goons or got shot dead by National Guard troops dragged in by state governors in the pockets of rich factory owners.

It was a rough and bloody fifty or sixty years.

And then the unions had to do the whole thing over again with women.

When you have money—or access to somebody else's money—you tend to get the idea you run the show, and anybody who doesn't like it can take a hike, try their luck in the factory next door.

Unions came along with the purpose of changing the minds of those rich guys. But minds that change can change back again. It's what we do here on Planet Monkey-boy.

So unions have to stay vigilant. They have to remain on the job, ever on the lookout for backsliders. Plus, there are always new contracts to negotiate.

And there's the rub.

New contracts operate like boa constrictors. Every time you let out your breath, the snake tightens its coils, ratcheting up the deadly pressure.

Union negotiators are working men, too. They have a job, and that job is to get a better contract than they did last time. In general, the only way they can do a better job is by squeezing a little more life out of the company.

When you come down to it, the only thing a company can offer their workers is a bigger piece of the profits. Sure, they can mess about with flexible hours and such like, but the bottom line is likely to involve cash.

Money comes from profits, which are the life of the company. When you squeeze the last bit of life out of a company, it dies.

Now, before that happens, the company can borrow money and buy machines that will clear a whole bunch of slots in the parking lot. The union will howl about this predatory attack of automation, but in the end the changes will get through. After all, unions represent the workers—the ones still working at the plant. Ultimately, the guys who got laid off by machines are on their own.

Union negotiators want to keep their jobs, and they do that by slowly murdering the company. The factory bigwigs will complain they've gone as far as they can, but union reps have heard all this before. They didn't believe it then and they don't believe it now.

The slow, deadly squeeze goes on—as far as it can.

In the end, the last workers at the factory have it pretty good. High wages, bonuses, paid days off, all kinds of benefits, and so forth.

And then they're out the door, which will give them a nice close-up view of the chain being wrapped around the handles. They can watch the padlock snap shut, before going over to get a beer at the neighborhood bar that will be out of business by this time next year.

Companies close, baby. (Good thing the fat cats just opened that new factory in Mexico, right?)

If automation seems, well, automatic, will it always be necessary for unions to put their workers out of work?

Sure looks that way.

On the other hand, if government can impose reasonable wage minimums and safe working conditions, the crying need for unions could go away. And if owners can come to realize they will make more money by treating their workers better, maybe the unions could stay away.

The union's most lethal weapon is the man whose paycheck (with bonuses) comes directly out of how hard he can squeeze the company balls at contract renewal time.

Maybe you could automate that guy. Machines don't (yet) get a thrill from tearing other guys a new one.