Letter: Automation rapidly changing 21st century workplace – INFORUM

President Trump promised to bring back the coal industry. Coal mining is now a highly-automated industry requiring far fewer miners than in decades past. However, Trump never discusses the fact that cheap abundant natural gas is replacing coal along with renewable sources. Modern combined-cycle natural gas plants are nearly twice as efficient as our older single-cycle coal power plants.

Most of our coal plants are 40 to 50 years old and are at the end of their life cycles. Wall Street banks refuse to finance new coal plants while the costs of renewable sources and natural gas power plants are replacing coal plants everywhere. The Sierra Club tracks coal plants saying over 200 coal plants have been shut down in the last decade with hundreds more coal plant closings on the way in coming years. The coal industry analysts say coal is on a bleak permanent decline that will never be reversed because natural gas, solar and wind turbines are more cost effective period.

The Trump cult also blames undocumented immigrants and global trade agreements for the decline of the manufacturing labor force in America. Most economists will tell you immigrants and global trade agreements make our country stronger.

Trump also promised to bring back labor intensive manufacturing jobs in the Rustbelt states. At least 85 percent or more of the decline of manufacturing jobs in the industrial Midwest over the last 30 years have been because of automation in the workplace.

Trump has promised to revive the steel industry as well. Modern steel minimills are now highly automated but produce large amounts of recycled steel with only a few highly-skilled workers. Most modern manufacturing plants only employ about one-fifth the number of workers they did 30 years ago. A General Motors plant that employed 25,000 workers in 1980 would today only employs about 5,000 workers to produce the same number of cars. Most industrial jobs require a worker to have excellent computer skills as a precondition of employment.

Automation will likely displace at least five million more workers by 2020. How will the cult of Trump compete against industrial robots and machine tools controlled by artificial intelligence in the 21st-century workplace?

We need a Medicare public option that makes health care more portable for workers with vastly improved vocational and technical retraining programs that help displaced workers find the high-tech jobs that exist. We must learn to adapt to automation in the information technology economy of the future. The Trump cult wants to go back to the industrial age of the 20th century that is the road to nowhere in the automated computer information age of the 21st century.

Stoutenburg lives in Moorhead.

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Letter: Automation rapidly changing 21st century workplace - INFORUM