stoweboyd:

Welcome to the postnormal, where manufacturing is returning to the US, but the jobs aren’t, because they are gone forever, replaced by machines.

Stefanie Clifford, U.S. Textile Plants Return, With Floors Largely Empty of People

Founded in 1916, Parkdale is the largest buyer of raw cotton in the United States. In the 1960s, when its current chairman, Duke Kimbrell, took over, it was a single plant with a couple of hundred workers.

Seeing that other plants in the area were streamlining their businesses and ceasing to make their own yarn, Parkdale supplied yarn to nearby manufacturers like Hanesbrands. Business flourished, and Parkdale acquired competitors and soared until the 1990s.

That’s when its clients started fleeing the United States.

The North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was the first blow, erasing import duties on much of the apparel produced in Mexico. The Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, when currencies collapsed, added a 30 to 40 percent discount to already cheaper overseas products, textile executives said. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and quickly became an apparel powerhouse, and as of 2005, the W.T.O. eliminated textile quotas.

In 1991, American-made apparel accounted for 56.2 percent of all the clothing bought domestically, according to the American Apparel and Footwear Association. By 2012, it accounted for 2.5 percent. Over all, the American manufacturing sector lost 32 percent of its jobs, 5.8 million of them, between 1990 and 2012, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The textile and apparel subsectors were hit even harder, losing 76.5 percent of their jobs, or 1.2 million.

“With all the challenges that we’ve had with cheap imports, we knew in order to survive we’d have to take technology as far as we could,” said Anderson Warlick, Parkdale’s chief executive.

The company began meeting with machine manufacturers, doing trial runs of equipment and offering feedback and debugging, so it got dibs on the newest technology. It looked for business opportunities in the countries where its customers were heading, those in Central America in particular, and now 75 percent of its business is in exports.

Over all, the company employs 4,000 people, its biggest work force ever, but it is technology that has made it competitive.

“We’ve been able to be effective here because we invested in our manufacturing to the point that labor is not as big of an issue as far as total cost as it once was,” Mr. Warlick said. “It’s allowed us to be able to compete more effectively with foreign countries that pay, you know, a fraction of what we pay in wages. We compete with them on technology and productivity.”

[…]

Where Mr. Winthrop relies on labor — the cutting and sewing of the sweatshirts, which he does in five factories in California and North Carolina — is where the costs jump up. That costs his company around $17 for a given sweatshirt; overseas, he says, it would cost $5.50.

But truth be told, labor is not a big ingredient in the manufacturing uptick in the United States, textiles or otherwise. Indeed, the absence of high-paid American workers in the new factories has made the revival possible.

“Most of our costs are power-related,” said Dan Nation, a senior Parkdale executive.

Apparel has lost 85% of its workforce since 1990:

So, this begs a great many questions. The manufacture of clothing is returning to the US, but with few jobs. This means the operating profits are returned to the owners, not the employed, in the aggregate, because it is machines doing the work.

And to extrapolate: what are people for? If we are moving into the postnormal era, where sooner or later nearly all manual work — and many kinds of cognitive work — can be handled by ‘machines of infinite grace’, what are people supposed to do? How will they pay their bills?

The reality is what we learned in the transition from agriculture to industrialism is happening all over again. When people left farming to move to the cities, having a dozen children to help with the chores just didn’t make sense. People have persisted in child rearing, but primarily for cultural reasons, not economic ones. 

And now we have to ask: how many people do we really need on Earth, if we can provide food, clothing, and shelter using machines, and where human beings aren’t a necessary source of labor, and soon, maybe not even the primary source of common sense intelligence?

What are people for? And whatever it is, do we need billions of us to do it?

see also the Seed To Shirt project by NPR’s Planet Money.