Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 952-954

With millions still out of work, companies face little pressure to raise salaries, while productivity gains allow them to increase sales without adding workers.

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With $85 billion in automatic cuts taking effect between now and Sept. 30 as part of the so-called federal budget sequestration, some experts warn that economic growth will be reduced by at least half a percentage point. But although experts estimate that sequestration could cost the country about 700,000 jobs, Wall Street does not expect the cuts to substantially reduce corporate profits — or seriously threaten the recent rally in the stock markets.
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“Right now, C.E.O.’s are saying, ‘I don’t really need to hire because of the productivity gains of the last few years,’ ”....
Recovery in U.S. Is Lifting Profits, but Not Adding Jobs
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
New York Times
Published: March 3, 2013

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On a visit to Standard Motor Products' fuel-injector assembly line in South Carolina, Atlantic writer Adam Davidson asked why a worker there, Maddie, was welding caps onto the injectors herself. Why not use a machine? That's how a lot of the factory's other tasks were performed. Maddie's supervisor, Tony, had a bracing, direct answer: "Maddie is cheaper than a machine."Davidson's complex, poignant story, Making It in America, revealed some chilling data about where American manufacturing is headed. It's a matter of simple math. Maddie makes less in two years than a $100,000 machine would cost, so her job is safe—for now.

Elsewhere in America, robots are getting cheaper and more sophisticated, and they're landing better, more advanced jobs. They are driving cars, writing newspaper articles, and filling prescriptions, displacing people with years of schooling and training under their belts. It sounds like a classic sci-fi story, but that disconcerting future isn't in the future. It's here today.
How a Robot Will Steal Your Job
Cord Jefferson
Gizmodo

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Before long we will have the means to provide comfortably for everybody, and human labor will be subsumed almost entirely by machines. This leaves a problem; currently we distribute wealth through the trade of goods and services. If there is no service for people to provide there is no money flowing back into the population in wages. If there is no money flowing back into the population people will have no money to spend, and no money to pay the tax that provides the welfare. Automation is demanding a new way for resources to be distributed before seemingly inevitable economic catastrophe happens, and the solution will need to include a plan for a smooth transition from our current wage based economy to a economy where there is a basic income guarantee for everyone.
George Deane
Technological unemployment: panacea or poison?
IEET
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