Re:The deep roots of modern resentment
by ryanmarsh on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @12:56PM
(#13533225)
"the need for unskilled labor has dropped precipitously"
here, the need for unskilled labor has dropped precipitously here
Re:The deep roots of modern resentment
by infinite8s on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @04:43PM
(#13535527)
That's only because unskilled labor has become much more expensive here (unions, safety regulations, overtime, etc).
No, the need has gone away. Take, for example, moving a few tons of concrete rubble a couple hundred feet. The way it used to be done was to have a group of men hammering it into movable chunks, and another group of men carrying the chunks by hand. Now, you just use a Bobcat. One man can do the work of twenty.
Any job that requires a lot of muscle and not much brain has been more or less wiped out. That's a lot of jobs.
Re:The deep roots of modern resentment
by infinite8s on Friday February 03, 2017 @09:11AM
(#13559863)
That's only true where the cost of labor is too high. Go visit a construction site in India and you'll see a lot of tasks done the way you've described above.
But the need for unskilled labor has dropped precipitously, while demand for skilled labor has spiked. See, for example, the IT industry's need for "cheap brown people" (from India, Pakistan, and elsewhere in Asia). They're only marginally cheaper than white citizen labor, and a lot more expensive than unskilled labor. This has been offset some by outsourcing, so the labor can have a lower cost of living in their native country, but still.
Brown labor is always, always an act of desperation. A racist society would rather not have brown people at all, and only employs them if whites cannot or will not do the job.