Walmart's Bringing Manufacturing Back To The US; But Not The Jobs

Forbes reports:

This is an interesting little story, about how Walmart is encouraging manufacturers to produce within the US for the company. Part of this is of course political pressure but a lot of it is about the greater responsiveness and shorter lead times that local manufacturing can provide. There’s also, of course, the influence of trade tariffs to deal with on imports from China. However, by far the most interesting part of the piece to me is the confirmation of what Steve Jobs said to President Obama: those jobs are never coming back.

Sure, some jobs are coming back but very few. The manufacturing, for the above reasons might be slowly coming back: but what has people manufacturing in the US is really that machines, technology, have advanced enough that some of the more labour intensive tasks can now be done by them rather than by people who need to be paid an hourly wage. Meaning that despite what various associations for manufacturing and various unions continually claim, we really have got to the point where mass manufacturing employment simply isn’t going to be a major feature of the US economy looking into the future.

An article for all those who think higher minimum wages are an answer to something.