Textiles have always been the first line of industrialization. They were the cottage industries that were consolidated into the world's first factories in the British midlands. Production shifted to the US first in New England and then to the south in search of ever cheaper labor. Over the last generation textile plants have almost disappeared from the American landscape as they were relocated in Asia. Even there they have shifted from countries rising on the scale of industrialization like China to the poorest countries like Bangladesh, where workers are locked into notoriously unsafe factories.
American populists have long dreamed of government action that would compel the return of manufacturing jobs to the US. Well there is some indication that is being brought about by market forces rather than government action. However, there is a fly in the ointment of this story - ROBOTS.
U.S. Textile Plants Return, With Floors Largely Empty of People
Bayard Winthrop, the founder of the sweatshirt and clothing company American Giant, was at the mill one morning earlier this year to meet with his Parkdale sales representative. Just last year, Mr. Winthrop was buying fabric from a factory in India. Now, he says, it is cheaper to shop in the United States. Mr. Winthrop uses Parkdale yarn from one of its 25 American factories, and has that yarn spun into fabric about four miles from Parkdale’s Gaffney plant, at Carolina Cotton Works.
Mr. Winthrop says American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Turnaround time is quicker. Most striking, labor costs — the reason all these companies fled in the first place — aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have largely turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers.
This is a long article that is a mixture of anecdotes and charts. However, it does point to some interesting trends. Automation is having a sweeping effect on manufacturing worldwide. The number of humans needed to produce goods anywhere is steadily declining. In the case of reopening some of the closed textile mills in the US southeast some new jobs are being created, but only a small fraction of the people who used to work in those mills will find work there now. They will be tending the robots. Robots are steadily getting better and cheaper. It seem inevitable that robots that require less tending will be coming down the pike.
At the same time that a small number of jobs are being created by returning some manufacturing to the US, the manufacturing industries that are still here are following the same path to automation displacing more manufacturing workers who will be scrambling for any jobs that they can find.