I’m so fucking sick of this fixation on obsolete manufacturing jobs that only get attention because they’re seen as blue collar white man jobs. We’ve lost 90,000 retail jobs since Trump was elected, which is more than the entire coal industry employs. But we’ll never hear a peep about those because that’s work for women and POC.
And fuck all this demagoguing about foreigners stealing your job. A robot stole your job and it’s never coming back. 50 years ago a steel mill producing 500,000 tons of steel wire per year would employ 1,000 people, enough to prop up the economy of a small town. A steel mill with that same output just opened up and it employs, wait for it, 14 people. You won’t even see any humans on the production floor, just watching the monitors in the office above. No pussygrabbing orange fascist is gonna turn back the clock on that one. Oh sure, there was a candidate with a plan to retrain everyone in green technology jobs, but solar panels seem vaguely effeminate, not like the muscular labor of dragging shitty rocks out of the ground for pumping poison into the air. How about we really get back to basics and let dentists stick leeches on you again, there’s a lost source of income they could use. Maybe get some blacksmiths back to work. We’ll have a purely nostalgia-based economy and all the old demographics that we’re comfortable with.
