The Anti-Robot Party

This presidential election season has been all about jobs - despite an economy that is growing. Republicans and Democrats alike blame the loss of jobs to trade and immigration.

Both are wrong - sort of.

While it is clear that manufacturing jobs were lost to trade - that doesn't mean that more protectionist trade policies can bring back millions of high paying, stable manufacturing jobs.

First of all, we've demolished the unions that made those manufacturing jobs stable and high paying in the first place. That means new jobs that are created will have lower pay, lower benefits and less security than the ones we lost.

Moreover, as FiveThirtyEight's Ben Casselman writes this week, Manufacturing Jobs Aren't Coming Back because manufacturing itself has changed.

The reason the economy looks good on paper but feels bad all around is that the this has been a long "jobless recovery." Employers have invested heavily in automation and outsourcing to contractors and consultants over the past decade, using low interest rates to rebuild their manufacturing capacity without hiring new workers.

Productivity -- the amount of goods produced by an hour of work -- has gone way up, while unemployment has not.

One way that happens is just laying off a worker and making whoever is left do the jobs of two or three people. Certainly I've seen this in many American workplace. It is a very easy way to increase "productivity." Moreover, no matter how stressful it is for the remaining workers, they will put up with it because they fear the loss of their own job.

The other way to increase productivity is through automation. Robots don't need health benefits and don't call in sick. They don't complain when you pile on the work.

Automation in factories has been -- and will continue -- to increase. We lost jobs to cheap labor in China and Mexico, but lately manufacturing has been returning to the U.S. without the increases in manufacturing employment. The new factories are more automated and the jobs at these factories require a higher skill and education level.

So a new factory only needs a fraction of the manpower to run it as was needed a generation ago.

The trend is likely to continue and not just in manufacturing.

Just read the Robot Invasion series Slate magazine did last year to get an idea of the wide range of professions that can and will likely be replaced by software and automation. From lawyers to pharmacists to sports writers, software is getting better at the jobs that humans used to do.  Even pizza delivery is now being automated, with Dominoes rolling out automated pizza delivery drones in Australia. That's right, even the pizza delivery driver's job isn't safe.

So scream all you want about immigration and China -- it won't do any good.

The robots aren't even listening.

Required Reading:
Robot Invasion: Slate
Manufacturing Jobs Aren't Coming Back from 538
Delivery Robots Making Pizza Runs from Discovery News
Business is Thrilled that Automation Raises Productivity

Patrick Cooper Hunt: An Irish Refugee's Story

In 1848, a young lad named Patrick Cooper Hunt fled a starving land - a boy refugee desperate for a chance to live. 

His story is the story of America and the promise of prosperity offered to immigrants and refugees for more than 200 years. St Patrick's Day is not about Ireland, it is about immigrants who weren't wanted, refugees who had not choice but to flee.

Patrick Cooper Hunt left Westport in County Mayo, Ireland in 1848 at the height of the Great Famine.

Gorta Mór killed a million Irish and sent a million more fleeing across the seas in search of something better. 

One third of the population of Ireland was gone when the famine finally ended. The British landlords blamed the poor for their poverty while exporting crops to England.

It was the young that had the strength to leave, to seek a better life than starving while growing crops you can't eat. 

Many died never touching shore. Packed as they were aboard the coffin ships, two-fifths died at sea of disease and starvation.

Patrick was lucky to have an uncle in Lambertville, NJ so he worked in England to scrape up the fare and he sailed from Liverpool, for the port of Philadelphia aboard the ship Wyoming.  

He was just a teenager, sailing alone. Or he may have been 22 - it depends if you trust his headstone which says 1833 or the ship's manifest which lists him, and a dozen other young immigrants as 22. It might have been a wee lie about one's age that meant the difference between life and death when it came time for the ship to sail.  

In America he found work for his uncles who had sponsored him. He found opportunities he would never have had in an Ireland occupied and oppressed by England.

Yet by 1850, more than a quarter of the population of Philadelphia was Irish and the flow of Irish Catholic refugees created resentment and discrimination as well. "No Irish Need Apply" was a familiar sign by 1851 -- a door slammed in a man's face, when he sought only pay for a day's work and food for an empty belly.

The ship Wyoming, part of the Cope Line of Philadelphia.  Constructed in 1845 By John Vaughan & Sons of Philadelphia, the Wyoming would have been newer and perhaps quite a bit more seaworthy than many of the "coffin ships" that brought Irish immigrants to America. (source Wyoming Trails and Tales) 

Secret societies and an entire political party emerged in opposition to Irish immigration. The Irish were the "wrong religion" because they were Catholic. Nativists believed their religion was incompatible with American Values.

 Sound familiar? 

The Know Nothings used fears of Irish immigration and conspiracy theories of Papal armies to gain power in statehouses and Congress in the 1850s. The Know Nothings electing governors, over 100 congressmen and ran a Presidential candidate that got 20 percent of the vote. They enacted laws to restrict voting rights of the Irish. 

Mobs of Know-Nothings dragged priests out of churches and attacked immigrants with deadly violence as they became emboldened by their rising political power. 

As Christopher Klein writes,

Abraham Lincoln was among the many Americans disturbed at the rise of the nativist movement as he explained in an 1855 letter: “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

The civil war over slavery overshadowed the nativist political rise, but it has always remained in the background. As the Irish gained political power, they gained pride and marched in the streets. 

St Patrick's day celebrations that we know and love are born out of a stubborn resistance to nativist forces that tried to exclude and oppress the immigrants of the Emerald Isle.  The first parade was in New York, not Ireland. The Friendly Sons of St Patrick Society was formed in Philadelphia in the 1700s to provide aid to Irish immigrants. 

"Yes, the Irish transformed the United States, just as the United States transformed the Irish. But the worst fears of the nativists were not fulfilled. The refugees from the Great Hunger and the 32 million Americans with predominantly Irish roots today strengthened the United States, not destroyed it. A country that once reviled the Irish now wears green on St. Patrick’s Day."

In America Patrick Cooper Hunt found a girl named Mary Malone. She too had emigrated from County Mayo. She too had seen the Great Hunger of Gorta Mór and survived. Together they made a life. They had five children and went on to become upstanding Americans. 

Patrick Cooper Hunt and his children did well in the US. He found work in a Lambertville rubber mill. 

 His eldest son John got skilled work as a Boilermaker - a union job that required skill and paid well.  His grandson, Charles started out on the railroads as a teenager, then served in World War I as a pharmacist's mate caring for sailors felled by the Spanish Flu. After the war, he became a state transportation engineer and taught college in New Jersey well into his 80s.

From Irish immigration to jetpacks in Space. Patric Cooper Hunt's great grandson helped design the MMU. 

Patrick Cooper Hunt's great - grandson worked for NASA on Apollo and Skylab as well as for the military designing things that go into space, and things that go boom. My father, John Hunt designed a lot of other things too, of course. He even designed that grocery checkout scanner that you find in every store.

And of course, that Irish refugee's great great grandson is writing his story today. 

So on this St. Patrick's day, dress in your green and lift your glass, but take a moment too to remember those refugees that America took in. Those men and women fleeing political and economic oppression, who found a new life in this land of opportunity and hope -- and made the country better by their presence. 

Because that is what St. Patrick's day is all about. 

It is a story of refugees coming to America because they could no longer survive in their beloved homeland. 

It is a celebration of immigration and an act of defiance by the immigrants and refugees that could not know freedom until they came to America.

                                                                               -30-

Required Reading:
The Irish Refuge Crisis
How the Know Nothing Party Change America

What Made the Irish Famine So Deadly

A Brief History of My Labor

Putting up hay - Library of Congress

At work, I often talk about other jobs I've had over the years. At some point, someone asked me to name every job I've ever had. So here goes.

Some of these I didn't get paid in cash for - sometimes it was work study for college, or a trade where my work was loaned out so my employer could get something in return.  I didn't include volunteer work -- EMT is not listed.

Some of these jobs I worked concurrently - for example, all through college I had at least three jobs at any one time. After graduation I was working for one newspaper and two radio stations at the same time. I only got paid for one of the radio gigs, my services for the other radio station was a "trade" for free advertising for the newspaper.

I started working at 12 years old in my mother's restaurant -- peeling potatoes and mixing waffle and pancake batter and bucking hay bales in the summer. Working every weekend for my mom probably kept me out of a lot of trouble growing up -- but it is also the reason I never got into hunting or fishing.

My dad always emphasized the importance of "gainful employment" when I was a kid. My family is full of workers - dad worked his way through college -- and is still working at 78. For years everyone in my family had at least a second job on the side.

So I've worked hard to have a job -- some sort of job -- ever since. The only year I've ever been without work was when I laid myself off from the top Tidepool job and went to nursing school full time.

Nursing school was worth it. Out of all these jobs, I've really only had union representation in the healthcare jobs of the last ten years. Not surprisingly, those are the jobs that have not only paid the best, but had the best benefits by a mile.

Here's my list in no particular order:

1. Hay loader
2. general farm labor (pulling fence posts, building fences, cattle droving)
3. dishwasher
4. bus boy
5. cook
6. restaurant night manager
7. zebra/llama (animal) feeder
8. radio station receptionist
9. radio DJ
10. radio news reporter
11. radio jingle creator
12. taco bender (Taco Time)
13. weatherization training manual writer
14. counseling psychology department receptionist
15. classified Adverrtising secretary
16. news reporter (crime, politics, education, science, environment)
17. columnist -- for several newspapers
18. newspaper photographer (in the days of film and darkrooms)
19. editorial editor
20. editor in chief Tidepool News Service
21. book reviewer
22. blogger (before the term was coined.)
23. radio pundit (politics and environment) 
24. delivery truck driver
25. Football gameday program distribution manager
26. Day in the Life educational program director
27. tractor and handyman for cherry orchard
28. cherry sorter / brine line 
29. night warden in adventure hostel - Ireland
30. rescue boat operator for windsurfing students - Ireland
31. boat salvage (Alaska)
32. salmon headbutcher  (Alaska) 
33. Crisis Prevention  and Intervention instructor
34. CPR instructor
35. apartment manager / maintenance 
36. internet help desk (Mac) 
37. CNA
38. Emergency Room Technician
39. Licensed Practical Nurse
40. Registered nurse - Charge, Oncology, Emergency room.

Small Town Girls

Last night the girls and I looked up the top songs from the year and week they were born -- I didn't recognize any of the songs or artists.

Meanwhile, 30 years ago today, this song was released. It is still part of the soundtrack to my life. 

By the time we got around to having kids, I'd met and married another small town girl. In fact, one of our first conversations was comparing who went to the smaller high school. I graduated in a class of 18 kids, she had a few more, but not many. 

We had bought an old farm house in the small town where she grew up. The party-pop and hip hop that was topping Billboard in 2001 didn't have any relation to the lives we were living when Lindsay was born. That's not the soundtrack to our lives. 

This still is.