The drive for “efficiency” has long been simmering as one of the great political issues of our time. It’s caused a wave of mergers and acquisitions, leading to unprecedented levels of corporate consolidation, profit, and inequality. It’s the driving force behind two hot-button issues, immigration and out-sourcing, that the right has highlighted in a political toolkit that has successfully shifted a significant number of working class voters in our country.
At the most basic level, increased “efficiency” in corporate America means decreasing overhead costs in order to transfer a higher share of revenue to shareholders. Immigrant labor and overseas labor are both “efficiency” tools for corporate America because cheaper labor (whether immigrant or overseas) allows for higher wealth distribution to shareholders.
The fight over immigration efficiencies is exploding in the news right now, as a civil war seems to be breaking out on the right between the DOGE Bros, Musk and Ramaswamy, who value the “efficiency” of importing foreign labor, and the right’s anti-immigration wing, who have captured a lot of political capital with the issue.
That civil war is likely to expand into the outsourcing front, too, as Musk and friends, who enjoy cheap overseas labor, continue to protect their positions on the outsourcing front. Something we recently saw Musk actively do when he killed a bipartisan anti-outsourcing provision in a budget bill in order to protect his investments and activities in China.
We will continue to hear about immigration and outsourcing going forward. Both because they are real issues that our country is grappling with, but also because there will be a lot of fireworks as this civil war continues to develop. And it will continue to develop. Because, let’s face it, the DOGE Bros aren’t really trying to make government more efficient. They are simply trying to get government out of the way so that they can pursue their corporate efficiency vision without what they consider to be government interference—and many of us may consider our only opportunity to not get steamrolled by their vision.
Because their ultimate vision of efficiency isn’t the importation of cheap labor, or even the out-sourcing of production to cheaper places. Those are waystations on the path to the ultimate end-state: maximum automation.
In The DOGE Bros’ vision Part I, I did my rudimentary best to sketch out that end-state. And although it might have seemed like science fiction, it isn’t. Multiple people in the comments remarked how they had seen this play out in their own workplaces over the years.
Automation, the replacement of human workers by robots and artificial intelligence, has arrived. It is growing rapidly. It is in the process of completely transforming the way we work, the way we communicate, the way we conduct warfare, and the way we live. In the coming years, this issue is going to become politically hot. It even started happening in the background of the last election cycle, including my campaign.
Although I was supported by the AFL-CIO and the vast majority of unions, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters gave money to my opponent. They did this despite the fact that he had a 0% rating from the AFL, supported anti-union right to work legislation, refused to help the Teamsters secure their pensions, and called half of Teamster members hostage-takers.
They gave him financial support because he was already an elected official who has also rightly been willing to push back against AI operated vehicles and an existential threat to their existence called platooning. Platooning is the linking of multiple vehicles through AI/computers, kind of like a train, to a single lead truck driven that for now is driven by a human but will likely be driven by a computer in the future.
Unlike many of the building trades, who don’t yet face the full threat of automation, the Teamsters are on the front line of the automation discussion-- in part because the Musk’s of the world have dumped vast resources into automating transportation. The situation is, in fact, so existential for the Teamsters that their District 7 website references a coming “robot apocalypse” that could wipe out 4 million transportation jobs in the next 5-20 years.
But the change is not going to stop at trucking. At some point, automation will come for every sector and will almost certainly overcome immigration and outsourcing as a political issue. Currently, neither the left nor the right have defined the problem, staked out a solid position, or built out a compelling vision for the future of working people in this country. And the party that takes this issue is going to see a huge return on their efforts. Perhaps even commanding the working-class vote for a generation, much the way FDR secured it for Democrats during the Great Depression with the New Deal.
The American people need and deserve champions to face the challenges the automation transformation will bring to our country so that our future is bright and wonderful, instead of dark and lonely. And our lawmakers need to act now, before it is too late. Because this really does have the possibility to go either way.
Just think about it. Technology can hold so much promise for us all. Whether it was that first color TV, a home computer, or a cell phone, we have all been touched by the magic of innovation. My first moment like that came when I was a kid in the early 1990’s.
Growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money, but my parents always did what they could to give back to the community. One of the ways they did that was by helping found a soup kitchen at our parish. My parents drafted my oldest sister and I into helping.
The guy who ran the parish kitchen, Al, made things fun and interesting for all of us kids who were helping out. First, we would set the tables, and then he would sign us up for our nightly duties. We could greet people, clear the tables, do the dishes, help serve food or drinks, all that sort of stuff.
When Al would ask us kids what shores we wanted to do, my sister and I would shoot up our hands. “Mr. Al, Mr. Al! We want to do the dishes Mr. Al! We’ll do the dishes!”
He thought we were kind of dumb for wanting to do the dishes every time and would ask us if we were sure we didn’t want to try something else.
But we never did. Because at home doing the dishes for a big family meant forty-five minutes of hard labor: scrubbing them up, rinsing, drying, and putting them away. At the parish kitchen, on the other hand, all we had to do was toss the dishes into this magical machine called a dishwasher and let it do the dishes! Shoot, we thought Al was the one who was dumb for calling that “doing the dishes” and considering it a chore in the first place!
I’m not sure when it happened, he never let on to us kids, but at some point Al figured out why we thought doing the dishes was such a good deal. One day, years later, after those dinners had ended, we got a knock at the door. When we opened it up and looked outside, Al was standing on the porch with his big blue pickup truck parked out front.
“Come on, kids!” and called us all out to his truck. “Do you know what that is?” he asked, pointing up into the truck bed. We all looked up and, sure enough, in the bed of his truck was a dishwashing machine. He had renovated his kitchen and, remembering those kids who were so excited to do the dishes down at church, had loaded it up and brought it by our house. That afternoon him and a buddy installed it for us and saved my siblings and I forty-five minutes of hard labor every night.
That is the great promise of automation. It can give us more time to spend on important things, like playing! Or, if you’re an adult, like building our communities, raising our children, and caring for one another. At its best, automation can unburden humanity from hard labor and mindless toil. It can free us from hardship, want, and suffering. This is the bright and wonderful future we should all be happily moving toward. And that our lawmakers should be securing for us.
But there is another, more sinister, path that automation can go down. The one that the DOGE Bros’ are getting government out of the way in order to pursue. One where power is concentrated more than it has ever been concentrated before. In that future, an ownership class, those who own the machines and the programming, either individually or through shares, will live in unmatched luxury, while the rest of us fight amongst ourselves for the table scraps. In that world, the value of life and human contribution is diminished. People are left helpless, depressed, and directionless, by forces that are beyond their control.
Our current trajectory points more toward the second, gloomier future, than the first. The better path is still attainable, but it’s going to take a deliberate effort to achieve it, because the path of least resistance isn’t working. Here is what I mean.
Despite its promise, automation is not freeing us from hardship and want. The introduction of one robot per thousand people into a commuting zone has led to the loss of 5.6 jobs and a reduction of wages by .5% for the remaining workers in the area. For workers, even those whose jobs aren’t taken, automation makes them poorer.
It also hasn’t given us more time to spend with one another.
When machines like dishwashers or washers and dryers liberated humans, particularly women, from much of the hard labor in the home, the hours saved on these menial tasks weren’t transferred to the family. The traditional 40-hour work week wasn’t suddenly split between a husband and wife, with both having the satisfaction that comes from meaningful employment as well as more time with their family. Instead, middle class families who used to have one parent working outside the home and one working inside the home, now needed two full-time working parents outside the home. The technology that should have given us more time to spend building our families and communities, instead gave us more time work.
Instead, more automation appears to have led to full-time employees laboring more, not less. Today, the average full-time worker reports working 48 hours per week (42.5 during the workweek and another 5.5 on the weekends). This doesn’t seem like it should make sense. If machines are doing more work, shouldn’t workers be doing less?
Not in a world without competition or legal protection where the ownership class writes the laws. Let’s first look at competition and then the lawmaking side of things
Competition
There are two types of labor market competition: employers competing with employers for workers, and workers competing with one another for jobs.
Massive employers have been winning the monopoly game, so there are fewer employers than ever before. In a market where only one buyer is buying a good (in this case, labor), they have what is called a monopsony. In the vignette in Part I, a fictional company called ALPHA is an example of this: how a monopsony employer can pay whatever they want in a town or region because they are the only, or primary, purchaser of labor. And monopsony employers have become endemic in America. Currently, 60% of American labor markets are considered highly concentrated. A massive increase in corporate consolidation has led to less competition among employers, and correspondingly stagnant wages and longer workdays for workers, even though machines are doing more work.
The second half of the competition equation is competition between workers. While Americans can find plenty of work in part-time jobs, as independent contractors, and in the ‘gig economy,’ the competition for good full-time work with benefits is fierce. Unemployment numbers look great, but the jobs that are creating that low unemployment do not. In an economy where there are fewer good paying jobs with benefits, because of increased automation, workers are forced to compete more for those good jobs. One way to do that is by working for less. Another is to work more for the same pay. If two people work 60-hour work weeks for regular pay, that’s like a free 40-hour workweek for the employer. And somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of workers report doing just that, working at least 60 hours per week. What better way to prove your value to the corporate “family” than giving them half an extra employee for free?
As an aside, I just want to add that a corporation is never a family. That C-suite perpetuated scam needs to die. This isn’t to say there aren’t good companies or business owners. There are. But our laws are written in a way that make a corporate family impossible. In families, people look out for one another and take care of each other. In a corporation, leadership is obligated to look out for the company or the shareholders, not the employees.
Legal Protection
As jobs become automated, and the market for selling human labor becomes tighter and tighter, if our current system of shareholder and worker compensation isn’t adjusted, the ability to earn a good living by selling labor will continue to diminish and the income from owning shares in companies and machines will continue to grow.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We should have the power to adjust our system so that this inequality isn’t inevitable. After all, we live in a representative political system purportedly created to empower the people.
Solutions are everywhere. We could enforce our anti-trust laws. We could promote workers getting shares in the companies they work for or seats on corporate boards. We could keep the automated vehicles and transportation sectors out of the hands of the plutocrats, as we did with aviation before the late 1970s. We could enforce and expand overtime protections. We could institute shorter workdays or workweeks. Some people have proposed some sort of universal income. We could pursue dozens of future ideas that don’t exist because our lawmakers and politicians aren’t taking the time to explore them.
Unfortunately, the reason they aren’t doing that is because of what has happened to our politics. The strong relationship between lawmakers and those who fund their campaigns is a vicious circle leading us down the wrong path. I saw this in my campaigns. The ownership class use their money to influence elections and then the laws. The laws help them make more money, which lets them buy more influence in elections, and even better laws for themselves. There are millions of examples of this, but Elon Musk is probably the most relevant one right now. They move in and out of government, like he is trying to do with the DOGE scam, under both parties to shape the laws and playing field to benefit themselves.
This circle of influence is why the ownership class has been able to capture the vast benefits of automation without sharing it with workers, increasing their wealth by vast sums while the middle evaporates. Gaudy statistics on the wealth gap are everywhere. The share of wealth held by the middle 60% of Americans since 1990, for example, has dropped from 26% of our total national wealth to just 16%.
It's not a coincidence or just some happy circumstance for the richest Americans. It’s a direct result of them writing the laws and the rules that we all have to live by.
Automation—less Americans toiling on assembly lines or behind the wheel—should mean more Americans doing things other than work. It should be a happy story about Americans spending more time with their families and doing meaningful things. Yet here we are facing it as an existential threat to the middle class. Because the way our system is set up, automation means a few people in the ownership class getting obscenely rich and the rest of us shifting to poorly paid service sector work to make ends meet, which we have seen happening over the last couple of decades.
A real danger is looming, though. Because that shift to the service sector, bad as it is, isn’t sustainable. The loss of manufacturing jobs is not the end of automation, it is the beginning. Any job that involves repetitive work or pattern recognition can and will be done by a robot. As machines become cheaper and more efficient than humans, they will take over that work, too. Current estimates are that 47% of jobs are at risk of being replaced by machines in the next 20 years. Drivers and fast food workers are on that chopping block. Grocers and retailers. Even doctors and lawyers. Algorithms are already better at diagnosing certain patients than human doctors.
If we let the DOGE Bros dismantle our government, the only organization many of us will ever be shareholders of or have a voice in (even if just barely), nothing will be standing between these guys and completely unchecked wealth and power. Nothing but the Luigi Mangione’s of the world. And that’s not really a country we want to live in.
There is a real opportunity for lawmakers from either party to get in front of this issue, secure our future, and secure the biggest voting block in this country. Right now, the only angles the “efficiency” obsession is being attacked from are immigration and out-sourcing, and most of that is coming from one side—and paying dividends for them. What happens during the automation era and how the wealth from technology is distributed is still anyone’s game, and it’s going to be the big one for whoever takes it up.
Please let me know what you think in the comments and, as always, share this with anyone you think might be interested!
Until next time.
Lucas
