Owners looking at robots to replace workers prone to rioting
As the example of Detroit clearly shows, people power is easily swapped for machine power
Hearing that Vietnamese factory workers were rioting and breaking up machinery reminded me of a documentary film I viewed last year about blue-collar discontent in the United States some 40 years ago.
The film, Finally Got the News, was made in the early 1970s by a fringe labour group in Detroit. Grainy footage shows a number of labour leaders and professors, all turtle necks and tobacco, discussing the purported power that the working man had to shut down America.
As the truck drivers and ditch diggers, the steel makers and car workers, they comprised the "foundation stone of industry" - if they stopped working the system would "cease to function".
Jobs do not just migrate to new locations. They also increasingly go to robots
We know today that these labour leaders overestimated their power. Detroit is a bankrupt ghost town, with few jobs left in manufacturing. Jobs were shipped overseas, either directly through outsourcing or indirectly by cheaper imports from countries with lower cost structures.
Many of those US jobs migrated to Asia, chasing and developing various low-cost destinations, before moving on again as costs and worker demands inevitably rise over time.
While Vietnam's recent riots began as an expression of anti-Chinese political rage, they quickly morphed into rampages against any factories, no matter the nationality of the owners.
We have seen worker anger boil over elsewhere in the region, including violent confrontations at factory gates in China, or protests by guest workers in Singapore and by textile workers in Bangladesh.
Jobs do not just migrate to new locations. They also increasingly go to robots.