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One small town sock maker?s fight to keep jobs and make it in a different America
10 October 2017
Fort Payne, Alabama was the former “Sock Capital of the World” until a trade deal triggered job losses. In this installment of #WorkInProgress, we show how one sock maker is pushing to keep “Made in USA” manufacturing jobs. … Just to take a step back, past technological advances in prior decades created new kinds of jobs as others disappeared. No economist is forecasting mass unemployment overnight. And you can’t blame robots for all lost manufacturing jobs. There are other shifts at play including globalization, offshoring and the skills gap. Researchers recently found no significant relationship between more industrial robots and overall employment. However, they did find evidence that suggests robots may reduce jobs for low-skilled workers. “We find that low-skilled workers in particular may lose out,” according to research published in June by George Graetz [sic] of Uppsala University in Sweden and Guy Michaels of the London School of Economics.