Well that is some good news for the folks down in Willies Puddle…..

True, but with the new planer there will be less jobs, no need for graders means 10 jobs lost only down side of new tec.

stop the world, I want to get off.

hope it works better than their major planer upgrade they did at their Houston mill. They spent tons of money putting in a new planer for the HFP mill, but it wasn’t working properly for months and they were shipping their rough lumber to Fraser Lake all summer to get it planed.

Has any company ever purposefully installed more productive equipment incorporating the latest advantages in technology to create ‘more’ jobs? To make any individual process ‘more’ labor intensive, instead of less? I know of none.

Time to face facts. People have been investing to put themselves and other people out of work for generations. What they want is an income without working for it. Is that some great sin? It’s as normal and natural as the sunrise each day.

Who wants to be a drudge hand grading and stamping every stick of lumber, literally wearing themselves out over the years they do that, when the same thing can be done automatically, and likely even better by a machine? No one that has an ounce of sanity.

Anymore than anyone would want to shovel all the sawdust out from under every saw all day, every day of their productive years, when a conveyor can do the same thing.

Or pull boards off a green chain all their lives, instead of it being mechanically sorted and stacked as it now is? Or do a myriad of other jobs that have literally ‘gone by the boards’ now? In EVERY industry. No one wants TO HAVE to do those things, though there certainly are jobs that many people enjoy doing, and would still do if given a free choice, and some of the above may be amongst them.

The real problem with technology isn’t that it creates the end result of increasing unemployment, it’s that it brings with it increasing unemPAYment.

For how do we consume all the products of the modern machine when the incomes once distributed in making those products the ‘old fashinoned way’ have now vanished like the job? And without that continued consumption, how is the investment made ever going to be fully retrieved, let alone ever remain profitable?

The consuming public, whether it’s composed of those still employed, or not, is being charged through the prices of the products made by the machine costs which represent its Capital Depreciation.

This is entirely right and proper from any accounting standpoint ~ the machine wears out, and people don’t invest what they already have in money for the purpose of losing it. They’re hoping to recover what they’ve paid for that machine, plus a profit, before it’s obsolete or worn out completely.

But the general public, as consumers, have never been fully provided with any money representing the Capital Appreciation to meet those charges ~ to credit them for the increased capacity of society as a whole to produce ‘more’ output with ‘less’ (labor) input. Something which is always greater than the financial charges we are being asked to bear for Depreciation, or real progress would be impossible.

This is not something difficult to correct, if we’d only turn our attention to it. Rather than engaging the present futile nonsense of trying to replace every ‘job’ that’s been displaced with some other job. This is completely counter-productive, and can only lead to an actual waste of natural resources and human potential.

Although I agree with a lot of what you say here, the truth is technology shows up to work every day and keeps costs at a consistant level! Although employees are a company’s number 1 asset, they can also be its’ number 1 liability! Catch 22 situation

As a person who’s been an employer for far more years than I was ever an employee, I know what you’re saying, cougs78.

Good employees can be hard to find, and sometimes even harder to retain, and your control over ‘technology’ is always far more certain than any control you can ever exert over that fellow ‘human’ you’ve hired. The one you’re hoping will put in a fair day’s work for what you’ve agreed to pay him, or even show up at all when he’s supposed to.

I think it comes down to whether someone really has the interest and dedication to try to do the job they’ve hired out for.

If it’s not in the employee to start with, if they won’t accept the challenge offered by the job in the way of a fair ‘inducement’ to do it, I doubt very much whether such people will respond very well to any form of externally imposed ‘compulsion’ either. Evidence seems to indicate that a volunteer army is always superior to a conscripted one. And I believe numerous other examples could be cited to prove the case for ‘internal’ willingness vs. ‘external’ force in getting any job done efficiently.

Such latter is usually counter-productive to the employer, who then often has to exert more time and effort trying to get work out of somebody else than it would take him to do the job himself. You really can’t get ahead that way. It just wears you down with frustration.

The whole issue is quite complicated, to be sure.