GasGas:
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All lessons which seem to have been forgotten as bosses seek to ‘take cost out of the business’ by reducing wages and off-shoring or automating.We need a return to Wages Councils (as introduced by that well-known lefty Winston Churchill about 100 years ago) and a tax on robots, so employers who introduce them are forced to pay for the social consequences of their introduction, and a ban on the off-shoring of jobs.
Indeed. The “tax” on robots is achieved simply by workers bargaining for better hourly rates and reduced hours - putting the value of their labour up to reflect their own massively increased productivity, because robots are not workers, not independent agents of production, robots are tools built by workers and that workers then use to improve their own productivity.
That’s all that happens when workers on a new production line bargain for better wages - it’s not a “tax on machinery”, it’s workers taking their share of the increased productivity of the operation. It’s the same as when a carpenter builds a jig or uses a power saw, so that he can produce more work in a given amount of time, and accordingly either earn more from his work because he is more productive, or reduce his hours whilst maintaining his take-home pay - he is not “taxing” his jigs and electrical machinery.