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I believe we will see massive labour shortages. We are in an economic slump and unemployment is low. Industrial civilization has had exponential labour growth for 250 years and it is coming to an end. Industrialism started in cities in Western Europe that by today's standards would be towns. During the next 200 years, people poured into British and Dutch cities to work in industrial civilization. Industrial civilization quickly spread, other parts of the west went through the same process, turning millions of peasants into workers. By the end of WWII women were liberated by being made to work 40 hours more in industrial civilization almost doubling the labour pool. Japan, China, South Korea, Mexico, Turkey and India were also let into the club expanding the labour pool by another billion. When the Iron curtain fell 250 million people with relatively high skills joined the western industrial civilization. Five million Poles have moved west while Eastern European cities have large office plants for German companies.
Now we have the results of 1.5 women per children yeilding few young people. The Peasant stock of China is soon exhausted and their population is decling. Japan and South Korea are facing demographic collapse. Eastern Europe is in steep demographic delcline and there are few highly capable eastern Europeans not participating in western industrial civilization. Instead of exponential labour growth we are going to see decline in the work force. There aren't that many really bright Indians left who are doing manual farm labour. The gifted people in Latin America are working as remote programmers for western firms. The baby boomers are checking out, and the millenial's baby boom seems to have been cancled.
Add to that geopolitical tensions and a will to bring production home. The jobs created by excess labour are the ones automated by AI such as HR, social workers, paper pushing work. What will be in dire supply will be hard hat workers. Skilled tradesmen that can't easily be replaced by a robot. If anything, that should lead to a shift to the right.
As for economies with few workers and a lot of money leaning left I present you the counter example of OPEC-states. Oil producers have few jobs and radically conservative societies.
Regular ol’ automation has already slashed physical jobs. Not just assembly-line robots, but improvements in machine tools, logistics, construction. One hard hat can produce more widgets than ever before. AI dumping more HR workers, lawyers, and programmers into the unemployment pool isn’t going to meaningfully change the demand for these products, not without the kind of demographic shifts you’re talking about. Even onshoring won’t bring us back to the industry of the 1960s, because we won’t be exporting to prop up the free world.
I also question the premise that renewed demand for blue-collar labor would incentivize right-wing politics. You are talking about the core of the unions.
Union leadership has been captured by socialist activists and politicians as to be completely alienated from their working-class roots. There's a reason why unions are marginal parts of the leftist coalitions now - outside of regime-adjacent bodies like teachers and civil servants, blue color labor has little real power. If they did, you think that NAFTA would have ever flown?
Always has been. The people who would actually benefit from collective bargaining, etc. always outnumbered the Fabians and academics.
I assume they waned because of the reduced demand, rather than because of any ideological mismatch. If manufacturing somehow had a Renaissance, I would expect a corresponding renewal in the influence of unions.
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