Donald Trump ran for president with the slogan of “Make America Great Again”. Implicit in this was the idea of making America work again.

Trump was addressing widespread anxiety about the loss of jobs to globalisation, to downsizing, and other factors associated with the economic policies of the past 40 years, and he was telling people that he would bring the jobs back.

Two things about this: the first is that, as a political strategy, it worked. The second is that it is nonsense.

It worked because it addressed legitimate concerns about people’s lived experience, where not only have many traditional jobs disappeared but the ones that remain are insecure.

In fact a 2015 US government report suggests that 40% of US jobs are now contingent, so that “millions of workers … are in temporary, contract, or other forms of non-standard employment arrangements” which have no “employer-provided retirement and health benefits, or … job-protected leave”.

The states that turned from Barack Obama to Trump closely hew with the areas most affected by disruptions associated with globalisation and economic downturn. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky and Indiana swung heavily to Trump. Even where Hillary Clinton won, such as in Virginia, her margins were thinner than Obama’s.



So whatever other factors contributed to Trump’s victory, his focus on jobs helped.

But here’s the thing: the jobs aren’t coming back. And this is why Trump’s promises about making America work again are nonsense.

The structural changes that have occurred – the shift from an industrial economy to one built on knowledge, information and automation – mean that we will never again require the same number of people working to produce the things we need.

What’s more, technology is displacing not just blue-collar jobs but white-collar ones as well, and this is unprecedented.

Even where companies can be encouraged to return production to the US, it is unlikely to make much difference. Indeed, onshoring (as it is called) is already happening, but the factories being built are heavily automated, and none of the president-elect’s promises will do anything about that.

Yes, such factories are creating jobs, but a tiny fraction of the number lost when they were offshored. Also, these new jobs are paying less than similar jobs back in the 1980s and 90s. Bureau of Labor statistics show that: “In September, those employees made an average $8.63 an hour, in 1982 to 1984 dollars, while they made an average of $8.80 an hour in 1985.”

There are certainly economists who suggest that concerns about jobs losses owing to automation are exaggerated and that eventually the economy will create new and different jobs. But that “eventually” is being asked to do a lot of work.

Yes, jobs will be created, but there will be no obvious path from the jobs lost to those created. The new jobs will require either high-level technical skills or the sort of the interpersonal skills associated with an arts degree – everything from problem solving to collaboration and teaching.

Even where people can retrain there will still be fewer jobs requiring fewer working hours, so they will likely be offered on the basis of short-term contracts. Without other interventions, such work will be highly insecure, as the gig economy is already showing us.

Having said all that, it is hard to fault the approach Trump is taking without also criticising his opponents. Clinton and Bernie Sanders ran on job creation every bit as much as Trump did, and so does just about every politician in the western world. Here in Australia, Malcolm Turnbull ran at the last Australian election on the slogan “jobs and growth” and was barely challenged to explain how he would achieve either.

The Labor party’s jobs plan was more credible, and talked about “innovation and more local jobs in advanced manufacturing, renewable energy and services”, but it simply did not mention rising to the challenge of automation. At the end of the day, it was a vision for recreating the past rather than building the future.

None of this is to say that short-term efforts to build employment are wrong but we need so much more than that and none of the major political players are addressing the issue head on.

So this is our real problem: politicians still speak as if a new era of post-second world war full employment is just around the corner and it really isn’t.

This doesn’t mean our future prospects are bad, far from it, but it does mean rethinking our whole relationship with work. It means recognising that a job is an increasingly unreliable way of ensuring that everyone shares in the wealth of our societies.

Put simply, Trump’s xenophobic retreat from a globalised world isn’t going to help anyone.

Instead we need a radical and inclusive reinvention of the economy around shorter working hours; government intervention that favours the many rather than the few, including fairer taxation regimes and policies of redistribution; and an embrace of the new technologies of energy, communication and information that have the potential to ensure an improving standard of living for those outside the 1%.

Oh, and we need to plan now for some form of universal basic income.

Mostly, though, we need politicians who will tell us the truth about the future of work, not ones who sell us a Trumped-up vision of the past.

