>>> But even repatriating production has a small long term effect as automation continues to grow. No point having a $16 minimum wage for a role that no longer exists.
>
>That's certainly true and it tends to give employers monopoly salary pricing power where jobs don't require special skills. Witness Walmart and McDonalds.
>Good management techniques aim at reducing the skills required to bare minimums.
>In fact, that's what I've been doing during my whole career and still do now.

Not true in my case, probably because when I started coding we were still in self-managed socialist market, so the purpose of automation was not to get rid of unskilled labor, but to have existing labor rid of menial tasks, and enable them to do much more during working hours. It went so far that actually some branches were created, with new jobs, because they were now possible - without computers, the paperwork (translated into work hours, i.e. money) alone would make the thing unprofitable (the bonus being very reduced theft because warehousing was strictly controlled now).

In a way, this is pretty much what I was doing all the time, making stuff possible which previously weren't. The only thing redundant turned out to be our competition :).