What the hell went wrong

Ordinary men and women are becoming redundant in the scheme of things if the results of the automation in manufacturing and distribution in China are anything to go by.

It seems ridiculous that with a population of  1.6 billion people and climbing there is a push to minimise and in some cases eliminate the human hand. Robots and the shrewd use of interconnected services leads to massive savings and a 24 hour reliable service to meet the consumerism demand. 

But hang on. The people who are 'consumers' have to also be 'workers' to afford to buy the things you produce, so how do you square the circle. And as men and women are being forced into competition with the robots, how can one compete emotionally or physically with a machine. The nearer you get to working in competition with a machine the nearer you are to recognising that you aren't a machine and the question of not only your sensibilities but your status as a human being has to be addressed.
From the boardroom the prize is, increased market share as you speed up production and lower unit cost but what about the bigger picture. We are the same human beings as are the high flyers making the decisions, the gap in earnings and the discrimination which earnings effect is becoming a problem as ordinary people seek the power to be represented by people who purport  to have 'their interests at heart'.
It used to be the left wing who represented the workers but the workers representatives, such as the unions have been demonised and ridiculed by the right wing press for decades such that the worker has bought into the mantra that unionism is bad for business and therefore bad for jobs. 

Unionism was always about 'pay and working conditions', and they represented the source of  pressure which is sometimes needed to be put their case to management and to seek play fair. Sadly, over the last 25 years, the repeated mantra is that companies work better if there is little or no unionism.
The Anglo Saxon workplace is a strange mixture.
Heavily accentuated Health & Safety rules to avoid 'litigation', hand in hand with employment practices which take us back to the Victorian era. 'Contractual obligations' for the benefit of an employer but no obligation from the employer to provide set employment hours or therefore, no guarantee of any pay.
Anomalies galore but the person most disadvantaged and continually in the headlights is the ordinary worker.
Given that the work has changed and lower skilled jobs are done by machines, and given that our educational system is failing so many children, where will these poorly prepared youngsters go when there are no jobs in the future.
Perhaps ISIS will be one of the destinations, perhaps a more realist one is to join the National Front Parties in Germany and France, Golden Dawn in Greece, Tereza or the 'Third Position' in Italy are all calling cards for the economically disenfranchised. 

Each have a dynamic which could leave the sleepy suburban, wherever they live, wondering, "what the hell went wrong".