Production, Consumption and the New Industrial Revolution

3D Printing and the New Industrial Revolution

Illustration by
OR drowhowa Wikimedia commons

There is no doubt that technology is taking us into new and exciting territory.  Victoria Craw wrote recently in a News.com article that 3-D printer technology is set to become the new industrial revolution.  In the article Dominic Parsonson, Tasman Machinery’s national sales manager, pointed out that the only limit to 3D printers is whether or not they are able to process the material used to manufacture the product.  This technology is an exciting, and advantageous, development for countries like Australia where high wages and the legal responsibilities of using a local workforce to manufacture at home has meant that we've outsourced our manufacturing to countries that can offer large workforces at a cheap price.  This outsourcing has had a huge impact on our economy and our manufacturing industries have become a distant and historical memory.  Our shop shelves are now largely filled with products made overseas.

The Forgotten Workforce

So what will the consequences of this exciting new technology be for the workforces that we have been using

Factory workers
Wikimedia Commons

to fill our consumer marketplace with a constant supply of new products if 3D printing makes it viable for us to manufacture locally?  Harvard Business Review author Richard A. D’Aveni suggests that the factors that have made countries like China the “workshop of the world”  will lose their impact as the West becomes able to produce goods closer to the location where they are to be consumed.  For counties such as China who have built economies that depend heavily on providing the west with cheap labour the effects of 3D technology could be catastrophic.  For the workers it will be felt even more so.  For these workers there will be no safety net to break their fall when they are made redundant when their labour is no longer required by the west.  There will be no welfare system to tide them over until they can retrain themselves for other work and little or no support to retrain.

For many years now the west has used these work forces to saturate their consumer marketplace with new commodities and build up strong economies.  If our western manufacturers adopt 3D printing technology and begin to produce goods locally our own economies will flourish as more people are employed locally in the manufacturing sector to fill our store shelves.  But what will the human cost be for the workforces that currently produce the goods that stock our shelves?

It all bears thinking about as we stand at the cusp of the new industrial revolution.

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