https://t.co/ycnHVZ1gT1 https://t.co/4NXb0GLK5L” / X
Factory work for thee but not for me.
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• 2% currently work in a factory
So, 98% of respondents don’t know what they are talking about, when it comes to working in a factory. How many respondents have even been in a factory and looked around?
The foundry I worked in, in the summer of 75. was hot and dirty. But auto final assembly lines I have toured, AMC Kenosha 1975, Ford Rouge, several times, are clean and quiet. The GM stamping plant in Kazoo (1965) was also clean, but not as quiet as final assembly. Hydramatic in Three Rivers, Dana in Edgerton, Wi, and the pump seal company’s machine shop, were a step down on the clean part, but I still did not need to wear a hard hat, and ear plugs, like I did in the foundry.
And the other thing: the local news talked to one of the Stellantis people being laid off due to the shutdown of Windsor Assembly. He said he would need three other jobs, to make what he makes at Stellantis.
Steve
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Reminiscent of the old Onion headline on mass transit that still gets traction in urban planning circles:
But to be fair, this isn’t as absurd as it appears on its face. There are two main theories for why America might be better off if more manufacturing took place here, even if most people would not:
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Unrigging the economy, or “predistribution.” Here, we postulate that changes in the American economy have mostly benefited upper classes in the income distribution (the truly wealthy and upper-income information and professional workers), but have not benefited working-class folks. Especially working class folks that have no more than a high school education. Factory jobs are not especially great jobs, and most people wouldn’t be better off with them. But for folks who are currently struggling economically, having more manufacturing in the U.S. would create more opportunities for people to thrive and perhaps enter the middle class that otherwise would not.
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The Common Good. Or, “It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.” Here, the idea is that the nation is better off with an expanded manufacturing capability, even if it’s not for everyone. Pretty reasonable idea. Most of us believe our community is better off if it has firefighters or paramedics, even if only a handful of us believe that we personally would be better off becoming a firefighter or paramedic.
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I think we recognize that factory jobs are boring. But in good circumstances workers there become sort of like a family. It can become a social experience.
Its not for everyone. But when jobs are good paying with good benefits many will take them. Best employer in town is often a career goal in factory towns across the country. Sometimes parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles have worked there. They know when company is hiring and can help get the next generation hired.
Too many of those are going away. But it is tradition in some families.
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Article in WSJ saying that you can make $70,000/yr sterilizing surgical instruments after a one-year training program and a 400 hour unpaid internship. There are 4-year engineering grads from 2nd tier schools who would happy with $70,000/yr to start.
intercst
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True dat. But…with the dollar lower and increasing inflation, their standard of living will be diminished. They will not be happy about that.
Did they interview the right cohort?
The Captain
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Americans are lazy when it comes to physical work for pay. Look at all the lawn cutting crews out in neighborhoods, good times and bad, people will pay for these jobs to do because they don’t want to spend the time to do them. It’s a pity! Or cook for that matter, look at the lines at the convenience stores and fast food places at meal times, it’s unreal! All that money they could be saving!
what can you do, can’t change anyone’s behavior or mindset. If I’m broke I want to earn money and benefits, give me a job, physical or not, if I can do it, I’ll be happy so I can take care of myself and my responsibilities.
Probably. And if they’re good they’ll double that salary in a few years.
As suggested above, only 2% of respondents actually worked in a factory, so most respondents don’t know what they are talking about.. The Googily thing says 9.7% of USians work in manufacturing, so the survey sample is probably flawed.
Meanwhile, a lot of the “big thinkers” are still married to the narrative of 40 years ago, that the future of the US is in mostly low wage “service” jobs, while manufacturing is offshored to where it can be done cheaper.
Steve
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Most junior colleges offer training programs in a variety of medical programs. X-ray tech, ultrasound, and many more. Often good paying jobs.
Aging population means we will need more of them. Negative is high cost of health care, labor intensive. Cost cutting may squeeze some positions. But we need them.
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I can’t think of anything more demoralizing than working in an office cubicle. Talk about sucking the soul out of a person.
I worked in a manufacturing plant all of my life. Granted most of my working career was as a manager. I hated the paper side of the position. Calculating labor rates for new products was the worst. The best part of my job was walking through the plant with no agenda. Talking with the employees about their families, sports, politics, religion, local events, whatever. We even talked about the company, and it wasn’t always good.
I would never made it in a full-time office setting.
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My geezer play, for several years, has been Stryker. Their annual meetings, before the plague, was held at a hotel/convention center in downtown Kalamazoo. They would have a trade show set up in the lobby, where each division showed off it’s latest products. Some of their stuff is really neat, though I cringe when I think about some of those devices and processes being used on me. Unfortunately, since the plague, the annual meetings have been held “virtually”.
Found this piece about Stryker 3D printing titanium for replacement joints.
Steve
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“Manufacturing” and “factory” are not the same thing. A person working in their house making quilts or charm bracelets or birdhouses and selling them on Etsy is in “manufacturing” but not ‘factory worker”.
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You seem to be suggesting the industrial revolution has matured and maybe moving toward the decline stage.
I can’t imagine reduced demand for manufactured goods. That must imply increased productivity. Maybe from larger scale production. Global standardization. Automation?
They say we are into a more service oriented economy. Whereas manufacturing can be measured in tons or dollars, services is dollars only.
Useful, but not a solution to one of the problems people think will be solved by reshoring manufacturing.
Not everyone is going to be able to succeed in the service economy. Garrison Keillor notwithstanding, half of all workers are of below-average intelligence. There are lots and lots of people who can’t meet expectations in an academic environment, who aren’t good in collaborative or customer-facing scenarios, who just aren’t cut out for those good-paying service jobs.
This is in some ways an insoluble problem. No matter what you do, there will always be a slice of the populace that is well below average in the skills or performance measures used for the service economy.
Advocates for reshoring believe that there used to be a path forward for those folks to have productive middle class lives which has been taken away by trade policy choices. If you weren’t smart or eloquent or academically-inclined, you could get a job at the local plant. There was a path for you to earn enough to own a home, pay your bills, be a suitable prospect for a spouse, and raise and support a family.
That door has now been closed off - or at least significantly narrowed. If you’re not smart (and again, by definition half of the American workforce will be of below-average intelligence, and 20% of them will be in the lowest quintile), there are fewer and fewer options for you in the modern economy. We’ve set up an entire system where a lot of your life prospects depend greatly on how well you perform on a series of academic exercises administered before your brain is even fully-formed. But that system doesn’t really have a good answer for what to do with the millions and millions of people who are going to do far worse in those exercises than average.
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Fully agree, but here’s the thing: The same problem applies to the manufacturing sector itself.
Manufacturing increasingly requires skilled workers, and analysts see more manufacturing jobs than workers going forward, due to lack of skilled workers.
As I mentioned in my post that is now hidden, this is a global trend. Low skill manufacturing jobs are being automated away. Trying to reshore low skill jobs isn’t a winning strategy.
This is similar to agricultural jobs in many ways. The number of workers required per unit of output has shrunk enormously. But the industry itself requires enormous capital and technical inputs. Which is to say, service jobs.
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Considering the push to defund education, and push ever younger children into the full time workforce, the US will have many more of the sort of low education workers that are causing such upheaval in the country now.
Steve
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