Chris Cuomo laid it all out last night.
If you understood were you were getting screwed 40 years ago, you could have retired early.
intercst
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Yes, but…is that immutable? If manufacturing requires skilled workers, and there aren’t enough skilled workers, and manufacturers don’t have the option to find skilled workers overseas, perhaps they’ll have to themselves invest more in worker training? That won’t help with jobs that require advanced degrees or specialized technical training - but the major manufacturing centers in China aren’t being filled with people that are college graduates.
I don’t disagree that this is a bit of a fool’s errand. Part of the nostalgia for manufacturing jobs involves a bit of Cargo Cult effect. Working class people could enter the middle class with a high school diploma in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and there were more factory jobs back then - so therefore more factory jobs will bring back the ability to enter the middle class with a high school diploma. But that’s just correlation, not causation - the economic rewards to a high-school level job were shaped by a lot more than just it being factory vs. non-factory work (for example, levels of unionization).
But the larger point still stands - one of the major reasons people advocate for re-shoring is not because they personally want to go out and get jobs in a factory, but because they believe those jobs fill an essential societal need for employment opportunities for folks who don’t have the skills or aptitude to work in knowledge economy jobs.
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Oh! The burden!!!
Hence the “full throated” endorsement of H-1B Visas by Mr DOGE and TIG. Hire highly skilled people after they have been educated at someone else’s expense.
Of course, with the improvement in communications, many of the highly educated and skilled can do their engineering and research from Bangalore, so the USian “JC” isn’t burdened with having to obtain an H-1B Visa for them.
Steve
Many many many jobs that only need “low skill” or “high school education” (to 1950’s high school graduating levels, never mind today’s home schooled and negligently schooled mental cripples), will NOT be filled by humans but by robots because far cheaper after initial expenditure and much much easier to manage and “upgrade”, and no unions, and…..
Education is idiotic when only about satisfying “JC’s” wishes for compliant cheapish meat robots.
I expect we are now hopelessly screwed up and headed towards an extremely nasty social crack-up, or we will hard swerve so that a lot more work becomes more hands on and less mechanized — smaller organic farming of HQ fruits and veg, craft manufacture of custom designed long lasting fitted goods, and so on; and most likely first the nasty and then a slow crawl to a fix.
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They say it because it’s overwhelmingly true. 79% of US gdp is service, and it accounts for 78% of wages. It’s a trend that’s been true for decades and shows no signs of slowing down.
At the moment I’m sitting watching a guy repair a line on my irrigation system. I doubt he finished high school but I am about to pay him several hundred dollars for the prvilege of his “service”.
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Yes, it is a burden. It costs money to train a worker. Regardless of whether the worker pays for their own training (trade school) or the employer does (OTJ), it’s got to be paid for by someone. Employers can pick up that expense and pass it on to their customers in higher product prices, but that requires relatively low worker mobility that might not be achievable in today’s low union and more transient labor markets.
Sure. We’re never going back to the rates of manufacturing employment of the Olden Days, any more than agriculture will ever require the same number of farmhands as the Oldener Days. But since manufacturing is a somewhat more open path to employment for those that have only a high school diploma than many service sector jobs - even with modern tech - advocates believe it would help the working classes out if we did more of it here.
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My experience in factory work was in the agricultural sector in California. Starting in high school and continuing through college I worked in various seasonal jobs: peach drying yard; peach cannery; tomato and pepper packing plant; onion and garlic dehydrating plant; hoeing weeds in vineyards; picking peaches. The factory work was sometimes physically hard, but that never bothered me. Oh, but the boredom! It taught me that that kind of work was not something I wanted to pursue long term. Picking peaches, on the other hand, was hard and HOT. Pay was 11 cents a flat. And if the foreman thought your peaches weren’t up to standards they would just dump out the flats you had picked. My high school buddy and I couldn’t make a decent wage, so we quit after a week. We were the only non-latinos working there. Those guys could make a decent wage. They could hustle and I had great admiration for their work ethic.
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I have had a few surgeries. I am glad that the people who sterilize the equipment are well paid for what I consider a VERY important job.
Remember in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy it was the lack of people sanitizing pay phones that led to the extinction of one iteration of Earth’s population.
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Who knows what the robots might get up to in time!
Yup. The phone sanitizers were on the “B Ark”, with all the people from McKinsey. Of course, the entire “Ark” thing was a fabrication, to get rid of the useless third of the population.
Steve
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Manufacturing is not synonymous with factory work. Factory work is a subset of manufacturing.
For example, there are many degreed engineers and scientists involved in the manufacturing process. I doubt any of them would call themselves a factory worker.
Hawkwin
Whose mother worked in a lab testing chocolate - at a candy factory.
I think we can easily name quite a few service jobs. Truck driver. Warehouse forklift truck driver. Salesman (of many types). As well as the medical services mentioned above.
Its easy to run around screaming its hopeless. Nothing will work. But hopefully calmer heads prevail.
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Oh you rose-colored glasses optimist, you.
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Generation Z is interested in blue collar jobs [electrician, plumber or auto technician]. But not likely manufacturing jobs.
In recent years, an increasing number of the Gen Z population are opting out of the traditional route to employment to secure prestigious roles in white collar fields in favor of blue-collar jobs.
High school graduates have always been encouraged to pursue a college degree to secure their dream job and earn a decent living. Everyone from schools, parents, and the media have stressed the importance of higher education. A four-year college degree has long been held as a symbol of prestige, accomplishment, and pride. But this mindset is changing.
Gen Zers are more conscious of economic hardships. A global survey by Deloitte found that 56% of Gen Z respondents lived pay check to pay check, and a third of them were worried about the rising cost of living. These concerns are causing them to tighten their belts, and one way they are pinching the pennies is by joining the workforce earlier through apprenticeships and vocational training which are significantly less expensive than a four-year college degree.
pros
cheaper to gain access to this job.
competition for career growth is not as fierce within skilled trades.
predictable working hours–unlikely to be called in to work extra hours–not on a salary either
better than monotonous wrench turning assembly line job
cons
blue collar work can be physically demanding
negative stigma attached to these jobs
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tj, thanks, a good short summary of an overlooked pattern.
All work forms and patterns of being a useful person are in for big changes as energy sources and flows, cybernetics, electronics, robotics, AI, and everything else under the sun changes.
Actual care, even loving care becomes the secret sauce. Can robots do that?
Also, just in my life time many “crafts” such as cooking, clothing, and education have been smashed into mostly garbage mass production. Opportunities to figure out what our humanity wants and requires are all around me.
But that will require some human restructuring…
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