This is what always gets me as someone who works in manufacturing. We go though people like clockwork. Finding someone who wants the job, can do the job, and can learn the process is such a monumental task. The sad part is the money is there. You’ll get paid better then people with degrees. Still they don’t want to do what it takes.
Eh, our techs don’t make shit imo. We are in a high cost of living area, and they make better wages than unskilled labor, but it’s nothing like it was back when I was a kid. If you talk to the old heads, what they were making 25 years ago is less than techs make today, not even accounting for inflation. The thing is, the reason we had well paid techs then was strong union membership. If they bring jobs back, the Republicans for sure aren’t going to make it a union job, and if they do bring back manufacturing, it’ll be in a bunch of shitty “right to work” states, and people will make shit wages. The people in said states are too dumb to unionize, and will keep voting for their oppressors
As someone who started right out of school, it took years for my income to start to surpass some of the more experienced operators. No its not hundreds of thousands but it’s in that 70,000 to 90,000 range for people who don’t sleep on OT.
I feel like there are a lot of dimensions to this. I am a huge proponent of manufacturing, but yeah a lot of factory jobs suck. The problem is, they don’t have to. Modern factories are way better than old ones, and could be even better if we as a culture prioritized making jobs less soul crushing rather than access to cheap shit. I also feel like people who haven’t worked in manufacturing don’t really understand what it’s like in a modern facility. I think there’s this idea that it’s working at an assembly line or going out and turning a bunch of valves all the time but nowadays 99% of it is just sitting at a computer watching numbers. I wouldn’t want to be on the floor at my current job but I’ve worked other places where it seems a hell of a lot better than most other jobs available to non college grads.
Another issue is that modern manufacturing sites are super automated. Very few people actually work at them, at least the ones in America. You can have a plant that makes millions of pounds of plastic a year that employs 60-70 people, which is less than a typical Walmart.
Subtext: Americans would be fine with minorities working in factories.
Only about 10% of the working population in the US is in manufacturing, so 20% more people that would want to work in manufacturing is quite a lot. It’s impossible to undo the automation that has happened to date, though. Worse, if more people work in manufacturing, the pressure on wages and the pressure to automate can both increase.
Even if we stop all imports and make every finished good purchased in the US here, it’s far from enough to bring us back to the historic levels of employment in manufacturing.
20% is a lot. Goes to show that the working conditions in the US are bad.
Thanks, as much as I think whatever the US government is doing rn is dumb and self-destructive, it’s important to clarify these two charts don’t contradict each other.
No no, you have this wrong. We want factories, but it should be all robots and the people that don’t own factories should simply kill themselves.
Obligatory solid argument to use on people against a living wage: https://youtu.be/qyIyT2qTtzY
These are the same fucknuts who dream that once all the “illegals” are gone, their innumerable American neighbor enemies, too many to list but all the groups that aren’t almost exclusively white, fake Christian, conservative, and pro capitalism exploitation will be forced to harvest their dinner in the fields for minimum wage or less for 12 hour days as they laugh in victory and mock our sunburn.
Won’t ever happen, but it’s what they believe is their endgame. In truth, a lot of farms will go under and a new great depression they have to suffer too will occur. But it’ll be our faults for refusing to work under the conditions undocumented migrants were invited to do under the lie big corpo pushed for psuedoslave labor that their children would have better opportunities as a result.
To me, a silver lining of this national collapse is that we’ll no longer be able to dupe swaths of desperate people in bad situations with drug gangs into coming here only to end up in another kind of bad situation with robber baron gangs.
This goes a long with some of the other silver linings of the world no longer being subject to our soft power bullshit propaganda machine. Bullshit, our number 1 international export, followed by tools of mass human murder, aren’t you proud? The world should have kicked us to the curb for our actions decades ago. We’ve been toxic since the Red Scare, and a straight up global poison since Reagan.
