Manufacturing in particular... it's very easy for folks to say we should bring those jobs back to the US but people are often shocked when confronted with the prices of items manufactured in the US. I don't say that to dismiss the thought but it would be a lot more difficult for folks to swallow than they think it would be.
I've worked a wide array of blue collar jobs and manufacturing I always found some of the worst, even worse than stuff like general labor building houses or working on fishing trawlers in the Bering sea because at least that stuff wasn't nearly as rote.
You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over. Do one thing wrong, your finger gets chopped up -- you think that sounds easy but wait until you're up all night taking care of a screaming infant and then have to come in so your family doesn't starve, then you make a simple mistake and now part of your body is gone. Often a overnight shift. I would find myself waking up at 2,3 am moving my arms but completely unconscious. Sometimes I would catch myself before I stick my hand into something that would break it apart. One place I was working, about half the people were missing fingers.
I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right. Why we would trade away our comparative advantage in things like designing widgets and instead do the awful work making them is beyond me unless you are so desperate it's your only option.
> Why we would trade away our comparative advantage in things like designing widgets
As China has shown over the past 20 years, that advantage erodes quickly if you stop making widgets altogether. It's very easy for widget makers to move up the value chain into widget design. And once they do, you're cooked, there's nowhere to hide.
Not to mention, widget design can't absorb as much labor supply as widget production. And many people can't do widget design, still need a living, and would be perfectly competent widget makers. So...you gotta solve for that if you focus only on widget design.
Out of all the many industries out there, I don't understand why we keep glorifying and romanticizing manufacturing and trying to "bring it back." I've also worked a few of these jobs and you're right: THEY SUCK. Depending on what you are manufacturing, it can be boring, stressful, stinky, physically taxing, or dangerous. And most of them, even the highly skilled ones, don't pay well. For the sake of our own society, we should be getting rid of these jobs, not adding them.
Because there are 300M people in the US and not all of them can have your cushy SSE role. See all the homeless people - it's because we're selling them out.
Maybe not literally all but certainly most. We hardly have any farmers or factory workers compared to what we had at one point. They've mostly moved onto cushy office jobs.
Most is 12%? This is the problem with HN. You're all so bubbled it's ridiculous to think sometimes a HN'er will say something like "If I were President."
You're using officer/administrator role for your number. The number of people who work in an office or sitting at a desk is much higher. I see numbers ranging from 40-60% for that.
that's a very incomplete view though. How many of those would take up the newly created manufacturing jobs? How many of those can be trained to do other, better jobs? There are reason to bring some manufacturing jobs back for national security interests etc, but from a labor and economics perspective, it seems a better investment is first to try to invest in people such that more of the current labor pool can be engaged in "better" jobs first.
> For the sake of our own society, we should be getting rid of these jobs, not adding them.
So let me get this strait. You think these dangerous, monotonous jobs are bad for "our own society" so the best thing for "our own society" is to export these dangerous jobs to another society "own own society" doesn't give a shit about. Wonderful.
I can't believe how ignorant and callous people can openly be.
You can't seriously believe those other societies are taking manufacturing jobs because they are worse than what they already have. People in the 3rd world are less fortunate; they're not dumb -- they want the same as us: better lives for themselves and their family. If they're working in a factory and not the alternatives it's because they passed something else along the way that was an even shittier option than that.
Short of going back to a society of married families with a single income, there isn't really a solution to keeping everyone working and making an income though. Without jobs, we revert from a modern society to a third world nation.
There are some people who like the rote work. You and I may not but some of the people I talk to like that they can basically "turn their thinking off" and get paid.
>Do one thing wrong, your finger gets chopped up
This should not be possible in the US. OSHA is still in existence(you could argue that the future state is unknown)
https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19...
>1910.212(a)(1)
>Types of guarding. One or more methods of machine guarding shall be provided to protect the operator and other employees in the machine area from hazards such as those created by point of operation, ingoing nip points, rotating parts, flying chips and sparks. Examples of guarding methods are - barrier guards, two-hand tripping devices, electronic safety devices, etc.
> a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right.
When the safety on a machine fails, the machine should stop. If it does not, then the safety was not installed correctly.
Where was this? Because that's not true in the US, land of the personal injury attorney. My brother used to be a machine salesperson. He got a call from a law firm couple years after his company sold a machine asking about a particular one that was sold (not even by him) because their client lost a body part. Those payouts often end up in the millions.
It looks like a company was using uninformed and "scared" employee population to commit labor violations. Also using the same tactic that I alluded to in one of my other comments: Production workers are hired from a staffing agency and dispatched to the job site, that way the company HR doesn't know(and can't legally ask about work eligibility).
It looks like that plant in particular has serious issues. Someone else died after the 16 year old, bringing the number of deaths in recent years to 3.
This one in particular seems to know what it is doing: Googling "Mar-Jac Poultry" does not bring up any of the issues, nor are they listed in the Wiki page.
I've worked some in metal fabrication and supported some light industry. if you think anyone in a normal business in the US that hires less than 50 hourly people has even read the OSHA regs, you're completely unconnected with the reality
we really do call those stamping machines 'finger eaters'
I work in manufacturing and stamping machines scare the shit out of me, usually because of the forces involved but I did work on some that were not guarded. That was not in the US however.
My first job with a stamping machine was in a company with about 30 production workers. This was early 2000s in the southern US, all the workers were from Latin America and I think that most of them were not here legally(I say this because the company used temp agencies to employ the workers and at one point later they wanted to bring one of them on in a management role so they had me(also a temp) ask if the person wanted too switch the the higher paying but also requiring them to submit legal documents role).
Even under those circumstances, I never saw the company do something that skirted OSHA regs. Their stamping machine was a POS that was annoying as hell to use, mostly because the light curtain and other safetys kept tripping but it was never bypassed.
Or more likely, the safety measures were bypassed because they were a PITA. You can put all of safety measures you want on equipment, but humans have this insane mindset of faster = better. Yes, that includes top to bottom of companies.
> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills
We don't want to bring back their 3rd world safety standards. We just want to bring the jobs. Factory work can be less rote if teams rotate or their employer provides enough rest. Unions are a potential solution to this issue.
This is part of the Labor vs Capital stuff I mentioned in my post. We're not likely to have strong unions again in the near future, so any jobs we bring are likely going to be dangerous in addition to carrying low pay.
OTOH if we posit strong Labor, the good news is we have a lot of jobs now that we can turn into Good Jobs. We could, for example, make it so that any large employer pay their employees enough such that nobody who works for them full time (including contractors) is eligible for income-based government assistance at the state or federal level. We could choose to expand those rules to any organization over a certain size. There's a lot we can do to turn Bad Jobs into Better Jobs without boiling the ocean and moving industry supply chains.
Because in a lot of people's minds having ~1/1000 of your coworkers killed for every decade you work at the factory still sucks less than taking orders from some algorithm crafted in a downtown office by someone who wants to exploit you at best and hates you and your way of life at worst.
In the factory you get both. With essentially zero chance to change the algorithm. When my father worked in the factory he found a way to manufacture the product faster and cheaper and just as safely, and rearranged the factory to do so. He was punished by management for altering the algorithm and also ostracized by fellow workers because they perceived it as reducing the demand for jobs.
Yup, that does sure sound like a silent-generation or boomer era story.
I'm sure pockets of that stuff are left but pretty much all of "those sorts" of "we don't pay you to think" workplaces either transitioned or went tits up over the course of the 1980s and 1990s as the Japanese management made its way to the US (though one could argue it's come back over the past 10-15yr).
Now, of course if you are doing something that's as unskilled as unskilled gets or in a particularly perverse workplace you'll encounter those conditions, but they are absolutely not the norm. The business schools these days teach various flavors of "it's cheaper to run a workplace people feel doesn't suck".
This stuff goes through phases to some extent. The 1920s and 30s were adversarial. The 1940s-60s were more cooperative. The 1960s-80s were not great. 90s and 00s were quite collaborative. Now we've kind of got another wave of "management knows best" and adversarial thinking that's waning.
That's the American dream story- always starts with dad getting yelled at for making things better and faster - the next sentence in the founding documents: So he went his own way and now we have NicoCloth Inc. which in the years since has become a global corporation.
Pretty sure they regulated that out of existence in the past several decades. Now best you can hope for is to be bought out by the competitor of the company you left sometime before the 50 employee mark.
(only partly joking, and that part is way smaller than I want it to be)
Doing rote work is better than no work and living off the government.
People in those rote jobs enjoy the camaraderie, the beers after work and putting their kids through school. Something an unemployed person has more difficulty doing.
Even the great USSR had huge amounts of rote work. People found a way to live life.
Sure, let's adopt the Soviet model of "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay" because what could go wrong there!
You're basically asking every consumer to pay more for goods so someone can feel better about themselves personally (at the cost of someone who they don't share a country with). I'm not sure if you've met many people, but it's not a very compelling argument, nor a morally superior one due to the global impact.
It’s going to cost the consumer one way or another. Either taxes, (cities still need to take in taxes, so if they lose taxpayers, their option is to levy more taxes), quality of life (more homeless, less municipal money for maintenance due to social costs, etc.)
I’d prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don’t need new fashion every year. I don’t need new appliances every few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may be. At least he’s not calculating the cost of suicide and wondering if he’ll be around for the kids 18th birthday.
> It’s going to cost the consumer one way or another. Either taxes, (cities still need to take in taxes, so if they lose taxpayers, their option is to levy more taxes), quality of life (more homeless, less municipal money for maintenance due to social costs, etc.)
It's actually not, because people aren't required to live near people who consume more in social services than they contribute in taxes. Areas like you describe exist, but basically contain the people who are unable or unwilling to leave an economically depressed area. Most people just leave.
> I’d prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don’t need new fashion every year. I don’t need new appliances every few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may be. At least he’s not calculating the cost of suicide and wondering if he’ll be around for the kids 18th birthday.
I don't disagree entirely, but most people do based on behavior.
It's not a simple problem at all, including what is fair to consumers and the businesses themselves which have to compete with other companies that don't have artificially inflated expenses.
> You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over.
Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI presses himself. I ran the press, milling machines, lathes and saws. No one in that shop was missing body parts. Sure, its monotonous at times but that can be said about many jobs. A well ran shop should not put you in harms way.
> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right.
I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with other people being subject to the same conditions.
> You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over.
Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI presses himself. No one in that shop lost a finger.
> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right.
I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with people outside of your country So the laborers in other countries where safety is ignored aren't people?
Theoretically wages should rise due to the increased demand in labor.
In practice, not sure. But it's not like the prices dropped drastically when mfg. was outsourced, the companies pocketed a most of the savings as profit.
Prices absolutely _did_ drop dramatically for many, many things that are manufactured overseas. Goods from from clothes to electronics are vastly cheaper.
For clothing, for the most part is an Indian woman that is moving the cloth on a sewing machine still. We have not LLM'd making clothes yet. Nike and a few other companies are working on 3d printing shoes, but it's not comparable to hand made yet.
For the most part, the price of a shirt made in India vs USA is the cost of labor. The Indian woman will work for $3 per hour which is a decent wage for that area (don't fact check me, it's just a guess here). She can probably make 5 shirts an hour.
A woman in the United States will make $16 per hour and still make just 5 shirts (or less - more rules in the US about breaks, and probably streaming Netflix too)
Now the company that sells the shirt at Walmart for $10 will have a profit margin of probably $5 per shirt from the Indian labor, and $1 from the US labor.
Technically after the industry is built out more we may be able to squeeze more shirts per hour if we start doing technical innovations (for example we make a machine that pre-sews 5 of the seams because of innovation. This is something that won't happen if the center of gravity is in India, but may happen in the US. (Actually today that may happen in India as tech is taking on its own thing there now).
If we cut costs and automate the way China has automated - some factories run without any lighting at all because it's all robots running in the dark - then there aren't going to be a lot of jobs created by on-shoring. And the only way to create a product on-shore that approaches the pricing of the Chinese equivalent is to heavily automate.
"Lights out" has been the big automation meme since before China joined the WTO. Everyone has gotten better over time but it's still "high school sex bragging rules": a few people are doing it but not nearly as many as brag about doing it.
Clothes are nowhere near as heavily automatable as people like to believe they are, is the problem. Unlike many other goods, nearly every article of clothing produced today is still produced with human hands. This does not mesh well with the fact that the modern public has been trained not to value apparel; people expect to casually buy items of clothing for less than they'd spend on a single meal.
It's not like the cost of clothes would be that much more if produced domestically though... the difference is the margins would be lower, a domestic employee would have a job and the domestic economy as a whole would be stronger as a result. Not to mention, the lower margin also means the wealth gap would be more narrow and there would be less incentive to stoke the flames of class warfare.
Why do people assume that clothes (and other goods, mind you) produced in the US are a mere hypothetical? There are plenty of brands that do so, and your general public overwhelmingly ignores them (and, as you have just demonstrated, don't even know they exist) precisely because they are way more expensive than consumers have been conditioned to believe that clothes should cost.
For instance, actual MiUSA jeans from companies like 3sixteen and Raleigh Denim retail for ~$200+, which is a far cry from the $30 to $50 that most people think jeans "should cost" (and that companies like American Eagle, who have long since outsourced their manufacturing, are happy to provide). Sure, it's not as if MiUSA jeans HAVE to be a few hundred dollars (I believe there are some Gustin's jeans you can pick up for $120 or so), and there are offshored jeans like Levi's which are already overpriced. But you'd have to be very naive to think that there would not be a massive and quite frankly unbearable sticker shock for the vast majority of people if you were to somehow force all domestic clothing demand to be met through domestic production. You could maybe sell it with some very effective austerity propaganda, but good luck with that.
Where did I say there are no clothes produced in the US? That said, I do think there's room to compete of most US clothes were produced domestically and that the pricing could come well below the existing US brands.
There's also brands made in China for cheap with Euro brand labels attached that sell for several hundred. Cost is not the same as price.
Pretending to not understand how game theory works is a choice -- more of a choice than customers have.
Companies are also constrained to do labor arbitrage once the rules allow it, but they were the ones who lobbied the rules into place and they were the ones to profit from the rules, so they have far more culpability here.
It would be a virtuous cycle, though, right? If we had the right incentives for keeping manufacturing here, then sure, prices would be somewhat higher [0], but so would income for the very people who would be buying.
[0] But how much higher, really? On a mass production line, what is the actual contribution of wages to the cost to produce?
Assuming the local versus offshore good is a perfect substitute, that means that the value has not changed.
Paying more for the local good means your money is worth less, as it buys less value.
Your question on the production line doesn't account for all of the precursors also being local, plus the local energy rates, local taxes, local rents, and so on. Everything tends to be more expensive, otherwise the cost of managing offshore production wouldn't be worth the effort.
Total isolation only works when there's still room to grow by way of some underutilized resource- cheap labor, land, or something extractable from the environment like wood or minerals.
From purely a price perspective, sure. But there are other advantages to maintaining production capacity within our own country.
Plus, doesn't offshoring effectively push the whole world towards a common cost-of-living/income ratio? Great if you're labor in a struggling country, bad if you are labor in the richest country in the world.
That's why I do blame corporations for outsourcing. The companies outsource every time they select for more profit for their owners and not for sharing among the workers.
And if corporate officers don't select for more profit then their stock goes down, shareholders become unhappy, officers could lose their jobs and the corporation could even fail b/c they have competitors and their competitors will likely select for more profit.
I'm not aware of that many times where I've had a choice. I could get a nice, expensive dress shirt made in the US but for general clothing it's extremely difficult to buy domestic.
Frankly, a lot of the corporations are still to blame because they're the ones actively concentrating wealth at the top. If I had more disposable income I'd buy more made in the US products but my budget simply doesn't allow it.
But you wouldn't. You, and everybody else, would see several shirts that looked basically the same and not pick the expensive one without giving it any more thought. If you think I'm wrong, go start a company that makes shirts in the US. You will make a fortune because demand is completely unmet.
Even expensive brands are usually made overseas. I looked at a couple of random pieces of expensive Patagonia outerwear in my closet. One was made in Vietnam. The other in Bangladesh.
Sure, you can get custom/semi-custom dress clothing made in the US. Probably other things (at an eye-watering premium). Which may be OK if you buy very little clothing. But mostly forget about going into a store and picking things off the rack.
Right, because there is virtually no difference in quality so companies go with the lower labor costs (as does basically everyone else on earth who is looking to have a task completed).
IIRC the last company that manufactured men's dress shirts in the US closed not too long ago. They really were dedicated to making stuff here. The economics just simply did not support it. Which is another way of saying people would not pay the necessary price premium.
The expertise to do that isn't here anymore on a scale to satisfy the majority of the market.
However that is likely exactly what happened when it was finally pretty much killed of in the 90s. At some point clothes were made largely domestically. Some manufacturers started offshoring while others didn't. At that point consumers had a choice, the choice they made was to drive the onshore industries out of business or offshore.
There might be some argument people have more surplus wealth now though, and they'd rather en masse buy those domestic products than healthcare, healthy food for their children, education, housing, and the other stuff that absorbs all the income we can muster. Of course I think there is always a market for people with money for luxury goods, some of them buy USA because it is USA.
This is true, but let's not pretend that "healthcare, healthy food for their children, education, housing" is what's absorbing all the money. Average car payment is around 700 bucks a month now.
~75% of cars are bought used and according to Experian only 33.5% of those are financed. When adding 80% new cars financed you're already under 50%. Then consider already paid off vehicles.
I recently came to a tangential realization (obviously I'm not the first to notice) regarding "cheap Chinese knockoffs":
The US company outsources the manufacturing to China because "they have to" (I don't necessarily agree with that), Chinese company keeps the assembly line running a few extra hours and resells the units back in the US under a slightly different name.
This equation is so comical to me:
The greed-driven US company screams that it's "fake", yet they didn't do anything illegal by outsourcing, just put Americans out of jobs. But if they don't build in China, a competitor will.
The Chinese company is driven by the same "profit over everything" motive and doesn't infringe on the US companys trade mark, but competes with the US company with essentially an identical product minus the R&D costs.
US company cries foul, "they're stealing our trade secrets!" Creates FUD about China but has no legal standing to do anything about it. Reeks of the same "immoral but completely legal" argument the former/would-be employees make
That's what tariffs are for. These are macroeconomic decisions, not decisions that should flow down to individuals, to be thought of as their responsibility and their moral failing.
Individuals shouldn't be expected to choose to buy American. It's a cost with an at best extremely distant (in time and space) benefit for an individual, and a non-existent benefit unless everyone does it. Instead, when goods are produced by foreign slavers and polluters, they should either be barred from import (if they're morally impossible to support) or taxed arbitrarily in order to optimize the local market, for which discriminatory taxes are not a factor.
But all if this is bad faith reasoning in general. What is produced is shit clothing, with shit treatment of the workers producing it, and intentionally outmoded by planned fashion cycles. If it were quality clothing being imported, labor costs would be a much smaller part of the costs, and therefore of the potential lost margins if owners failed to maximize the exploitation of labor. Tariffs wouldn't even effect quality imported clothing. What they would do is kill the shit imported clothing market, and allow us to redevelop a shit domestic clothing market if the minimum wage were low (i.e. sweatshops), or if we raise the local minimum wage, force a quality local clothing market.
> I'm wrong, go start a company that makes shirts in the US. You will make a fortune because demand is completely unmet.
The belief that macroeconomic problems should be solved by spontaneous generation is a form of religious capitalism. The fact that it doesn't ever happen is pointed to as the evidence that we are always at an eternal maxima. It's a practiced, self-serving denial that our economy is always actively managed by a very few people.
You seem to think I'm trying to make some moral point but nothing I said has the slightest thing to do with morality. It is simple fact of incentives and human behavior.
It isn't. I'm saying that people select for cost because corporations are actively engaged in pooling resources for the rich. If they didn't people wouldn't need to select for cost as much as they do.
When do you intentionally overpay for goods or services?
Are you haggling with your mechanic, landlord/mortgage lender, or grocery store to pay them more money than they're asking for, or do you purposely seek out suppliers that do not provide the offering with the best value?
>I'm saying that people select for cost because corporations are actively engaged in pooling resources for the rich.
People select for cost when resources are finite. This is going to be the case until we reach a post-scarcity economy, rich people or not. It's not like under communism everyone was driving around in lambos on gold paved streets.
Clothing is one of the hardest things to automate production of. We have had the "women at a sewing machine" since about 1850. Bring that 1850 women to 2026 with the latest computerized sewing machine and she would be equally productive as she was back then in an hour, and even after working that machine for a decade would not be much faster than she was. We can do a few fancy stitches today that she would have had to do by hand with the machine - but mostly we do them less know even though the machines are faster.
Nonsense, it's just cheaper to pay someone without any rights 50c/h then to automate it
If that industry was still in the area, they'd be automating the shit outta it. It's just not worth it right now considering there are always literal wage slaves in some place they can ship in for their sweatshops
Also, even locally produced premium clothing uses materials sourced from literal slave labour. There is no consumer decision anywhere, because the immorally sourced materials are just too cheap... And if you're willing to pay a premium for your morals, someone in the middle will just take it and fulfill the order with the cheap stuff.
They have been trying. Clothing is hard to automate. It needs to stretch and flex which is a problem for machines. We need many different sizes which makes things harder
