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Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory

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Re: Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory

#231
post #217
post #44

This is good news, but Milwaukee is primarily a power tool company. Bringing power tool manufacturing back to the USA would be much bigger news. Project Farm is a YouTube channel that reviews tools. I've noticed that most of the made-in-USA products are relatively simple - hand tools, drill bits, adhesives, lubricants, and so on. Any complex assembly that includes electronics is almost invariably made in Asia. It fee…

Also, isn't Milwaukee Tool owned by a Hong Kong-based holding company (TTI?) Why would they build a factory in the US?

Perhaps to sell "Made in USA" tools to the US government, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32462829

Re: Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do spot incoming QA testing. And if you find any issues, you test the whole shipment. And then you compare the results to the outgoing QA test results. And if any results can't be explained by failures relating to shipping, then you fire your supplier. You let them know ahead of time that this is the procedure you'll apply, and then they'll do proper QA testing.

QA testing is easier said than done. There are few firms the in the world that could do complete QA testing on a TV for example.

Ya for instance protein supplements. If you didn’t know you have to be very careful about the origin and the process the company use to produce those. But because it’s very hard to test even with an independent testing company, you have all kind of speculation about which company to avoid and the ones that are good because you can never know. So if you see one company doing shading things or not being 100% transparent then even if the production line is fine it’s still casting enough doubt in the “expert” users to avoid to buy them. And again testing was easy then all this won’t be here. We will just test the protein powder and that’s it.

Re: Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory

#233
post #44

This is good news, but Milwaukee is primarily a power tool company. Bringing power tool manufacturing back to the USA would be much bigger news. Project Farm is a YouTube channel that reviews tools. I've noticed that most of the made-in-USA products are relatively simple - hand tools, drill bits, adhesives, lubricants, and so on. Any complex assembly that includes electronics is almost invariably made in Asia. It fee…

China is very very good at injection molding/making plastic stuff

That makes sense given their experience in mass production of plastic-based objects. How did Keter in Israel out-compete Chinese suppliers to manufacture injection-molded toolboxes for Milwaukee Packout and Ridgid, when both are owned by China-based TTI?

Re: Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why do non-Western elites send their kids to Western countries for university educations? Elites. We have the best education for elites. Not for everyone, which is a large part of the problem.

Should be very easy for you to rattle off a list of countries doing better then. You may find the below link helpful in your quest. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_...

Those rankings are for 15 yr olds. The US definitely is #1 when it comes to high-end university schooling.

Even among high schools and prep schools the nation-wide US average might be mediocre in public schools but when it comes to the higher-end private schools the US is still easily #1

https://www.prepreview.com/ranking/world/high-school-ranking...

Re: Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they’re offended at the notion that we might want to build things in the US instead of China, because that would be racist. No, they're not.

The Nation: https://newrepublic.com/article/144390/trumps-white-supremac... Vox: https://www.vox.com/2019/7/3/20681384/trump-trade-agenda-rac... I didn’t say everyone who supports free community college also thinks rebuilding the industrial base and trade wars with China are white supremacy. But there are enough people who do to divide the coalition and render it ineffectual.

On your side of the argument, you've marshaled Bryce Covert, contributing writer for The New Republic (I read it twice and I still don't know what that Zeitlin article was trying to say).

On my side of the argument, I have the President of the United States of America, and one of his first executive actions:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/management/made-in-america/

This is not a good hill to die on. Everybody thinks made-in-America is a good thing. Republicans like it. Democrats like it. Liberals like it, conservatives like it.

Re: Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory

#236
Makita makes power tools in Japan... for domestic Japanese customers. Makita power tools in the US (and I suspect elsewhere?) are made in China. Either Japanese customers are more patriotic, or Makita can't compete pricewise with Chinese made power tools in US market.

Re: Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory

#237
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions aren't about more wages. Unions are about checking owner/capitalist/CEO power. Why does the CEO get paid 10-100x more than the lowest paid worker despite working the same number of hours a day? That's the question unions aim to solve. This puzzle revolves around power. Power is the ability to execute force or inflict pleasure or pain. A CEO is clearly capable of painful force against their unskilled labor. A C…

I see that point, which is why I'm not entirely against unions, but they have their downsides too. Unionization has brought about some very beneficial improvements in working conditions and worker benefits and rights. But unions that get too big and powerful are often just as bad in different ways. They tend to make pay increases and promotions based solely on seniority instead of any measure of actual skill or work…

Corruption is equal opportunity. Police unions are known to keep bad cops around. Teacher unions are known for making it hard to fire bad teachers. I agree there are bad union implementations, but these seem like implementation problems rather than core idea problems.

In the list, just about every bad union behavior corresponds to an equally bad or worse corporate behavior. Bad behavior correlates with unchecked power.

The nature of workers and management is adversarial. Working for a company is trading your stress/time for money. The company tells you it's bad to share your wage because that creates upwards pressure on wages, while they go behind your back to ADP and buy your wage history[1] so they can pay you less than you're worth/what they budgeted to create downward pressure. That sure seems adversarial to me.

I do agree that international non competitiveness is a worry, but that's also an argument in favor of letting big un-regulatable monopolies run wild (the counter argument being that monopolies kill/acquire innovation). I suspect parents who work at sweat shops tend to raise more poorly educated mentally worse off children, which then hurts the next generation of engineers/innovaters and society as a whole.

I think I would be most worried about agents (corporate or nation state) agitating small disagreements into big ones or directly compromising and harming industry via agents emplaced in union leadership.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753

Re: Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory

#238

Increasingly looking like my decision to give up bootcamping myself into a coastal tech job and come back home to the midwest and work in a factory was the correct choice long term. Plenty of job security with all the onshoring happening. Ironically I'd be worried if I was in tech about the WFH trend and out of touch entitlement of the zoom class bringing about outsourcing again. Oh and the funny money ponzi scheme c…

That's amazing, care to shed light on how you transitioned from tech to manf? What kind of things do you do?

It sounds like they didn't fully go into tech yet ("give up bootcamping"), so I'm not sure "transition" is the right word.

Re: Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory

#239
post #87
post #44

This is good news, but Milwaukee is primarily a power tool company. Bringing power tool manufacturing back to the USA would be much bigger news. Project Farm is a YouTube channel that reviews tools. I've noticed that most of the made-in-USA products are relatively simple - hand tools, drill bits, adhesives, lubricants, and so on. Any complex assembly that includes electronics is almost invariably made in Asia. It fee…

Low prices or well paid workforce...Choose one! This is a result of decades of regulations and labour laws. Paying Americans 10x more to make similar quality tools is a terrible business decision. This cannot be fixed without government incentives/handouts (eg. Chips Act)

Milwaukee tools are not what you would call cheap. Most of their models rank fairly highly in reviews, but not for the bargain category.

Re: Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory

#240
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to be careful to distinguish between capitalism as an ideal, and as a description of what happens in the real world. (The same applies to socialism or any other -ism.) Otherwise we will just engage in 'No True Scotsman' fallacies.

True, but fraud is not at all specific to capitalism in practice or theory.

I agree with that, but not everyone does. So at least being careful about _is_ and _ought_ (or practice and ideals) makes that discussion slightly less unproductive.
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