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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

molsonhart.com

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Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#681

Post by palmotea »

NoTeslaThrow wrote: post #581

We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people. > We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials. The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-bus…

> The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-business—there's no willingness to invest, or to train, or to support an employee seen as waste. Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the state of the country, this will continue.

I think you're exactly right there.

>> We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture

> That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world.

I want to quibble with that a little bit. I don't have the numbers, but relative position matters too. The US could be "second-largest manufacturer in the world" if it only manufactures Dixie cups, other countries manufacture nothing, and China manufactures everything else.

My understanding is Chinese output is so huge, that even if the US had maintained steady or modestly growing manufacturing output from the 70s or whatever, it would be dwarfed by China.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#682

Post by Retric »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #675
glitchc wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concur, employee training and retention are at an all-time low. There are no positions available for junior employees, minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work. Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actu…

To get employers to invest in employees, they'd need more of a stake in it. Right now if you invest $200,000 to train someone, they can immediately quit and go work somewhere else and you're out $200k, so they don't do that. A way to fix that would be to e.g. issue student loans for the training and then forgive them over time if the employee continues working there. But that's rather disfavored by the tax code when…

Nobody is talking about handing out 200k of training upfront. Individual 1-8 week training courses don’t actually cost that much to operate internally and generally allow someone to do something very specific and useful. There’s plenty of ways to boost short term retention like a bonus after 1 year of service.

50+k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but the first set of training should have paid for itself before you’re offering the next.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#683

Post by pengaru »

glitchc wrote: post #589
NoTeslaThrow wrote: post #581

We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people. > We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials. The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-bus…

Concur, employee training and retention are at an all-time low. There are no positions available for junior employees, minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work. Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actu…

> Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work.

Could you please inform my managers who keep pestering me about career growth of this shift so I could just focus on the work? ktnx

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#684

Post by elif »

It really is starting to bother me when people attribute a deceptive narrative crafted by one individual to "American thinking" as if there was even a lone individual in this country who was earnestly believing a global trade war would solve a non existent trade problem before the narrative became convenient to our dictator

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#685

Post by matthewdgreen »

stetrain wrote: post #506
gosub100 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Largely due to government welfare, business is great!

There are carrots and sticks. The current plan seems to be to cut down giant trees at random and hope they don't fall on anything important. If they do there will need to be government welfare applied anyway to keep businesses alive just like during the previous Trump administration.

I've mostly decided to stop arguing about this stuff, since it's fairly obvious that Trump is going to ruin the economy and discredit his party for a generation.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#686

Post by nradov »

MisterTea wrote: post #622
nradov wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employees have always been responsible for managing their own career growth and always will be. How can it be otherwise? It would be foolish for an employee to let someone else handle career growth for them as their interests aren't aligned (or even known). If you want help with career growth then find a mentor , don't rely on your manager. Managers should facilitate training to improve employee productivity and help…

> If you want help with career growth then find a mentor, don't rely on your manager. Your mentors are your peers at work which can include your manager. Career growth is the accumulation of both knowledge and experience which is beneficial to both parties so I dont understand how those are misaligned unless fraud is involved.

No, that's not how it usually works (at least not for professional and managerial employees in the US). Mentors are typically more senior, not peers and not someone in the employee's direct chain of command. They may be in an entirely different organization.

I don't know how you could believe that career growth interests are aligned between employees and their managers. For the majority of employees, their optimal career path will involve changing companies at some point. This is generally not in their current manager's best interest.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#687

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Retric wrote: post #682
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get employers to invest in employees, they'd need more of a stake in it. Right now if you invest $200,000 to train someone, they can immediately quit and go work somewhere else and you're out $200k, so they don't do that. A way to fix that would be to e.g. issue student loans for the training and then forgive them over time if the employee continues working there. But that's rather disfavored by the tax code when…

Nobody is talking about handing out 200k of training upfront. Individual 1-8 week training courses don’t actually cost that much to operate internally and generally allow someone to do something very specific and useful. There’s plenty of ways to boost short term retention like a bonus after 1 year of service. 50+k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but the first set of training sh…

> Nobody is talking about handing out 200k of training upfront.

Why not?

> 50k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but is hardly a major risk.

"Pay 50k for training and then pay a salary bump" is more expensive than "just pay a salary bump to the person the competitor was a sucker enough to pay 50k to train", so how does that work?

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#688

Post by LunaSea »

cratermoon wrote: post #218
pjc50 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to want jobs with the macho kudos of manual labour, but with the physical comfort and salaries of email jobs, and I have some very bad news about that combination.

Those people need to watch a few episodes of Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs". Also people need to stop saying "unskilled labor". There is no such thing as labor without skills, outside a category in an archaic way of justifying low wages. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unskilled-labor.asp

Working at McDonald's takes 1 day of training.

Working as a doctor takes 10 years of higher education on top of secondary school.

Calling McDonald's "unskilled labor" seems quite fair to me.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#689

Post by idle_zealot »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #542
idle_zealot wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm surprised that the administration didn't understand this. Why would you assume they don't understand? Every time they're questioned about the tariffs the narrative shifts. We have a trade deficit, we're getting ripped off, we want to bring back domestic manufacturing jobs, we'll automate them with robotics and AI, we're playing hardball to negotiate a better trade deal and get rid of fentanyl, it's a matter of…

I genuinely don't believe there's five-dimensional chess happening here. The problem is simply that the US president is a repugnant, stupid, erratic egotist who's surrounded himself with nasty people of varying levels of intelligence, with stupid ideas about how to run the country, and this is the policy result.

To be clear, I don't think it's chess either. I think Trump likes tariffs and wants to appear strong by slapping them around. I think some, but not all of his hangers-on are using this to push for a recession. There are multiple hands on the levers of power here, but there's a common interest in transforming the US into a Russia-style oligarchy.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#690

Post by toomuchtodo »

pengaru wrote: post #683
glitchc wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concur, employee training and retention are at an all-time low. There are no positions available for junior employees, minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work. Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actu…

> Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work. Could you please inform my managers who keep pestering me about career growth of this shift so I could just focus on the work? ktnx

If you don't upskill for free with no additional comp, how will they continue to cram down labor costs to make their quarterly numbers? You are, broadly speaking, treated as an asset to be sweat until you can be replaced.
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