721–730 of 1001 posts
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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.
Well, tbf, it's not like there's no carrot in this case. (I'm at a FAANG) But I'm sure what you're describing is common in the general case.
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 US manufacturing sector is about half the size of China's in terms of value-add, but it's much smaller by any other measure. The US has focussed on high-value verticals like aerospace and pharmaceuticals, where intellectual property provides a deep moat and secure profit margins. That kind of manufacturing doesn't produce mass employment for semi-skilled or unskilled workers, but it does create lots of skilled jobs that are very well paid by global standards.
That's entirely rational from an economic perspective, but it means that US manufacturing is wholly reliant on imports of lower-value materials and commodity parts.
A Chinese manufacturer of machine tools can buy pretty much all of their inputs domestically, because China has a really deep supply chain. They're really only dependent on imports of a handful of raw materials and leading-edge semiconductors. Their US counterparts - we're really just talking about Haas and Hurco - are assembling a bunch of Chinese-made components onto an American casting. To my knowledge, there are no US manufacturers of linear rails, ballscrews or servo motors.
If the US wants to start making that stuff, it's faced with two very hard problems. Firstly, that it'd have to essentially re-run the industrial revolution to build up the capacity to do it; secondly, that either a lot of Americans would have to be willing to work for very low wages, or lots of Americans would have to pay an awful lot more in tax to subsidise those jobs.
It's worth bearing in mind that China is busy moving in the opposite direction - they're investing massively in automation and moving up the value chain as quickly as possible. They're facing the threat of political unrest on a scale they haven't seen since 1989, because of the enormous number of highly-educated young people who are underemployed in unskilled and semi-skilled jobs.
Lots of Americans want to bring back mass manufacturing employment, but very few of them actually want to work in a factory. You can't resolve that contradiction through sheer political will.
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…
I'm American and heavily involved in manufacturing for industrial/mining/agricultural customers. 'We just don't want to employ people' is a gross simplification. We do want to employ people, and lack of skilled labor is a serious problem which has hampered business growth for years, The first unspoken problem is that very few young people want to live where many factories are located. I can't blame them. I certainly…
It's pay. It's always pay.
You gave a range so I'm guessing the lower end is starting out, why take that when nearly every entry level job, with far less demand, pays about the same?
Start your pay at $45/hr and people will flood in. If they aren't, it's because the factory is too remote for population to get to. Put that factory in any mid to large midwestern city and it'll be flooded with applicants.
How do I know? About an hour south of Louisville, Amazon keeps building giant warehouses and hiring workers, and people fight over those jobs. They don't pay half of that.
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The US can't even make EUV machines, just parts of it.
"Can't even". I think there's only one country that can, so the US is not alone.
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How many Americans are dying to and will do tedious labor (not many), as well robots, automation and AI can do a lot of it and or will end up doing a lot of it. If we want to strengthen America (military & economy) immigration reform is needed! This could be unpopular but such reform could be ...those who want to come here must serve in our armed forces for x amount of years and can bring two to four family members h…
Importing immigrants directly into the military sounds like a bad idea. I’m guessing many would be less likely to want to lay their lives down for the new country, so drafting them seems like a great way to end up with a bunch of disloyal troops.
Still, this kind of outsourcing of manufacturing (or even more food production) puts the US in an incredibly uncomfortable position, especially that China is its main geopolitical enemy. What if a war erupts? Suddenly the US cannot produce a lot of essential stuff - I think Covid was a good example of that happening. Of course the question is can this be done and what will be the price if so.
The author is not anti-US-manufacturing. He explained how the current tariff policy undermines US manufacturers. He is pointing out the obstacles and what we must do to overcome them. The obstacle is the way.
Two of his points: "Industrial supply chain is weak" and "We don't know how to make it" are exactly the same. >all the factories which make the needed components are in Asia, >because they know how to make the best semiconductors in the world.
But this is looking at the problem and then missing the point: If I decide to start mfg. IPhone in the US, I can't because there are no suppliers.
As long as nothing changes, there will continue to be no suppliers.
If I HAVE to mfg the IPhone in the US, at first I will import due to no supplier but someone will make a local supplier because they can undercut my importer.
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…
> We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people. That’s a misleading oversimplification. While it’s true we haven’t stopped manufacturing, we did offshore a massive portion of it--especially after the Open Door Policy with China and subsequent free trade agreements. That shift didn’t just change where things are made; it fundamentally altered corporate incentives. Once production moved overseas, th…
> It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has. Sounds more like China has an exploited educated class/lack of oppurtunity than America has bad education. Plenty of American workers can multiply in their heads and diligently perform there work. These people work in white collar jobs though, not in factories snapping toget…
Factories can be air conditioned.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm American and heavily involved in manufacturing for industrial/mining/agricultural customers. 'We just don't want to employ people' is a gross simplification. We do want to employ people, and lack of skilled labor is a serious problem which has hampered business growth for years, The first unspoken problem is that very few young people want to live where many factories are located. I can't blame them. I certainly…
> This influences manufacturer's hiring practices because of the 'skilled' labor thing. Putting time and resources into training employees when there is a high probability they will make a career change within 3 years isn't really acceptable. We've had decades of large companies laying people off (effectively) without warning, and the lessons of "don't trust an employer" are... fairly well understood by a lot of folk…
I've always been associated with mid-size (< 500 million/yr) where much of that 'wisdom' sounded good but didn't work out so well in practice. Sadly for the consulting folks, it isn't actually possible to lean out an entire supply chain and still maintain the ability to respond to market fluctuations. Being lower on that food chain, if you lay off reliable operators/maintenance during something like the COVID slump then you are screwed when business comes back because you can't rehire/train fast enough to fill orders that are needed 'next month'.