Comment by forgotoldacc
8 days ago
This is precisely the problem.
Plus, even assuming there existed lots of people to fill the gap, why would they sign up for manufacturing jobs? They pay like crap. Unions and worker rights have been gradually chipped away at for years and now they're straight up chainsawing them. Why work a monotonous job that pays at or just slightly above minimum wage, has skills that aren't really transferable should you decide to change careers, is rough on the body and doesn't even provide proper health care or sick days to rest, and employers will call you in during natural disasters with the threat of firing you otherwise and then leave you to literally die while pretending it's not their fault when you do die? [1]
It's companies and the government saying, "We want everything, and in exchange, we'll give you nothing. And you will be happy." No American sees their kid growing up and thinks, "I hope my child will one day work long hours at a factory." People in some countries do, and it's because those jobs are a step up from the current standard. Factory jobs in the US are, in many cases, a step down and that step keeps lowering. High tech/high skilled manufacturing can be an exception, but the bulk of the jobs they're hoping to bring back aren't that.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/11/02/g-s1-28731/hurricane-helene-t...
> Plus, even assuming there existed lots of people to fill the gap, why would they sign up for manufacturing jobs? They pay like crap.
Maybe that's just you talking from a position of relative privilege (e.g. as someone who's likely an extremely well-paid software engineer or some adjacent profession), and not really understanding other people's situation. Not everyone has a pick of the perfect career that ticks every box.
It's very well document that there are lots people bitter those manufacturing jobs got off-shored, and lots of communities that wish they'd reopen "the plant."
It isn't just "reopen the plant" - it is "reopen the plant and match economic conditions in the time period from the 1950s-1990s".
Just reopening won't bring back the comparably high wages from that time period.
> Just reopening won't bring back the comparably high wages from that time period.
It's a start though. If the plant stays closed, those "comparably high wages" certainly aren't coming back. If the plant opens, there's a chance.
There's a lot of "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" protecting a shitty status quo: "don't do that because it doesn't fix X," implicitly requires that one solution fix everything perfectly all at once.
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Yes, the hard part is convincing owners to part with their wealth in order to fund better pay. This is partly because they themselves are wrapped up in a massive obligatory apparatus; call it "the financialization of the economy." I'm by no measure a Trump supporter, but I do hope that what we're seeing is a proper crash that wipes out some of these folks. Once defaults are rampant, you'll have destroyed a lot of wealth, but also a lot of the obligations that necessitated all of this shifting of wealth upward in the first place. You'd also have a lot of very sophisticated people in the clock-in line, suddenly very interested in pay equity. That's one of the happier scenarios, at least.
I'm from a very poor Appalachian town. My only option to better my life was to get up and leave.
People from my hometown do talk about the good old days. People worked at union factories and my grandfather worked a well paying railroad job. My no-name town of 1000 people had a train station that made it possible to go to NYC. My grandpa got paid a handsome retirement from the railroad company. When he died, my grandmother was able to receive his benefits.
My hometown votes against building railways. The station has long crumbled. They vote against unions. The factories are long gone. They've voted against any sort of retirement benefits. The elderly are struggling and depending on churches handing out food.
Even if those factories come back, they'll be paid less than my ancestors did. They'll never have an affordable link to cities hours away. They'll never get the retirement benefits my ancestors had. And if you mention giving them these benefits, they yell and say they don't want them. The youth in my hometown who worked hard in school (we somehow had a decent school, all things considered) used their education as a ticket out. Now the people there are pissed and they're coming for education next.
These people don't want "the plant." They want to be young again, without understanding that their youth was great because my ancestors busted their asses to give us great opportunities. They squandered everything that was given to us.
I'm sorry to hear that. That's genuinely painful to read, but it's a reality that I've seen reflected elsewhere.
I tend to think about Feynman's Challenger commission report whenever I come across stories like yours, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
For a successful society, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. And yes, nature will come for us all be it pestilence or disease, or a storm that washes it all away. Nature never stops.
We created civilization and society as a way to escape nature's wrath. To become something more, to rise above the muck, and when we degrade that we will inevitably go back to the muck.
32 years after my father died, I still only get 1.9x the pay he used to get for manual labour. Given that inflation goes roughly double every 20 years, its clear I am getting less pay then he did. I also had to leave my village, because there were simply zero good opportunities to work in IT. The young leaving rural villages are pretty much common, and has almost nothing to do with how people vote. Neither in which country they actually reside. Its a downward trend, everywhere.
My background is very similar. Grew up in a small, poor mountain town that once boomed with industry but today is crumbling to dust as the population becomes increasingly elderly and young people either leave for greener pastures or abuse substances in order to escape their reality and succumb to addiction.
The industry that once fueled the town is long gone and isn’t ever coming back, and as you say even if a new industry moved in the jobs it’d open up would be so grueling and abusive that it wouldn’t be a net improvement to anybody’s lives, thanks to all the worker protections stripped away over the years.
It’s not enough to “just” make jobs available. They need to be good jobs with proper protections and support that allow people to thrive.
This is very telling. The American Empire didn't even work for Americans. Who really benefitted? Just the Elites? Why should common people care about propping up an empire if the people in power don't bother about them. For context, read this thread.
https://x.com/yishan/status/1906592890845028405
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Since you grew up there, what was their rationale for repudiating pro-labor policies at the ballot box?
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They squandered the sacrifice of their parents, and now they're asking their children to sacrifice for their benefit.
Reminds me on 'the town' in the book Damon Copperhead.
I worked in a factory. I agree with gp. Don't you dare speak for me.
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> Why work a monotonous job that pays at or just slightly above minimum wage,
If you torpedo the economy so people have no other sources of income, raise the price of all goods, and cut of all social supports and programs, people will have no choice but to take jobs they would have turned their noises up at before.
Draining the swamp is winning!
This. It’s the primary feature of the long term plan.
>They pay like crap.
Then raise the wages. Yes that means products get more expensive, but so be it. The economy will find a new equilibrium. White collar workers will see their purchasing power decrease, but factory workers will see it increase.
>No American sees their kid growing up and thinks, "I hope my child will one day work long hours at a factory."
Maybe its just me, but I think theres something seriously wrong with society if people have existential dread over the thought of having to produce the things they consume. If the production of it is so unethical, it shouldn't be consumed at all.
> Then raise the wages.
The same people proposing bringing back all these factories also want to lower wages.
The dread isn't over production. It's about the conditions they face while producing them. Americans dream about having a small farm and doing their own woodworking and blacksmithing or doing so with a small community. They don't dream about working on a factory line and being fired if they miss a day due to being sick. But at the same time, if someone else says they don't want this, they call them lazy and say the kids don't want to work these days.
It's an odd paradox.
And high skilled manufacturing still exists in America. That work is often paid decently and people are fine with working those jobs. The problem is tariffs being made to bring back low skilled manufacturing, and the desire to make the standards of employment lower in the US so that it's feasible.
> Americans dream about having a small farm and doing their own woodworking and blacksmithing or doing so with a small community. They don't dream about working on a factory line and being fired if they miss a day due to being sick.
They dream about being treated better than that, but this is a big cultural gap. There are a lot of Americans who do, genuinely, dream about working somewhat hard factory jobs. They feel proud and fulfilled that they work in the steel mill just like their dad and grandpa and great-grandpappy, and they want to make sure their son will have the same opportunity.
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The tariffs are high, but not 1,000% or whatever. If the alternative is "build new factories in the US, substantially raise wages and benefits for employees to encourage them to leave service positions for these roles, and then spend time training them" then the furniture from Vietnam with a 50% tariff is still going to be cheaper.
the good production worker's wages came from the unions. the GOP is fervently anti-union (with the exception of the police union maybe). they also oppose minium wages. there is no reason to think they'd support wage raises.
> Then raise the wages.
Then no one will be able to afford the products the plant is going to build.
They were able to in the 50s/60s/70s. So why not now?
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It's a vicious cycle. But at the end of the day it's the _company_ that has to entice workers.
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Wow I guess that WEF quote was true but just within boundaries of USA.
> rough on the body and doesn't even provide proper health care or sick days to rest
That's why I'm bullish on human shaped drones controlled with full-body trackers. If you could do most physical jobs without being physically near the area you'd open them to more women (so widening the potential workforce) and improve on-the-job accidents statistics.
and (of course) the company will record the data so that the robots will be able to learn via imitation learning ASAP