Comment by asdajksah2123
12 days ago
America does need to bring back manufacturing. Not because a manufacturing job that pays $25/hr is somehow better than a service job that pays $25/hr.
The US needs to bring back manufacturing for strategic reasons and in strategic areas.
And it needs to have the capability to scale up manufacturing in response to emergencies.
But also, importantly, the US doesn't need to do this by onshoring all manufacturing. Near shoring and friend shoring will have to be extremely important components of adding these capabilities, and unfortunately, teh actions the US is taking will likely hurt nearshoring and friendshoring and will end up making the US less strategically capable in manufacturing even if it's able to reshore a significant amount of manufacturing.
A skilled assembly worker makes closer to $30 or $40 an hour than $25. And that doesn't account for overtime. A skilled tradesman can make $40+.
Manufacturing is skilled, well-paid labor that requires commitment, attention, and care. That is why there's a shortage of labor--not because of wages.
>>A skilled assembly worker makes closer to $30 or $40 an hour than $25. And that doesn't account for overtime. A skilled tradesman can make $40+.
In theory. In practice the numbers are way lower.
As some one who has done quite a big time in India IT services firms, have lots of war stories, our Delivery manager would often tell us if US managers only knew adjusted for regular all nighters, whole week on-call hell weeks. Development phases where teams would be working days at stretch in office. The actual per hour rate of an engineer in India is at best $1 - $5 an hour. You just can't bill the customer that way.
Only reason why this even works is India is still poor and people work for anything.
Im sure, adjust for everything(in real practice) manufacturing hourly wages in China aren't all that different and wouldn't be surprised if they are at something like $1 per hour, or something such.
Americans have little idea how much affluence and luxury their ordinary citizen has. Most of the world would do anything even to be poor in the US.
Fair enough to say nobody in the US is signing up to work a hellish factory job for $1/hr anytime soon.
I was talking about the cost in the US, not overseas.
Manufacturing can be automated, and that's what should be done.
Chinese finds it cheaper to pay people to do it.
America will find it cheaper to build robots to do it.
Then when no one has a job America will revert back to paying people to do it.
Life will always find a way to balance everything out.
The cheapest option would then just be to try to become allies with countries where manufacturing is growing the fastest.
Yes, China.
The policy should be collaboration with China. 50/50 state subsidized joint ventures with Chinese corporations on EVs, raw materials refining, solar panels and batteries, etc. At the same time, a gradual and predictable tariff in those targeted areas. All of this, with the explicit consent and collaboration with the Chinese government. You could kill 2 birds with one stone and focus these policies on green energy and energy independence -- lessening the effects of climate change.
That is what you would do, if you really cared about bringing manufacturing back.
As of today, there is absolutely no off-ramp. The Dem policy is basically trump lite with respect to China. We are moving in lockstep towards making them a geopolitical adversary, and for what?
Or, Mexico, Vietnam, India, etc. Despite perception, they don't have all the world's manufacturing.
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If we're going to defy the invisible hand, we should at least do it to benefit people in a concrete way - health care, education, UBI. Doing it for "strategy" is equivalent to simply burning the money people would have otherwise saved by doing nothing.
The components of a strategic manufactured product can be as simple as an injection molded switch, a LiION battery, capacitors, copper wire, etc., so the notion of bringing only "strategic items" back is as much a myth as the idea its mostly coming back to the USA. The goal here is to diversify the supply chain globally so its not concentrated in China. Internally this is sold as bringing MFG back to the USA (will happen to a noticeable degree), but that's not the actual plan.
So putting tarrifs on Mexico, Canada, Europe helps diversify?
For strategic, economic, national defense and public health reasons, I completely agree with you.
Too bad a large portion of our electorate is brainwashed by propaganda and/or completely out to lunch.