Comment by NoTeslaThrow

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 actually doing the work. Meanwhile organizations see employees as cost centres and a net drain on their revenue sources.

Corporate culture in America is definitely broken. I'm not sure how we can fix it.

>We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials.

This is it. Aside from manufacturing, most recent AI startups are almost universally aligned in the desire to use it to reduce headcount. It's plastered all over their landing pages as a selling point: "use our product and you won't have to hire people."

Business culture is eating its own young and hollowing out the future with such empty goals and sales points.

I'm skeptical of actual results. There are a lot of layoffs attributed to AI but far fewer cases of increased sales attributed to it.

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 jump through hoops to live in an area well removed from the industry I work in but not everyone has this luxury.

The second is psychological. How many kids do you know who are ready to commit to a future of 35+ years of factory work in their early twenties, even with reasonable pay. 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.

This is HN, so I don't know if this resonates but as a thought experiment, would you take a welding/machine operation/technician position for 25 - 45 USD/hr (based on experience)? Overtime gets you 1.5 base rate and health insurance + dental + 401k is part of the deal. All you need is a GED, proof of eligibility to work in the United States and the ability to pass a physical + drug screen on hiring. After that, no one cares what you do on your own time if you show up, do your job and don't get in an industrial accident. Caveat, you have move away from anything remotely like a 'cultural center' but you do have racial diversity. Also, you will probably be able to afford a house, but it won't be anything grand or anywhere terribly interesting.

There is a dearth of applicants for jobs exactly like what I've posted. Why don't people take them?

I think it's worth specifying even further: wealthy business owners don't want to pay what a US employee costs.

Most jobs are wholly unsustainable. You have to job hop every couple of years to keep up with inflation because God knows you're not getting a raise that keeps you comfortable.

This has led to churn and brain drain and the slow collapse of US domestic business.

It's not that people don't want to work, it's that wages have fallen so far behind the cost of living that it's financial suicide to stay in any one job. Even with all the traps like employer sponsored healthcare, most people just can't afford to be paid the pittance most businesses are willing to pay.

This is a deep societal illness in the US. We've glorified and deified the concept of greed to the point where even talking about income inequality and the unimaginable concentration of wealth is just anathema. It's seeped into the everyday consciousness in the form of "I'm the only one that matters, fuck absolutely everyone else"

I genuinely believe that America will never, ever recover until we address this. We will always be this sick and broken country until the state entirely collapses or we get our shit together and address income inequality.

I have some real serious doubts that we'll ever get there, but it's easy to be pessimistic.

The problem is that we're talking about "manufacturing" as one big homogeneous thing. The US obviously makes a bunch of stuff, but it has very limited ability to make lots of kinds of stuff, especially in a hostile trade environment.

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.

100% agree with you!

I have worked US manufacturing and manufacturing R&D for most of my career: pharmaceutical, microelectronics, materials, aerospace, etc. The US is awesome at manufacturing when we want to be.

One problem is that "modern MBA/business philosophy" views manufacturing and manufacturing employees as a cost center and there is so much emphasis on maximizing gross margin to increase shareholder value.

So business leaders scrutinize the hell out of anything that increases the cost of their cost centers:

- employee training & development? hell with that.

- Increasing pay to retain good employees in manufacturing? Why? isn't everything mostly automated?

- manufacturing technology development? Not unless you can show a clear and massive net present value on the investment... and, then, the answer is still no for no good reason. I have pitched internal manufacturing development investments where we conservatively estimated ~50% internal rate of return and the projects still didn't get funded.

There is also a belief that outsourcing is easy and business people are often horrible at predicting and assessing the total cost of outsourcing. I have been on teams doing "insource vs. outsource" trade studies and the amount of costs and risks that MBA decision makers don't think about in these situations really surprised me initially... but now I'm use to it.

Anyhow... the US (and Europe for that matter) can absolutely increase manufacturing. It is not "difficult"... but it would be a slow process. I think it is important to differentiate between difficulty and speed.

> 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.

We produce weapons. We are an arms dealer empire.

Our biggest exporter is Boeing and sure Boeing produces commercial aircraft but their position has a lot to do with inertia as the accountant leadership of Boeing is doing their best to destroy Boeing by nickel-and-diming every aspect with a complex web of outsourcing that will fall apart the second there is any disruption in international trade.

What China has now is the infrastructure and ecosystem to manufacture. You need some tiny screws made of titanium? Well, there's a factory that produces that down the street.

The last time we got employers to care about employees it was because the unions dragged the bosses into the streets and beat the daylights out of them.

> Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the state of the country, this will continue.

The best financial years Puerto Rico had ended when the tax incentives to be there went away. It's a real shame. Puerto Rico was #1 in production, above the US and Japan. You could buy something made in Puerto Rico and you knew it was a high quality product. Its much harder to gain back that level of quality once you've effectively killed such a culture, I can only imagine the detriment in Japan if they lost their work culture and how much harder it would be for them to regain it.

This is even showing up a bit in tech now. The number of places that expect some articulation Venn diagram of skill sets is too high.

There are too goddamned many stacks to expect that your best hire is going to already have used everything you’re using. There are people who have used everything, but you’re mostly going to be hiring flakes if you look for those, not Right Tool for the Job types.

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

Sure, but we don't manufacture the things that are typically made in 3rd world countries and the lead time to build that infrastructure is years, and generally would result in us moving down the tech tree ladder from being a consumer economy to a manufacturing economy with all of the negatives associated with that.

The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society.

I agree with the unhealthy society and your statement got me thinking. In regards to health what happens when global trade is shut down and a country can not make it's own pharmaceuticals for example? About 64% of people in the US over age 18 are on prescription drugs. Some of those drugs have really dangerous rebound effects if one suddenly stops taking them. Some of those effects can be deadly, especially blood pressure drugs. Most of those drugs come from China, some from India. How quickly can each country start manufacturing and distributing it's own prescription drugs? Would that cause a quick adjustment to the culture or is that not enough?

Which means policies that reverse that are immensely important. The process of offshore our jobs and much I.P. took decades. Getting them back and rebuilding manufacturing support will take a long time, too.

Just need to make steady progress each year with incentives that encourage large leaps in progress.

> We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people.

I don't think it's just that. We manufacture, but we aren't great at the entire chain. China is much better are specialized tooling, etc. We have definitely lost a lot of knowledge in critical parts of the chain.

> 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, the need to invest in domestic labor--training, benefits, long-term employment--shrank accordingly.

Most companies that do manufacturing in USA are oriented to making business-to-business products, where high margins can be achieved.

As an European, there have been many decades since the last time when I have seen any competitive "made in USA" product that is intended to be sold to individuals.

There are products that I buy, which have been designed in USA, e.g. computer CPUs, but none of them have also been made in USA.

When I was young, it was very different, there were many "made in USA" products that could compete with those made elsewhere.

Chip subsidies seemed to work with little to no consequence. I'm not sure why you're so pessimistic about this obvious mechanism you even mentioned

It's shareholder capitalism. Capitalism can be a great thing, but shareholder capitalism defines profits as the only reason for a corporation to exist. Humans are simply resources to extract work or profit from, and destroying the future of the country is an unfortunate externality. CEOs are obligated to behave like sociopaths. Lying, cheating, stealing, and subverting democracy are all good business if it returns value to shareholders. We see this over and over again, and wonder why our society is so fucked up.

And since every major corporation is behaving like this, even if a CEO wanted to give a shit about the country, they can't do anything about it because someone else will be more cutthroat than them and eat their lunch.

Just because the US is manufacturing doesn’t mean it has the infrastructure to manufacture more.

This is the root issue

The idea that “labor is cheaper elsewhere” is simply a neutral statement of economics is wrong — “lower living standards” is not just a economic measure, it’s a political statement about the value of labor and labor conditions. The US and by extension the “western capitalist world” has been exploiting labor since day 0 with chattel then later globally slavery.

The reason Japan was the biggest manufacturer exporting to the US post war, is because the SCAP forcibly rewrote their constitution to be explicitly capitalist. Read “Understanding Defeat” for detailed proof of the 7 year occupation of Japan, explicity to destroy any semblance of Japanese imperial/keretzu culture, and replace it with explicitly capitalist structure. To be fair to MacArthur, they did suggest labor practices, like unionization, but it was a thin veneer suggestion, not forced into cooperatives and syndicates.

China moved into that position post 70s, because Japanese labor began getting “more expensive.” Nixon and Kissinger saw an opportunity to exploit “cheap” labor because there were no protections for workers or environmental protections - so “opening up china,” plus the Nixon shock and floating of interest rates allowed for global capital flight to low cost slave-like conditions. This is why labor and productivity began to separate in 1971, there was a “global south” that now could be exploited.

NAFTA made Mexico and the southern americas the agricultural slave countries etc…starting in the 90s, and on and on just moving the slave-wage ball until there’s nowhere else to exploit.

It’s not a conspiracy to demonstrate that capital will move wherever it needs to in order to exploit “arbitrage opportunities.” Its good business/MBA capitalism 101.

Just like #2 in Austin powers said:

> Dr. Evil, I've spent 30 years of my life turning this two-bit evil empire into a world-class multinational. I was going to have a cover story in "Forbes". But you, like an idiot, wanted to take over the world. And you don't realize there is no world anymore. It's only corporations.

> We just don't want to employ people

I don't think it's a matter of willingness, but simple global geo economics.

There's places where producing A, whatever A is, is economically more efficient for countless reasons (energy prices, logistics, talent, bureaucracy, cost of labor, etc).

That's not gonna change with whatever investment you want or tariff you put.

But the thing I find more absurd, of all, is that I'd expect HN users to be aware that USA has thrived in the sector economy while offloading things that made more sense to be done elsewhere.

I'd expect HN users to understand that the very positive trade balances like Japan's, Italy's or Germany's run are meaningless and don't make your country richer.

Yet I'm surrounded by users ideologically rushing into some delusional autarchic dystopia of fixing american manufacturing for the sake of it.

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 here that are able to start working and contributing to the economy immediately (pay taxes). Rounding up and getting of rid of these eager want to be Americans when we have adversaries with larger armies and we bang the drum on beefing up defense (and our economy) doesn't make sense to me.