Comment by korse
11 days ago
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?
> There is a dearth of applicants for jobs exactly like what I've posted. Why don't people take them?
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.
> It's pay. It's always pay.
Indeed.
I attended an injection molding conference and one of the panel discussions was about the poor state of hiring and retention. I stayed expecting to hear the standard complaints about the fact that injection molding was considered "obsolete" (really?), the pipeline was too weak so wages were out of hand and there was too much churn. I was interested in which companies were hiring off the people so much that it warranted a panel session.
Then I heard the complaints of what their primary competitor was: Amazon warehouses. They were losing injection molding workers to freakin' Amazon floor jobs!
I lost it and lit off on an absolute rant about how if a company couldn't keep their employees from joining one of the objectively worst employers in the country then they absolutely deserved to go bankrupt.
I, very suddenly, made both a bunch of friends and a bunch of enemies that day.
A friend, who owns a food packing factory, was ranting about his workers and stated, "When you pay peanuts, you really get monkeys!". I responded, "You've just stated and solved your problem in the same sentence!"
In Norway skilled trades generally require a 2-year education and an apprenticeship. After education you start the apprenticeship for which pay starts at like $5-7.5 an hour but every 6 months it increases until you finish the 2 year apprenticeship.
This is for things like process workers in Petro/chemical plants, mechanics for assembly or machining, painters, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, all kinds of stuff. The government also subsidizes the apprentice program so it's very cheap to train young workers.
The people who choose this path generally end up pretty well off, being able to buy a house or apartment by like mid to late twenties and make even more later.
Preach. How long does it take train someone to get them to $45hr level of experience? The truth is that it doesn't. Companies love using yoe as an excuse to pay newer workers less. Manufacturing is not like software engineering where you have to constantly be re-educating yourself.
Staff who’ve been around a while, understand how a company operates and can seed that understanding into new staff are more valuable to companies. For example: if every worker were replaced with an equally skilled worker tomorrow a company regardless would not be able to function. It therefore makes sense that a senior employee can demand a higher wage [than a new starter] even if their direct productivity is no different and so a gradient in wage for seniority is exactly what one would expect to see in a free market.
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> 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 folks. If I had the promise of working some place for, say, 20 years, with a statistically 0% chance of being let go because someone wanted to goose the quarterly numbers to get their bonus... yeah, I'd have gone for it years ago. Even 25 years ago, that wasn't much of an option with most companies. Lean/Kaizen/JIT were all big movements by the 90s and ability to ramp down headcount was a requirement for most companies.
Where does 'skilled' labor for specific types of manufacturing processes come from? High school? With slashed budgets and worsening teacher/student ratios?
Businesses could step up and create environments that people competed to work at - pay decently, invest in their workers and community - but that requires a commitment to stick with the people and community even in the lean times. And most companies don't want to, or more likely simply can't, operate that way.
30 years ago I considered positions like that. Some of my family and friends did, and were there for years - decades in some cases. I don't think there's many of those left any more.
You make a good point about the Lean/Kaizen/JIT philosophies + headcount.
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'.
Lol, $25hr. McDonald's entry-level wage is $20hr in CA. The $5 premium is not enough of an incentive to move to the middle of nowhere for a job.
Adjusted for cost of living, this could be double the wage.
$5 plus lower cost of living might be depending on the employee and on what you mean by “middle of nowhere”
Will your pay gradually increase to $45 or more at McDonald's?
Unless it's in a union contract, there is no guarantee it will at your non fast food option.
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Yeah I think I would say you're right to doubt if this resonates on HN. You're posing it to an audience which has very little GED-level representation. HN more often has people who did well in school and are at a much better disposition for higher-salary jobs.
I'm not part of the target population but my guess is that a large factor has to do with people's tendency to go down the path of life that is most similar to the path they've already tread. If you grew up in a 'cultural center' it's less of a paradigm shift to take the crappy job around the corner rather than move somewhere slightly more remote to start a new career even if in the long run it could actually lead to a more decent life.
Oddly, literally everything you just described is true about my pure remote software engineering position, except I had to get bachelors in computer science first.