Comment by lnsru
1 day ago
Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most can’t. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.
I worked in a factory for a few months. They moved me around on the line. While each week looked the same, each day in the week was different. Though I was told by some of the other guys on the line that it was one of the nicer factories they ever worked in. I did some tech work in a few auto factories as well, and those had a very different vibe on the floor.
While it may be boring to someone who use used to doing knowledge work, there are a lot of people who need jobs who aren’t going to be doing knowledge work. They need something.
I worked fast food for a shift before I quit. I found that much more boring and hated it much more than the factory. I’d rather see people employed making stuff domestically rather than have yet another drive-thru window in town.
I grew up in a small town with two fairly decent sized factories. That was a solid job prospect for a lot of people coming out or high school that didn’t know what else they could do. It gave those kids options and kept them in town where they could buy a house, raise a family, and spend money supporting other local businesses. Now they’re both closed and the city is hunting for ways to bring businesses to town. My brother-in-law is driving 100+ miles per day to drive to an area with more jobs opportunities. I’m sure if there was a local factory gig he’d probably take it and save a ton on gas, not to mention getting back 10 hours per week of his time.
The thing is, minimum wage there pays for 10 people on the floor in Asia and the cost of the factory is approximately the same. There’s no economic sense to build a factory in the states… which is where all the government subsidies enter the stage, but the budget is already running a war time deficit. It’s going to be so much worse for those small used-to-be-factory cities until the printer starts for real, and then there’s no guarantee it’s going to be any better after.
> There’s no economic sense to build a factory in the states…
That isn't how it works. Details matter.
A local factory can save a ton of money because it can be more just in time - you don't have to build excess because of shipping times. (shipping costs can also save a lot of money for a local factory).
The states have lots of cheap reliable power (not perfectly reliable, but close enough). If your production line is mostly automated (or could be) the states are cheaper - there isn't much labor anyway.
Production close to engineering makes for a lot of savings because when a part is designed you can get a prototype to testing faster.
there are lots of other factors, and most are not in the favor of local production but there are several that are. Where you fall is an optimization problem and there is no one right answer for everything.
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Tariffs are used all over the world for this exact reason, which is what is being attempted now. It will take time for it to pay off, more time than the current administration has, which is likely why business will drag their feet.
I think economic benefit goes beyond just having the lowest price. Having good jobs for people in the country means they have money to spend. If people make next to nothing, all they can afford is Temu quality. This is bad for the citizens, bad for US businesses, and bad for the environment. The only winner is China.
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> minimum wage there pays for 10 people
More like 2-4 at this point, if we're talking about China.
Something that I hadn't considered before I heard it being discussed by someone who studied the phenomenon of factory off shoring is that a huge factor in the off shoring has nothing to do with labor, it has everything to do with ramp up time.
Compare the build time between Tesla's battery factories in the US and China and consider how many batteries they can sell during the time difference.
Building a factory loses money until the factory starts making products. Good or bad, regulations that cost _time_ are the biggest issue. Labor costs matter but they affect the margins that can be somewhat compensated for by products not needing overseas shipping. A company, especially a new one, can go out of business in the years it takes to build a factory in the US.
Asian factories particularly China are deploying robots at a rate that puts the rest of the world in the shadows
> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week.
In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate. Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!
Western labor is never going to compete with Asian labor, so it's no use even trying. If we want to have any chance of matching what China is already doing (let alone beating it), we're going to have to invest an absolute fortune in automation and streamlining: reduce the number of unique products, reduce the part count, reduce the number of vendors, reduce the distance to vendors, and automate everything you can reasonably automate.
Make it capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive and we might be able to keep up.
> In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate.
Not really, American manufacturing is already automated. Manufacturing jobs have steadily decreased[0] while output has increased (or stayed steady) in manufacturing since the early 2000's [1]. There is only one reasonable explanation for this -> automation.
While it is true that the Chinese are indeed automated their manufacturing, it still doesn't negate the fact that companies like Foxconn still have 200k employees in China.
IMHO the real reason you'll never see manufacturing come back to the USA is because you can't convince people who are already in less manually intensive labor conditions to go back to more manually intensive labor conditions. Said differently, it's easier to get someone who's family has spent decades doing back breaking work in a rice paddy to work in a factory for slightly better pay than it is to do the reverse.
[0] - https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling...
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GOMA
I took a tour of the BMW Spartanburg factory a few days ago. It is highly automated with most work done by industrial robots. There are a few human workers manually pulling parts out of bins to feed the robots but nothing like the way that assembly lines used to operate.
https://www.bmwgroup-werke.com/spartanburg/en.html
Wow - super automated and they still employ 11,000 people?
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Exactly, most factories in China are already heavily automated. Americans don't have a clue of what they've been doing there in the last 20 years to modernize production. The US would need to invest trillions in automation and workforce training to be able to compete with China, Taiwan and Korea. I don't see Americans being able to do this because they're too addicted to easy money from Wall Street.
I watched some videos 10GTek published. Rather “boring” stuff of a life in the day of various employees.
But I was shocked by how efficient and modernised their factory was, including really rigorous quality control, advanced testing setups, dedicated jigs everywhere just for the testing… and then one video was of an office worker who spent her day making sure everything runs smoothly, juggling customers, orders for parts from vendors, and getting ahold of the right people when something was going wrong.
Incidentally none of my 10GTek stuff has ever failed.
From the American point of view there's something to be said for doing a job where the money is. Like you'll make more in finance or as an AI engineer than making stuff in a factory.
I London where I live you can't really afford to buy a house or things like that if you got a job manufacturing anything that's globally competitive which is why manufacturing is basically gone here and people get jobs in finance and the like. We used to have a factory in the London outskirts but it got knocked down and replaced with apartments long ago.
I don't know if it's addicted to easy money so much as the people earning easy money push up the cost of living and force others to do similar to afford to live in the same area.
Eh I wouldnt overstate this. I have seen production line videos from 2025 showing chinese workers hand assembling items.
Chinas value imho is that they are willing to take on shorter and shorter production runs. They have figured out retraining and logistics to the point that they can have 20 customers who only need 1000 - 12000 parts per year, on the back of their 3-4 flagship clients who keep the place running with scale orders.
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> Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!
Slight nuance - they have spent a [reasonable amount of money] automating production.
The trick to automating something that ‘isn’t a car’ is often to put in small bits of low-cost and flexible automation that can be moved around and repurposed. IMO this is often what we are bad at in the west - companies can/do setup massive automated sites at huge expense, but there aren’t the skills/infrastructure to do this at the lower end of production (eg if you want to deploy one AMR in the west the AMR companies don’t want to talk to you, and there isn’t really an easy way to get one yourself without talking to an integrator which will charge tens of thousands which will wipe out the benefit, and we don’t have the skills within most small production companies to get a small robot arm/AMR working without external integrators - but a one-AMR deployment might be a more common scenario in China).
I was thinking the issue might be its much better for factories to automate sections of production over time.
It must be a huge expense with risk to design a new factory, automate it end to end and push live hoping the market expectation for the product exists and the automation is as good as planned.
Whereas if you have a manual production line you could have a massive advantage as they can automate out sections ongoing and it allows engineers to build skills in this also as they go.
They're automating the production of many items not just cars
https://archive.ph/DuZGe
>The overall number of robots added in China last year was 295,000, compared to 27,000 in Germany, 34,000 in the US and just 2,500 in the UK.
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Or you could have trade borders.
Not that I would doubt the guy who let Mike Tyson hit him in the head or anything, but don’t we have decades of research showing the negative effects of those?
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Yeah, and you’re going to be poorer as a whole. People in backwards places like rural and urban ‘hoods live reasonably well with very low labor productivity relatively speaking.
I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Basic survival for rural poor is a car.
When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison.
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> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.
My family owns a small plastic manufacturing plant in the US. This is the biggest problem they face. The western worker's appetite for a low skill monotonous manufacturing job is very small. The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
Q: Do you ever use an online job service to advertise jobs and collect applications?
Asking because my 5 sons all learned that job portals auto-trash applications w/o a job history (1st time job seekers).
Other viable but never-seen applicants: Minimal or sporadic job history, the most minimal of criminal records, the wrong zip code.
Seen but never hired: Fully qualified people who are awful at job interviews.
> job portals auto-trash applications w/o a job history (1st time job seekers).
It rather feels lately like civilization is the project of putting up as many catch-22's as we can.
I have no involvement with the plant directly. My understanding is the best luck they had was getting in good graces with local probation officers & craigslist classifieds. Job portals were pretty useless from my understanding.
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My local factories are mostly union, and they rely heavily on the union to help fill empty openings. They also set up booths at local job fairs and have a poster board with current openings (typically electricians and pipe fitters, sometimes line workers or machinists). The jobs also have benefits and vacation and sick time off. Everybody I know who works there is always trying to get as many overtime shifts as they can, especially the weekend and holiday ones which are double or 2.5X time. Electricians are IBEW, pipefitters are pipefitters’ union, rest are UAW even though it has nothing to do with cars.
General advice is if you’re down on your luck and need a job, you can go there and be at $25 an hour in a few months (step pay increases are mandated by the union). It’s not for everyone but it certainly has less turnover than the local McDonald’s which starts and stays around $14.
Unions should do a better job of marketing to employers that they can supply a trained work force. For example the IBEW here always has a full book of apprentices. An employer can get a qualified electrician along with an apprentice basically guaranteed.
> Unions should do a better job of marketing to employers that they can supply a trained work force.
Unions need to quit their management is evil message as well. Unions can do good, but when they call all management evil and breed resentment I can't blame companies for not wanting unions around.
The above is US centrist - in other countries the Unions don't do this.
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Feels like there are a bunch of factories like that in the Midwest even now. There's a Honda factory near the Columbus, OH area where you have a bunch of employees doing absolute monotonous work all day like checking if a screw is the right shape or something. These jobs are slowly getting automated but it's not like no one would do them if they are available.
Marysville
Not trying to troll but it seems like there must be some way to make the job at least a little interesting (e.g. by rotating the tasks required, providing a little space for skill development)?
I guess most of these jobs don’t allow for music or YouTube to be used during work?
I’m just thinking that people already spend a lot of time just consuming content, so if it were possible to watch YouTube while at the factory, maybe it wouldn’t be as unpopular.
I work in manufacturing. There are a few instances where watching YouTube may not be a huge hazard, but 98% of the roles I've seen the are reasonable reasons to not permit that. If nothing else, it'd be easy to let quality suffer which causes many bigger headaches.
I went to a panel discussion at a conference last year. Operations managers agreed labor was their biggest challenge. The manager for the promotional materials company who was probably around 60 discussed how he has loosened up a bit the last ~15 years. If someone sends a couple texts and it slightly impacts the units they (personally) do per hour, it was better than being super strict and losing employees. He had to adapt because the mentality was far different than when he started in the workforce.
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From my limited experience working in a factory environment, listening to music can be a real workplace safety issue if it reduces your ability to hear forklifts or coworkers shouting warnings.
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Music might be allowed - though the factory is often loud enough that it isn't really practical. You still need to be able to hear the safety signals though.
YouTube cannot be allowed - you need to be ready to work when the line moves the next part to you. There are also safety concerns with watching youtube instead of the various hazards which are always there.
Listening to music should work, no pun intended. Watching YouTube though?
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If they're losing employees, then they must not have that much higher pay or better benefits for it to be worth it to work there. I don't think you can easily blame it on the job being monotonous...
The job being monotonous is clearly enough of a downside that significantly higher pay and benefits are needed to attract talent.
Paying higher wages might help retain employees (or not! there are jobs people just won’t keep doing no matter the pay) but doing so could easily increase costs to the point where your product is uncompetitive in the market. It also might just be worth having higher turnover in order to keep prices low.
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Sorry but whenever I hear employers say "much better pay/benefits compared to the competition", the reality is in 99.9% of cases that it's a negligible difference for work that is harder and much less desirable.
How much higher is the pay? Cause the first thing that crosses into my mind is oil rigs, where they get paid more than many software engineers I know do, and there's a huge number of people doing the work happily despite the gruelling conditions. I realize not every business can pay Big Oil salaries, but still, it might be worth thinking realistically about whether your pay & benefits really are better than Walmart's (who are the number 1 employer in the states AFAIR, so they must be doing something right).
I bust out loud laughing the other day when I saw two jobs listed here in rusty southern Ohio.
One was for a semi-skilled manufacturing position. A little more than just assembly line, but nothing super special or niche. The other was a janitor position at the local public school system.
The differential was not huge, but the janitor paid more. Probably less hours too.
I don't mean for this to be as pointed as it probably will come off - but do you allow these workers to listen to music, take regular (not smoke) breaks, and do their job from a chair?
The few factory jobs I've seen were not only monotonous, they were needlessly soul crushing.
For no reason at all, you had to stand for hours on end. Your only breaks were lunch and smokes. Bathroom breaks were monitored like a crime. And you were afforded no distractions from the task, 100% focus required.
Coupled with no care put into making someone feel actually appreciated and the end-products being MBA shrinkflated garbage nobody could be proud of, it's not shocking that no one in their right mind would want to work there.
“MBA shrinkflated garbage”
I’m definitely going to find a way to slip this into a conversation.
> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
I'm SUPER doubtful of this.
When I last bumped into this, the local Amazon warehouse paid more than all the local manufacturing. It wasn't even close.
Local manufacturing got used to being a local monopoly and being able to underpay. Now that they're not a monopoly, all they do is whine and complain.
The issue is of course there is no market for US made goods at a good salary when other countries were selling their goods in the US market without impediment.
Tariffs were supposed to fix that, but now I don’t know if they are effective at all.
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Should hire us autists and allow us to program via voice commands and augmented reality.. i would love something almost automate-able while doing something that also needs higher brain functions.
The problem is opportunity cost
Of what?
Of getting on disability (back pain)
And getting more (from the govt.) to sit at home and cook up conspiracy theories on the Internet
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I think you're being too hard. Working at a Wal-Mart is much easier than a factory job, considering the latter is usually dangerous, and has more RSI risk.
It'd have to pay at least double, and me being in a predicament, for me to gamble with my health, and only until I find a better option.
> There's nothing wrong with "western workers"
Yeah nothing other than not being willing to work 9/9/6 for $2/day
Some jobs are just inherently bad. People do them, if there are no better jobs available. If you increase the wage, people will do the job for a while, until they have reached sufficient financial stability. Then they can afford to switch to another job that pays less but provides a better quality of life. Or to retire early in extreme cases.
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> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
Better pay + benefits than the most rock bottom lowest possible pay + benefits is really pathetic.
And based on the vagueness of your claims, we can assume full-time hours are also out of the picture, meaning no health insurance.
On top of that, tyranical small business owners are usually a nightmare to work for.
It's all full time 4x10 work with the employer covering 100% of health insurance premiums.
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Decent chance given that it's a plastics plant probably not unionized and probably in a red state that the air is not healthy to breathe.
Obviously, the “higher pay and significantly better benefits” are not actually significantly better. I’d rather we address that than just exploit some other workers overseas where they’re out of sight, out of mind. Honestly, it seems like tariffs on imported goods would be the way around this, but also, we need to be sure that money is going to the people doing the work, not just the owners.
Speaking of which, I don’t really know your business, but a post starting with “my family owns a business” and ending with “we lose workers to Walmart even though we pay them more” (with no specificity as to how much more)…. This really comes off like a problem with the business itself, not the overall market.
I’m not the OP. Heavy labor is… a lot of work. It’s rough in the body and some people aren’t cut for it.
In the 90s as a high school kid, I made $14/hr as a farmhand when the minimum wage was $4.75. They’d hire 4 crews of 4 guys each and we’d lose about half through the summer. They were great family to work for, but the work was hella hard. You could go retrieve shopping carts for $4.75 an hour and smoke weed all day, and many of my former coworkers did.
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I'm not sure I agree. Tariffs adds cost, unless domestic manufacturing can be done in a more or less cost effective way. Manufacturing works benefit of course but that's a overall small proportion of the population and ought to be (we probably don't want most people to be doing manufacturing work). But the added costs end up be a tax on everyone and a regressive one at that.
I also don't see offshoring manufacturing as inherently problematic or being out of sight, out of mind (of course exploitation can happen, but that's not inherently a part of offshoring manufacturing).
Workers in China, Vietnam etc are paid significantly less, but their cost of living is less as well. Plus unlike in the west, where manufacturing jobs are not desirable, in places where those manufacturing jobs land they typically provide an economic opportunity that isn't otherwise there.
Basically, why not have high cost of living places produce higher cost goods that pay more, and low cost of living places produce lower cost goods that pays less?
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Wrong. Kids brains are fried from phones / social media so much that they struggle with repetitive labor.
I see this all the time at an automotive plant. UAW wages are good, especially after the last contract, but we still get people who struggle putting a sticker on a car for an hour straight before their break or task switch.
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Using people for manufacturing fundamentally will never be cost competitive compared to cheaper markets. There are really only a few ways to resolve this in my view:
1. Give up and just outsource manufacturing and be ok with it
2. Invest heavily in automation, technology etc so we remove cost of labor from the equation. Or at least heavily minimize it
3. Put up trade barriers to artificially raise the cost of imported goods, which is what the current admin is trying to do, at least officially
1. leaves us dependent on other potentially adversarial countries, 3. increases the cost of goods sold so puts a burden on the population. So seems like 2. is the only way to go, if the country can get behind it. But it also inherently won't add a lot of jobs.
1. Ok then what do you make? 2. A bit too late for that given that China is also highly automated. 3. You would have to be serious for this to work.
As for your responses. 1 who is "us" 3. I mean some would be automated etc. There is actually data on how little the cost of labor adds to different parts of manufacturing. 2. You at least have a sustainable economy (I dont mean that in an environmental sense)
Typically as economies advance there is a shift to services and higher value add / higher skill manufacturing anyways. That can be the explicit strategy for the US as well. Focus on renewables, high tech, aerospace etc instead of the lower margin / lower skill manufacturing.
They're not mutually exclusive of course. There can be some national protection via tariffs on some types of manufacturing, while investing in automating some other types and just completely ignoring others and keeping those offshore. Problem currently is there doesn't seem to be a much of a strategy.
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US manufacturing keeps going up in dollar terms (see first graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...)
but employs less people as it automates.
# 3 is not a solution because it will only make American production more expensive and impoverish the population. It's a full disaster.
Japan used that strategy very successfully for at least a century. The high cost of imported goods encouraged consumers to buy domestic at prices that were also high, which subsidized exports at competitive prices. The Japanese public is less docile now, but this is one example where import restrictions worked well. I believe you can find other examples from the 20th century, but I'm not sure whether they would work well in the current global environment.
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I used to work in such a factory in Germany and turn-over was high :) A large pool of uni students doing their summer breaks propped up the place. They could afford to work there for 1-2 months mentally because they knew they'd go back to university (me, too). The few long-timers on the factory floor were mostly functioning alcoholics.
This was a family owned biz? Somehow, I imagine, I'd feel better slogging for an SME than in an "externally-funded" place.
I'm guessing that US needs a similar nation-wide service to connect gig-workers of all sorts to factories specifically.
My sister has been at a family owned small factory for 30+ years now. Eventually loyalty to family becomes a thing, especially when they’re loyal to you.
They are gradually not replacing staff as they retire or the occasional person quits on the factory floor due to automation. Their biggest challenge is who will own it in the future - the son and grandson have fully taken over from the founder, but nobody else in the family is really interested.
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Let’s do the easy thing, even if it is a geopolitical disaster for the West?
The slight problem with how AI is currently being marketed is that AI is going for the fun and creative jobs that people want to do, not the dull and repetitive jobs that nobody wants to do.
If every creative job is gone to the AI beast then there will be people willing to do factory work since nothing else will be available.
What's the point of GenAI in a manufacturing pipeline? Good ol' ML based AI automation is heavily used in larger manufacturing plants to identify defects
Rubbish. Ai has been used for many years in factories and modern AI will be even more useful. The issue is that most people aren't going to be the target of this sort of AI advertising and also that this takes longer than making a chat bot
i get what you're saying, and i'd probably quickly hate it too, but somehow industrial bakeries seem to still work this way