Comment by phillyboy82

Then long hours of repetitive labor are a skill which needs to be attracted for.

So are you saying China doesn't have smartphones or social media?

UAW wages are "good" but you have to realize that you are competing with a service economy's leftover labor pool. All the good candidates left your manufacturing town already to get a job in an office tower where "good" UAW wages aren't really much to write home about.

For the last multiple decades graduating students have been facing a declining manufacturing job market where it makes just about no sense to get into manufacturing when they can get a degree and work a desk job with better pay and actually be in a job market that's growing over time rather than shrinking.

UAW wages are "good" but only compared to other jobs that are probably in the bottom 50% of desirability, and you're under constant threat of plant closures or the shift toward non-union plants in places like Alabama and South Carolina.

And oh yeah, you're stuck in some declining semi-rural rust belt manufacturing town rather than getting to live your best life in a vibrant growing urban area.

A full 35% of Americans have a bachelor's degree or higher, and those numbers are even higher when you are looking at states/counties that have the major population centers. The county map makes it look like basically every urban area has at least 40-50% bachelor's degree attainment, with standouts like the Boston area having some counties with over 60% attainment.

Almost 30% of Americans work remotely at least some time during the week.

So, basically half of the urbanized population has better options than working in a factory.

In China, working a factory is being compared to a much worse prior standard of living that was much more recent. Today's factory workers were yesterday's subsistence farmers. Americans haven't experienced that level of widespread poverty in at least 100 years.

> we still get people who struggle putting a sticker on a car for an hour straight before their break or task switch.

That seems wholly reasonable to me. Expecting humans to be able to do work like that, and especially to get satisfaction from such work, seems like the aberration.

finally a positive framing on social media addiction