We hear from the Republicans, especially the current reality TV star who is now running for the presidency on the Republican ticket and we even hear if from too many Democrats. Bring back manufacturing and labor will benefit, as if somehow, manufacturing jobs are immune from the exportation of the wealthy class. The reality TV star says that the $30 an hour manufacturing job that was once in Michigan that’s now a $2 an hour job Mexico will come home and return to $30. How? No one knows. They want to believe that because it’s “Manufacturing” it will pay higher wages for labor.
Why are jobs in “Manufacturing” better paying jobs than other jobs? Why is loading a plating machine with parts and then taking them out and putting them on a pallet a higher paying job then loading plates in a dishwasher in a restaurant and then taking them out and putting them on a shelf? Both jobs are just about the same, same level of skills required, same amount of physical ability. What magic does “manufacturing” hold and why does it only hold this magic in the USA and not in Mexico?
Finally, last question, why does there not seem to be any correlation between the wages of CEO’s who work in manufacturing and those who do not? CEO’s in Apparel and Accessory Stores make about $5.5 Million a year and CEO’s in Computer Integrated Systems Design make less at $5.3 Million but CEO’s of General Merchandise Stores make a lot more at over $7 Million.
Hello? Anyone Bueller?
Anyone who has, you know, lived on their own knows how to load a dishwasher, run it, empty it, and reshelve the dishes. I for one would need to be trained in how to manufacture pretty much anything.
I’ve worked in manufacturing. There are not unique “skills” needed for the most part. The entire concept of mass production, central to successful manufacturing, is in part, tied to the individual worker doing the same job over and over. When I worked in a plant that manufactured the Xerox 4000 copier back in 1975, I noticed that each station completed one operation, over and over. When I toured the largest forklift manufacturing plant in the USA a few years ago, the same held true. One station installed the wheels, over and over and over. One installed the counterweight, again and again.
So why do manufacturing jobs pay more?
It’s not because it’s “manufacturing”. It’s because the workers have political power to set the rules of the economy.
You realize that nearly all those lines have been replaced with robots, right? So far, nobody has figured out how to create a robot that loads dishes in a restaurant kitchen.
I suspect that if forklifts are being manufactured that way in the USA today, there is an overseas manufacturer that uses a robot that works faster, makes fewer mistakes, and doesn’t get overtime. That robot is also likely to be capable of producing whatever specific model and accessories are needed for each unit (“mass customization”).
You don’t seem to understand that a key reason why unions have become so weak is that nearly all those union jobs that you described have been lost to automation. The days when unions have enough political power to set the rules of the economy are gone.
That’s not only because of GOP union-busting. I’d say it was the reverse — the GOP was able to bust the unions because there are fewer and fewer workers left to object.
The remaining manufacturing jobs that pay more are not at all like what you describe here. Many of them involve the feeding and care of those robots — jobs that demand highly trained and skilled workers, many of them engineers and programmers.
While not on the scale-per-company of the old large manufacturing firms, there is the workable option of small-scale value-added manufacturing, per this article in the New York Times.
While these factories won’t totally solve the problem, they can put a dent in it.
I encourage us to dig deeper.
From the link:
Earlier in the piece, a unit price of $11/basket is cited. Let’s use $10 to make the arithmetic easier.
So when Mr. Greenblatt arrived, the company revenue was $800,000. That means, in rough numbers, 80,000 baskets at $10 a piece — produced by 18 workers.
Today’s revenue is cited at over $5M. That is FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND baskets — a half a million. Those baskets are produced by 24 workers.
How many millions of wire baskets per year can an economy buy? The 2010 population of Baltimore was about 620,000 people. So 24 people out of 620,000 have a good job. What kind of “dent” is this?
Meanwhile, this piece doesn’t tell us anything about the profitability or balance sheet of this company. I wonder how much of that $5M/year goes to the 24 employees. The figure of “over $50,000 per year” is cited for each of several employees. Let’s assume $100,000. So it sounds like the company payroll is at most $2.4M/year. Where does the remaining $2.6M/year go?
I think we’re whistling past the cemetery here. I suspect that the robots at this company will continue to increase their capacity each year. Each year’s increase in capacity must be met by an increase in sales volume, or pressure will mount to reduce the headcount from 24.
On another thread, we read of the shuttered Spalding factory in Chicopee. That plant employed a THOUSAND workers.
We would need FORTY Chicopee-area Marlin’s to make up for that. I just don’t see it happening.
The era of labor is over.
..of small scale manufacturing on a firm-by-firm basis.
However, due to issues of flexibility and distribution-cost, there is a bigger market for domestic small-scale manufacturing than you might think.
Manufacturing paid well because manufacturing jobs were union jobs. Unions need to fight to organize new industries to make sure those pay well, and fight for policymakers who respect workers’ rights.
And our failure to take the danger of their erosion seriously or fight for their rights to organize is a key reason why Trump was able to rely
On resentment politics do win over so many workers. And they aren’t all racist. Not when Trump is winning counties Obama won by double digits four years ago.
…what seems to be the divide between the leadership of existing unions who still faithfully endorse Democrats, and the rank and file who don’t always follow?
Guess who will get the worst of a Trump administration? The white working class. Guess who they will blame? Minorities. Will they be interested in setting up tax and labor policies that would actually help them? No, because the people who would actually implement those things will always react the same way to someone who puts a “Trump that Bitch” sign on the back of a rusty pickup.
At some point, the response to someone that doggedly insists on shooting himself in the foot, and then complains about his foot injury has to be “Well, what did you expect, you dope?”
Look you all thought you could win without them, you were just proven wrong. Doubling down on a strategy that didn’t work is just handing Trump a second term.
Obama knew how to win these voters, Hillary didn’t. Bernie knew how to win them, Hillary didn’t. Time to nominate someone else who does next time. Lecturing white people on food stamps facing another round of plant closures about checking their privilege is the sure fire path to a permanent minority. And if our base is demanding that fealty then they are just as dumb as the pro-lifers on the right.
Sherrod Brown has a 100% rating from all the liberal interest groups and has won these voters decisively twice. It’s because all he talks about is jobs and trade. Time to learn from what works.
You mean what Hillary’s campaign denigrated as being a “single issue candidate”?
… They made shit up about Hillary Clinton and she lost. Just exactly like they they made shit up about Al Gore and he lost. Just exactly like they made shit up about John Kerry and he lost.
They made shit up about Obama too, but the near total collapse of the entire global economy kinda put them off their game long enough for Obama to thread the needle.
You think they would not have lied and made shit up about Bernie Sanders if he ever even stood a whiff of a chance? If you think that, you’re not working with a full deck.
The insane part is that nobody really believed the lies….at all. Just convenient fiction to paper over their racist, sexist — entirely deplorable — motivations they can’t articulate. There is a whole world of Orwellian doublethink (but you can think if it as ‘the upside down’ if that’s easier on your brain) at play here and your willingness to blame Hillary Clinton for the lies told about her is a solid part of it.
And it hasn’t effected his approval rating or his success as a politician. Had it been a head to head against Trump, he wins it going away 58-41 according to exit polls. Bernie likely would’ve outperformed her in the states she lost. He won the same counties Trump carried in the general decisively in the primaries.
This is not to say that there were a lot of unfair and sexist attacks against Hillary Clinton, there were. This is not to say a large segment of America is comfortable with a racist sexual assaulter as President. They are and that is incredibly scary.
But figuring out why a county that went to Obama by 25% four years ago went to Trump by 6% is a key question for our post mortem. And recognizing the self inflicted wounds is as essential as attacking those that justifiably deserve our scorn.
It looks very much like the new government will finish the job of completely shredding Barack Obama’s legacy within the first 100 days.
I really struggle with your logic here. Bernie Sanders lost decisively to Hillary Clinton in most primaries where actual people actually voted. He won a few by a hairs-breadth — long after everybody, including Mr. Sanders, knew that he had already lost. How is it that someone who is as bad a politician as you claim Ms. Clinton is could nevertheless beat Mr. Sanders so decisively, unless Mr. Sanders was even worse? How then do you figure that Mr. Sanders would have done any better against the Trumpist avalanche?
The smear machine never had to even get oiled up against Bernie Sanders. Had he somehow been the nominee, I am quite sure it would have been JUST as nasty, just as divisive, just as dishonest — same circus, different clown.
See, I think that America actually was NOT ready for a black president. I think Mr. Obama managed to accomplish admirable victories in two successive campaigns — and literally nothing beyond that.
I think that by the time we’re 100 days into the Donald Trump administration, we will be well on our way to undoing pretty the ENTIRE legacy of the Democratic party. I think we’ll see LBJ’s great society in pieces on the floor. The GOP has been trying to dismantle the New Deal for decades, and this administration will do it. I think Social Security is in grave danger.
I anticipate a Supreme Court that will reverse the same-sex marriage decisions, reverse Roe-v-Wade, and on and on and on. I encourage you to refresh yourself about the promises Mr. Trump has been making for the last year and take another pass through his list of SC nominees.
1) On Sanders
I said that two weeks ago that it is hard to see since the Castro tapes didn’t come out and nastier stuff could’ve been spent against him. It is also hard to see if the gender and racial dynamics at play in the general weren’t a factor in the primary. That said, he knew how to talk to the voters who were left behind by this economy and she didn’t. That’s a potentially decisive difference.
2) She was supposed to win
I think we can’t argue with that. She lost this as much as he did, analyzing why is critical to avoiding this in the future.
3) On Everything Else
Look Tom, I am really depressed and despondent about this election. I am trying to think of how we can forward, I don’t want to be here four years later. But I am with you 100% at how bad things are going to be and why. I am not against you, you’re a great guy and I think we can move forward together. I’m an American first, a progressive second, and a Democrat third. As an American, I hope he does well. As a progressive, I suspect he won’t. As a Democrat, I want us to retake Congress to at least check his agenda. A lot of work to do.
Who praised universal health care, abortion rights, gun control. Is there any reason to doubt that he still has these feelings? In trying to look for the bright spot in all of this, I suspect that his children are more like us and they will have an impact on him.
It’s actually not so much Donald Trump that terrifies me, it is the sixty million Americans who either celebrated or ignored his hate-filled campaign rhetoric.
Just like Hillary Clinton (or Bernie Sanders), Donald Trump will do what Americans make him do. Right now, that looks like an absolute disaster.
…that this campaign was all a marketing strategy and he will ultimately show himself to have punked all of us.
Yeah. Because once in the job he did as good a job as he was able. The whole and entire point of smearing Gore, Kerry and Clinton was to prevent them from doing the job. If people were honest with themselves, yourself included, Clinton would have the opportunity to show what she’s capable of… You’d probably be her biggest fan… and, having done the job well, would have changed the entire game. For the better.
I am proud to have voted for team reality. That you want to blame Clinton for this loss, makes me ashamed to know you.
I am just trying to wrap my head around it. I voted for her and proudly, donated to her in fact. And we don’t know each other, but I am ashamed you take everything so personally here. A lot of your commentary is insightful and am glad to have you around. We just disagree on ‘why’, not whether the loss was a good thing or a bad thing. It was most certainly a bad thing.
… The reality is that there are worse things than a temporary political loss. Not knowing who and what you are, for starters…. You say we ‘don’t know each other.’. I know you. I know, too, that you don’t know yourself. I know more about you than you do…
And I know that reality always triumphs, in the long run.
Your last sentence is over the top.
I do know James. Agree or disagree, I am proud to have known him and I am sorry that he is on his way back to Chicago.
I fully expect to pass my MTELs and be teaching back here this fall, but my wife has been juggling two jobs and a full time nursing program that’s got another 8 months to go and I’ve been putting in 12-15 hour days for months and we’re both burned out. This was the halfway point of the expected time apart and we can’t hack it anymore.
Keep up the Stammitchs and if you got an open somerville apartment in September let me know 😉
The reason manufacturing paid well was the costs of mistakes. I worked in manufacturing all my life also.
Loading a dishwasher, loading a kiln, they are similar jobs but what happens when a batch comes out wrong? The dishes go back through and this time the guy sets the temperature correctly. In a kiln if the batch is not heated correctly when you open the door you have $5,000 worth of material which cannot be “refired”.
Mixing a cake, mixing a batch of XXXE-67. The cake takes 2lbs flour, 3 eggs, tbsp butter. The E-67 3,000 lbs xanthum, 7,000lbs 57A, 2,000 of 38B. The cake is ruined you lose $10, the E-67 mixed wrong you lose $10,000. (been there).
I worked in food prep in high school and made minimum wage, 2 years later in the factory (non union) and made what a college grad started at.
But Tom is right, when I started to deliver a 100lb bag of material to the loading dock would involve 10 people, after automation maybe 3.