9 ms·

How Does America “Reshore” Skills That Have Disappeared?

54 points by hownottowrite 11y ago

Animats 11y ago
By training people, of course. If you want good welders, you need to set up a welding training course, hire people who can't weld, and teach them to weld properly. There's a corporate mindset that companies should have a "flexible workforce" available to them. This means expecting people to show up with the desired skills at some arbitrary location for a job with no job security and pays slightly above the minimum wage.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  Corollary: this only works if that corporate mindset becomes recognised as an economic and political liability, and not as a relentless driver of increased productivity and GDP.
- pjlegato 11y ago
  They expect that because, in many cases, it actually happens that way. They will stop expecting that only when it stops working.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  It usually only makes sense to invest in a good you own. An employer might train a worker, only to have the worker jump ship to a competitor immediately after receiving training. Historical labor force norms made it more difficult to change jobs which mitigated this problem. In a sense the employer owned the worker and training made sense. Workers now own themselves, so it's up to the worker to invest in their own training. Do we really want to go back to the older era?
  - nradov 11y ago
    No we don't want to go back, but there is a middle ground. The employer can loan workers the money to pay for training, and then forgive the loan after the worker completes a year or two on the job. That's how my former employer funded part of my graduate school tuition and it seemed completely fair to me.
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      I have no particular objection to schemes like this, though I'd certainly be wary of offering such a scheme as an employer. I'd be worried about some rabble rouser spinning it to the media as indentured servitude.
    - NeutronBoy 11y ago
      It's fairly common. Employers are often more explicit - they'll pay for the training, but if you leave the organisation with 6 months-1 year of completion of training then you have to pay them back for it.
  - Animats 11y ago
    Instead of forward, to slavery?
  - jbotttt 11y ago
    Implying the past is worse and the future better is a misstep[0]. As others have been saying the problem goes away when you have viable careers in X. At some point it will better value to train someone, though I imagine that point is further away then training yourself. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_Progress https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_Progress
wmccullough 11y ago
I think the answer is to incentivize people to get back into those skills. Likewise, the corporations need incentive to keep those jobs here. We, as a nation, can't do this if everything like those jobs gets sent over seas.
joezydeco 11y ago
If you want Americans to reenter the manufacturing workforce, you need to convince everyone that manufacturing is a decent path to a good wage and lifestyle. And then you need to make it actually happen. Unfortunately, over the last 25 years the US has decimated vocational education in the high schools while simultaneously convincing families that a 4-year college degree is the only way to a viable lifestyle. So we cram college-prep and AP classes down everyone's throats while we auction off the drafting tables and auto shop tools. It's for the best, since there's nowhere for a voc-ed student to go after graduation other than community college. Meanwhile we've moved on to dismantling unions and apprenticeships and all the other things that tracked workers into the factories and guaranteed them living wages. I'll let our European friends explain how they don't have this same problem.
- x0x0 11y ago
  I think decimated vocational education is a symptom not a cause. If manufacturing paid a living wage, we'd figure out a way to get people prepared to do it. It doesn't, and baring unions, never will again.
  - douche 11y ago
    Actually, voc tech careers do pay a pretty healthy wage, for certain things. Welders, electricians, plumbers, HVAC, mechanics, those are all still decent paying jobs. Hard, more dangerous than white-collar work, but you can make respectable money doing them. It's getting so the certifications are getting a little onerous, but it's still better than dumping tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into a college education. Especially for those that don't have the wherewithal or temperament to do school
    - x0x0 11y ago
      I can verify that's not true for electricians, at least in WI -- father is an electrician. For his generation, it was true. For the current generation, it's no longer the case.
    - joezydeco 11y ago
WalterBright 11y ago
Change regulatory and tax policy to make it less expensive to hire.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
As others have said, the answer to the question is simply training. But the better question which is hinted at in the article is "How should America rethink skills that disappeared?" One of the things that "drove out" manufacturers in the Bay Area were a slew of environmental regulations which added cost to the process with no customer visible benefit. That pushed manufacturers to use the same process where they didn't have those costs. And surprisingly places that witnesses the environmental impact of these practices didn't preemptively implement those controls themselves. So we have identical environmental damage elsewhere which was regulated out in the US. So a more interesting question for me is how do we rethink this stuff in a way that understands the external costs of the activity and works in a way that makes those costs containable?
- rayiner 11y ago
  The answer is simple. Tax imports in an amount equal to the avoided costs of environmental and labor regulations from producing things abroad.
  - SilasX 11y ago
    Simple, welfare-enhancing, politically-popular: pick any two :-p
  - ChuckMcM 11y ago
    Heh, always important to remember Mencken though :-) Looking at the historical effectiveness of tariffs suggests they are not effective at solving this particular problem, although if you were proposing something different, such as a national sales tax which would be applied to different products based on their country of origin then I would agree that hasn't been explored. But more specifically, using the power of the state to impose taxes as a means of repricing the effectiveness of capital can only work when capital is itself priced on the same basis. Arbitrarily adjusting the exchange rage for Reminbi to account for price differentials can (and does) happen. What is worse, applying the tax allows practices such as child labor to be "priced under the tax" which does nothing for the children at all. Effectively rethinking the system such that a good can be manufactured in the US or nearby at a cost that both allows the humans involved to have a living wage, and one which makes sweatshops impractical, solves both problems, both increasing the standard of living for workers here and removing the market forces that enslave children far away. I recognize however the essential truth in your suggestion which is the limit on anyone's ability to make systemic changes in a market can only reach so far. Altering the economics through taxation or tariffs is achievable through fiat and one has to weigh that against the negative incentives it creates.
bsder 11y ago
The answer is simple. Pay them money. Why is it businesses never seem to see capitalism as the answer when it means they have to write checks instead of cash them?
- handedness 11y ago
  Because customers will ultimately pay a higher price for the goods in question, which is fairly terrible for a consumption-based economy. Manufacturing will always happen where labor costs are lower (assuming the other requirements are in place), or lowest: automated. And American companies are already well into the process of moving production from Asia to Mexico.
  - sundaeofshock 11y ago
    Why does it always seem that the only solution to higher wages is to increase the cost of the good? How about this solution: pay the workers higher wages, keep prices flat, and take a lower profit.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
alvern 11y ago
I rent out rooms in my house to two peers that are both college dropouts. Both work jobs that net less than $12/hour. I keep telling them to go to trade school but they never follow through. I got a 4 year degree, realized it was worthless (BFA in Digital Art), and proceeded to go to trade school for a certificate in manufacturing. Manufacturing sucks. For a hacker it is easy. I could quit today and be employed again by next week. The pay is good but not great. For someone votech was meant for, I don't think they have the same mobility as I do. Personally I keep looking to jump into development but I just haven't found the opportunity yet.
williesleg 11y ago
Simple, elect Donald J Trump.
_ph_ 11y ago
A robust economy needs a proper amount of manufacturing. While Wall Street might post revenue numbers a manufacturer can only dream of, the financial crisis of the past should show clearly enough that finance and services alone cannot sustain a national economy. The good news is though, that globalization is a two-way road. In our day and age, manual labor becomes a constantly smaller part of the industrial production costs. This means, that even at higher wages, production can be competitive, if it is balanced by quality, less transport cost and being closer to your customer.
swamp40 11y ago
I think the bigger problem is how does America compete with $1.50/hr wages for skilled workers? If we could, the companies would pay for any necessary training. It doesn't cost much in the long run. But of course we can't compete with that. And it's not changing any time soon, with the yuan pegged to the dollar, and the existing trade agreements. That's why Steve Jobs told President Obama "Those jobs aren't coming back".
- whistlerbrk 11y ago
  I haven't the faintest idea why you're being downvoted when you're the only one who actually hit the real issue directly. Free trade isn't free. We can not possibly compete fairly with countries who employ indentured servants or slaves compared to our working condition expectations and wages. Nor should we. We need fair trade if we want to keep manufacturing in the country. Further, I'd say it needs to be sustainable if we're going to ever correctly price in the true cost of a product into the retail price. That by definition includes the cradle-to-grave life cycle of a product and all of its constituent parts and raw ingredients.
- csense 11y ago
  > how does America compete with $1.50/hr wages for skilled workers? Simple, figure out a way to approximate how much more it would cost if they paid the overseas workers US level wages, then tax it to make it actually cost that much more to US consumers.
ThomPete 11y ago
Thats not how its going to work. It's no issue getting production back to the US is just wont be with any workers in there.
andrewjl 11y ago
One option is for a group of large manufacturers to come together and sponsor a paid apprenticeship program. The program would have performance standards just like a real job would. Besides the PR benefits, it could be a cost effective way to determine which workers to hire in a way that is less risky than just hiring them outright.
alphydan 11y ago
Program robots with those skills?
RGamma 11y ago
While classical manufacturing jobs may be on the decline in the western world, there's actually a programme in Germany to counteract this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_4.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_4.0) whose premise is production of customisable products at scale, whereby the focus is on automation engineering instead of manual labor (that programme is very much a WIP right now; I know the article mentioned it briefly, but I feel it could be a viable way to retain/regain competitiveness in manufacturing). Siemens, VW and others made short videos on this (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPRURtORnis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPRURtORnis or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTl8w6yAjds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTl8w6yAjds)
pc2g4d 11y ago
Note: the article seems to conflate the U.S. trade deficit with the U.S. federal debt. Not crucial to its argument, though.

54 points by hownottowrite 11y ago

By training people, of course. If you want good welders, you need to set up a welding training course, hire people who can't weld, and teach them to weld properly. There's a corporate mindset that companies should have a "flexible workforce" available to them. This means expecting people to show up with the desired skills at some arbitrary location for a job with no job security and pays slightly above the minimum wage.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
Corollary: this only works if that corporate mindset becomes recognised as an economic and political liability, and not as a relentless driver of increased productivity and GDP.
pjlegato 11y ago
They expect that because, in many cases, it actually happens that way. They will stop expecting that only when it stops working.
yummyfajitas 11y ago
It usually only makes sense to invest in a good you own. An employer might train a worker, only to have the worker jump ship to a competitor immediately after receiving training. Historical labor force norms made it more difficult to change jobs which mitigated this problem. In a sense the employer owned the worker and training made sense. Workers now own themselves, so it's up to the worker to invest in their own training. Do we really want to go back to the older era?
- nradov 11y ago
  No we don't want to go back, but there is a middle ground. The employer can loan workers the money to pay for training, and then forgive the loan after the worker completes a year or two on the job. That's how my former employer funded part of my graduate school tuition and it seemed completely fair to me.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    I have no particular objection to schemes like this, though I'd certainly be wary of offering such a scheme as an employer. I'd be worried about some rabble rouser spinning it to the media as indentured servitude.
  - NeutronBoy 11y ago
    It's fairly common. Employers are often more explicit - they'll pay for the training, but if you leave the organisation with 6 months-1 year of completion of training then you have to pay them back for it.
- Animats 11y ago
  Instead of forward, to slavery?
- jbotttt 11y ago
  Implying the past is worse and the future better is a misstep[0]. As others have been saying the problem goes away when you have viable careers in X. At some point it will better value to train someone, though I imagine that point is further away then training yourself. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_Progress https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_Progress

wmccullough 11y ago

I think the answer is to incentivize people to get back into those skills. Likewise, the corporations need incentive to keep those jobs here. We, as a nation, can't do this if everything like those jobs gets sent over seas.

joezydeco 11y ago

If you want Americans to reenter the manufacturing workforce, you need to convince everyone that manufacturing is a decent path to a good wage and lifestyle. And then you need to make it actually happen. Unfortunately, over the last 25 years the US has decimated vocational education in the high schools while simultaneously convincing families that a 4-year college degree is the only way to a viable lifestyle. So we cram college-prep and AP classes down everyone's throats while we auction off the drafting tables and auto shop tools. It's for the best, since there's nowhere for a voc-ed student to go after graduation other than community college. Meanwhile we've moved on to dismantling unions and apprenticeships and all the other things that tracked workers into the factories and guaranteed them living wages. I'll let our European friends explain how they don't have this same problem.

x0x0 11y ago
I think decimated vocational education is a symptom not a cause. If manufacturing paid a living wage, we'd figure out a way to get people prepared to do it. It doesn't, and baring unions, never will again.
- douche 11y ago
  Actually, voc tech careers do pay a pretty healthy wage, for certain things. Welders, electricians, plumbers, HVAC, mechanics, those are all still decent paying jobs. Hard, more dangerous than white-collar work, but you can make respectable money doing them. It's getting so the certifications are getting a little onerous, but it's still better than dumping tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into a college education. Especially for those that don't have the wherewithal or temperament to do school
  - x0x0 11y ago
    I can verify that's not true for electricians, at least in WI -- father is an electrician. For his generation, it was true. For the current generation, it's no longer the case.
  - joezydeco 11y ago

WalterBright 11y ago

Change regulatory and tax policy to make it less expensive to hire.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

As others have said, the answer to the question is simply training. But the better question which is hinted at in the article is "How should America rethink skills that disappeared?" One of the things that "drove out" manufacturers in the Bay Area were a slew of environmental regulations which added cost to the process with no customer visible benefit. That pushed manufacturers to use the same process where they didn't have those costs. And surprisingly places that witnesses the environmental impact of these practices didn't preemptively implement those controls themselves. So we have identical environmental damage elsewhere which was regulated out in the US. So a more interesting question for me is how do we rethink this stuff in a way that understands the external costs of the activity and works in a way that makes those costs containable?

rayiner 11y ago
The answer is simple. Tax imports in an amount equal to the avoided costs of environmental and labor regulations from producing things abroad.
- SilasX 11y ago
  Simple, welfare-enhancing, politically-popular: pick any two :-p
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  Heh, always important to remember Mencken though :-) Looking at the historical effectiveness of tariffs suggests they are not effective at solving this particular problem, although if you were proposing something different, such as a national sales tax which would be applied to different products based on their country of origin then I would agree that hasn't been explored. But more specifically, using the power of the state to impose taxes as a means of repricing the effectiveness of capital can only work when capital is itself priced on the same basis. Arbitrarily adjusting the exchange rage for Reminbi to account for price differentials can (and does) happen. What is worse, applying the tax allows practices such as child labor to be "priced under the tax" which does nothing for the children at all. Effectively rethinking the system such that a good can be manufactured in the US or nearby at a cost that both allows the humans involved to have a living wage, and one which makes sweatshops impractical, solves both problems, both increasing the standard of living for workers here and removing the market forces that enslave children far away. I recognize however the essential truth in your suggestion which is the limit on anyone's ability to make systemic changes in a market can only reach so far. Altering the economics through taxation or tariffs is achievable through fiat and one has to weigh that against the negative incentives it creates.

bsder 11y ago

The answer is simple. Pay them money. Why is it businesses never seem to see capitalism as the answer when it means they have to write checks instead of cash them?

handedness 11y ago
Because customers will ultimately pay a higher price for the goods in question, which is fairly terrible for a consumption-based economy. Manufacturing will always happen where labor costs are lower (assuming the other requirements are in place), or lowest: automated. And American companies are already well into the process of moving production from Asia to Mexico.
- sundaeofshock 11y ago
  Why does it always seem that the only solution to higher wages is to increase the cost of the good? How about this solution: pay the workers higher wages, keep prices flat, and take a lower profit.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

alvern 11y ago

I rent out rooms in my house to two peers that are both college dropouts. Both work jobs that net less than $12/hour. I keep telling them to go to trade school but they never follow through. I got a 4 year degree, realized it was worthless (BFA in Digital Art), and proceeded to go to trade school for a certificate in manufacturing. Manufacturing sucks. For a hacker it is easy. I could quit today and be employed again by next week. The pay is good but not great. For someone votech was meant for, I don't think they have the same mobility as I do. Personally I keep looking to jump into development but I just haven't found the opportunity yet.

williesleg 11y ago

Simple, elect Donald J Trump.

_ph_ 11y ago

A robust economy needs a proper amount of manufacturing. While Wall Street might post revenue numbers a manufacturer can only dream of, the financial crisis of the past should show clearly enough that finance and services alone cannot sustain a national economy. The good news is though, that globalization is a two-way road. In our day and age, manual labor becomes a constantly smaller part of the industrial production costs. This means, that even at higher wages, production can be competitive, if it is balanced by quality, less transport cost and being closer to your customer.

swamp40 11y ago

I think the bigger problem is how does America compete with $1.50/hr wages for skilled workers? If we could, the companies would pay for any necessary training. It doesn't cost much in the long run. But of course we can't compete with that. And it's not changing any time soon, with the yuan pegged to the dollar, and the existing trade agreements. That's why Steve Jobs told President Obama "Those jobs aren't coming back".

whistlerbrk 11y ago
I haven't the faintest idea why you're being downvoted when you're the only one who actually hit the real issue directly. Free trade isn't free. We can not possibly compete fairly with countries who employ indentured servants or slaves compared to our working condition expectations and wages. Nor should we. We need fair trade if we want to keep manufacturing in the country. Further, I'd say it needs to be sustainable if we're going to ever correctly price in the true cost of a product into the retail price. That by definition includes the cradle-to-grave life cycle of a product and all of its constituent parts and raw ingredients.
csense 11y ago
> how does America compete with $1.50/hr wages for skilled workers? Simple, figure out a way to approximate how much more it would cost if they paid the overseas workers US level wages, then tax it to make it actually cost that much more to US consumers.

ThomPete 11y ago

Thats not how its going to work. It's no issue getting production back to the US is just wont be with any workers in there.

andrewjl 11y ago

One option is for a group of large manufacturers to come together and sponsor a paid apprenticeship program. The program would have performance standards just like a real job would. Besides the PR benefits, it could be a cost effective way to determine which workers to hire in a way that is less risky than just hiring them outright.

alphydan 11y ago

Program robots with those skills?

RGamma 11y ago

While classical manufacturing jobs may be on the decline in the western world, there's actually a programme in Germany to counteract this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_4.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_4.0) whose premise is production of customisable products at scale, whereby the focus is on automation engineering instead of manual labor (that programme is very much a WIP right now; I know the article mentioned it briefly, but I feel it could be a viable way to retain/regain competitiveness in manufacturing). Siemens, VW and others made short videos on this (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPRURtORnis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPRURtORnis or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTl8w6yAjds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTl8w6yAjds)

pc2g4d 11y ago

Note: the article seems to conflate the U.S. trade deficit with the U.S. federal debt. Not crucial to its argument, though.