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So I am at the beginning of my mechanical and materials engineering education, but I do know enough to tell you that making your injection molding come out okay
by lsc 9y ago
So I am at the beginning of my mechanical and materials engineering education, but I do know enough to tell you that making your injection molding come out okay is not easier than swapping the head gasket on your motorcycle.
Machines need to be operated and maintained. How do you properly load the feed stock? How clean does it need to be? Will humidity duck it up?
A lot of this is lore and experience, too, because the manuals are often pretty bad(or written for the engineers, which is bad when you have someone less educated doing the operations).
I mean yeah, you can be the apprentice and do all this under the supervision of someone more experienced, but usually pay scales accordingly. I am not saying it is as hard as chip layout or anything, but there is skill and experience involved.
- brandonmenc 9y agoSure, in a modern plastics factory there will be a couple of machine experts on shift who roam around the shop floor troubleshooting and fixing things. But for every one of them, there are dozens if not hundreds of workers just standing there feeding and unloading the machine, pressing buttons, cutting flash off of parts, and loading pallets. There are a ton of jobs in a factory that require little to no skill or intelligence, even today. I'm not sure why everyone is trying to make it seem like everything is high skilled labor, because it's not, even in a heavy factory. Trust me - the guy in the forge doesn't need to be even as remotely smart as a programmer.
- lsc 9y agoHuh. But I would assume that pay scales with skill? I mean I did warehouse labor one summer myself for a few months, and they mostly wanted people who could show up on time, who could pay enough attention to get a list of compact disks into a shipping box, but it paid almost nothing. (And I can't really show up on time, and that level of focus on something that boring is quite difficult for me, so it didn't last long) I assume that those who have good paying factory jobs are going to have jobs that require a degree of skill. I kinda find it unlikely that this has changed over time. My point is just that I think people might be thinking of work that requires skill or training or something when they talk about high paying factory work. I don't think the 50s were so different that unskilled labor paid the same as skilled or semi skilled labor, and there is a lot of the latter to be done in a factory.
- brandonmenc 9y ago> I assume that those who have good paying factory jobs are going to have jobs that require a degree of skill. I kinda find it unlikely that this has changed over time. In union shops, the pay rate is dictated mostly by seniority. There's definitely some skill-based variation, but the guy driving a forklift for 40 years is likely making more than the fresh hire wiring the electronics on a train.
- lsc 9y agoI thought pay was stratified among roles. For that matter, I would assume that the two would be in different unions. I don't think a forklift operator would be in the ibew with the electrician.
- brandonmenc 9y agoafaik, large shops are usually organized by a single union. For example, GE Aviation is organized by IBEW and GE Transportation is organized by UE. The situation you're talking about, I think, is more common in construction.