>"Stretched thin" means there are few of you. Yes, there's less participation from young people in manufacturing. The pay doesn't go up, the plants go to Mexico

>"Stretched thin" means there are few of you. Yes, there's less participation from young people in manufacturing. The pay doesn't go up, the plants go to Mexico or China. During covid when a bunch of old timers left my factory tore down a few machines and shipped them to Mexico because young people like myself aren't coming into the field fast enough to replace the boomers. As other countries catch up in tech skills you might find yourself in a similar position. >If you can make similar money in easier work... Nerd sniping. Some people were just born with a wrench in their hand and need to be solving practical problems. I just can't work jobs like that without being bored out of my mind and miserable. >I would imagine that what you do is in fact skilled labor it should pay more... Buddy I can MIG TIG and stick weld, I'm a mechanic, I've worked as a qualified person on 480V three phase, and low voltage controls, as well as hydraulics and pneumatics. I can drive 10 ton trucks stick, take apart and put a motor back together, and locate the clitoris with only a bubble level, ruler, protractor, line out chalk, twine, pocket calculator, and a stud finder. Imagine what you want. Macroeconomic principles are of little comfort in the real world, where social forces and political forces collide and such simple game theory doesn't hold up. The company can pay less and ask more, paying less and asking more has become common and nobody wants to rock the boat and lose the immense power gap between labor and management by competing on the basis of wages to attract talent. Besides, a lack of manpower means you can just go somewhere else. The world supply chain, even during covid, is so robust at scale that physical location means little, but relative economic wealth and power means a lot. I'm not bitching, I eat three meals a day and pay rent. But tech has it good and I see a lot of people not realize how much that can change overnight. I expect a great deal more people will work in tech in the west, and less at my kind of job, so I'd like to see workers realize that they have to entrench the current available quality of life, for the future generations. Because the people in manufacturing through the 50s-70s didn't entrench the quality of life in such a way it could survive financialization and lean strategies of the 80s.