7 ms·

Who wants to work in a factory?

32 points by HR01 2y ago

cadamsdotcom 2y ago
Plenty of US workers work in factories. They're churning out immense amounts of software. Some examples of this type of factory are Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft. Other people work in other types of factories - like music studios, where they churn out music that gets billions of streams. Singling out a specific type of production as this article does requires blinding oneself to all the other types of production happening in an economy. Assembly lines needed tremendous amounts of people to do essentially the same job, thus making the whole economy simpler to try to keep in your head at once. Today a tremendous breadth of goods are being produced so it's harder to see, but the opportunities are there - they just don't all look the same like in the very short era when factories dominated employment. The article (unintentionally I am sure) commits a fallacy of quoting absolute numbers of university graduates without providing comparisons (eg. population size differences between US and China). Even if the US produces fewer factory-capable workers per capita, modern factories manufacturing goods require less people to do the same thing thanks to automation, so there's not the same need to churn out people to work in them. Hence higher education is geared toward providing more diverse skills in the US than in China.
nickff 2y ago
I think this is admirable, but probably hopeless. Permitting and regulations draw out timelines (and increase uncertainty/risk), reducing returns on investment, while tax policy makes capital investment very expensive. The global North is has enacted many deterrents to manufacturing, and doesn’t seem very interested in lowering any of them. The reason that software and services have prospered while manufacturing has stagnated is not marketing, its incentive structure.
FredPret 2y ago
I’m an industrial engineer from the 3rd world who now works in software in the 1st world. The transition wasn’t easy and took many years. Make of that what you will.
Workaccount2 2y ago
No one. No one wants to work in the factory. The US is an advanced economy and the population wants advanced jobs with advanced pay. Stamping sheet steel all day for $28/hr in a hot warehouse? No thanks. Maintaining a login page for $64/hr from your couch? Yes please.
- edflsafoiewq 2y ago
  No one wants to work retail either. So what?
- Kim_Bruning 2y ago
  Who says factory work is all about stamping sheet steel all day? How about getting to debug your code with a forklift? O:-) Been there, done that. Overhead crane too! Or dealing with software crashes leading to hardware crashes ... using a hydraulic jack. Or "Kiiiim, it's an electrical hardware failure, I can't fix that!" "Well that, or we could ask this here electrotechnician who's standing right next to us?" Speaking of: A freelance electrotechnician brings in about Eur 100 per hour around these parts, and gets to go on adventures around the world, because they're always in demand.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > How about getting to debug your code with a forklift? O:-) What does that mean? You're... debugging a forklift, or using a forklift as a debugging tool?
    - Kim_Bruning 2y ago
      In my case: forklift as a debugging tool! If you write code for an intelligent conveyor system, at some point you're going need to do an integration test to see if it actually works. So far, I haven't had a chance to do the opposite yet; I haven't had a chance to debug any sort of forklift. Yet.
  - ty6853 2y ago
    How much of that 100 eurobucks is liability insurance on getting sued for a gazillion dollars because you forgot to tighten a bolt once a decade after being kept up by a cranky toddler?
whatshisface 2y ago
Mechanical engineers are making average professional salaries which indicates that there is no supply problem. I wish these articles would occasionally check things like labor statistics. Here's another question for aspiring Soviet central planners: which successful American industry should be dismantled to free up the capital for rebuilding Guangzhou? The men and material have to come from somewhere.
- ty6853 2y ago
  >here's another question for aspiring Soviet central planners: which successful American industry should be dismantled to free up the capital for rebuilding Guangzhou? The men and material have to come from somewhere If serious I'd say 90% of the military. Take the skilled tradesman as the techs and the infantry as the line workers. Generally good, disciplined people and running a factory would bring production instead of destruction of Afghanistan or whatever other ideas used by the higher ups to abuse people that just wanted to defend our country.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Ironically having soldiers to supply goods and weapons for is the only thing backstopping most of American manufacturing today.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    But then, comrade, who will defend us from American imperialism? ;-) (Seriously though, the reason that wouldn't work very well, is that industrial production is too complex for a room full of people to organize from the top, down. It becomes too easy for false reports to be sent up the chain, and for bad instructions to be sent down the chain.)
    - ty6853 2y ago
      I hear kalashnokov rifles sell well.
- jltsiren 2y ago
extr 2y ago
I'll work in a factory if it means I get to be an engineer. Adjust the machines, get results, tweak gizmos etc. Nobody wants to be an assembly line worker of course.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  Manage IT for manufacturing for a bit. There are plenty of people that are happy to be assembly line workers at a job where they can just daydream but keep physically busy, and who would hate a office job where you are not physically active and have to be constantly mentally focused.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  Engineers work at desks too. Working at a factory isn't like working on your bike, and for most American factory workers it isn't a mind-numbing assembly station either. Factory workers are technicians, who learn the basic operating principles of the machinery, watch it for deviations from design parameters, and perform maintenance and repair according to instructions that come from drafters who work downstream of engineers.
  - extr 2y ago
    Okay, well whatever the job is called where you go out on the floor and tweak the gizmos. I'll do that if I have to.
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      That's a technician. Pay kinda sucks and the "big bucks" come from tons and tons of overtime and/or working 2nd/3rd shift.
      - snerbles 2y ago
        I was a controls engineer and frequently on the floor, usually directing the technicians and sometimes adjusting brackets myself. Industrial vision systems can be quite fussy. Agreed on the pay, it would have been good if it wasn't in California.
coding123 2y ago
[dead]
chefandy 2y ago
> Finally, we must ask a new question: not “Why doesn’t anyone want to work in a factory?” but “How do we make building things exciting, inspiring, and financially viable for millions of Americans?” This would require viewing workers as something more than fungible labor units whose success or failure is almost entirely a matter of their own performance. Few executives care if their workers are miserable— maybe they’ve got ‘retention’ problems, or ‘recruiting’ problems, both of which usually result in some HR-based initiative. I don’t see a executives taking that query seriously any time soon.
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  I worked in mega corporate retail and fast food from 16 through 20. Honestly it was fun, my coworkers and I got along great, we partied together, nothing about it was miserable. I think many elite leftists, like most people on HN, see everyone who works these jobs as miserable bastards and the jobs themselves as soul-sucking slavery. Few people are executives and look at things through the top management’s eyes. If you have an honest conversation without a diehard anti-capitalist and walk them logically through “cold” decisions a corporation makes, like layoffs etc, eventually you get to the point where they agree they make sense, but then justify themselves by arguing the entire system is corrupt and needs to be burned down and restarted with some sort of worker-democracy thing. You say “few executives care if their workers are miserable” and that is the dumbest, most misinformed, wrong take on earth. Even if the answer is only one of pure self-interest in profit, having all of your workers hate their lives and the company itself is beyond stupid, and is not the plan.
  - silverquiet 2y ago
    Why did you stop working there at 20 then?
  - chefandy 2y ago
    What most people viscerally understand as the worst is the worst they’ve experienced, and even if you intellectually understand that worse things exist, it’s easy to assume you relate to other people’s ‘worst’ far more than you do. My username isn’t based on a hobby— I am a classically-trained chef experienced in and intimately familiar with food service operations and labor from the retail concessions level to Michelin Star fine dining. Working fast food jobs can be tough, greasy, hot, and sometimes dangerous work, but it’s physically, mentally, and emotionally the easiest work in food preparation— almost no other job has been workshopped, designed, redesigned, re-outfitted, optimized and re-optimized for human interaction — and it doesn’t even pay the worst. Especially as a casual teen employee, it doesn’t hold a candle to working as an a la carte line cook, let alone in heavy manufacturing, or nearly any other blue collar work as an adult with adult responsibilities and needs. Even in the food industry — The cog-in-the-machine aspect of being a fast food worker doesn’t hold a candle to being a fine dining dishwasher, which pays less and is far more physically demanding, dangerous, monotonous, micromanaged, etc etc etc. Fast food work is more cog-in-the-machine-like than being a fine dining prep cook, but being a fine dining prep cook is much more physically demanding, stressful and skill-intensive. Lots of soul-crushing cog-in-the-machine work pays well because that’s the only way they can get anyone to work for them at all. Like working on the UPS truck loading line at the distribution point near where I grew up: the supervisors would walk around on catwalks above the docks with whistles and stop watches putting you on blast if they timed you loading fewer than X packages in a minute. Those jobs paid far better than other entry-level jobs in the area and made the chance of getting into the jobs people actually wanted— the delivery driver jobs— much easier. Those jobs were famously miserable, grueling, and dehumanizing and the people in charge couldn’t care less. They just kept inching up the pay until they could be filled because that’s the way business works. They didn’t think they had a problem with persistently understaffing the docs so it had to be run like a labor camp— they had recruitment and retention problems, which are a lot cheaper. And even delivery driver jobs these days are crap. People like trash truck drivers and corporate-employed Amazon delivery drivers interviewed often say they’re penalized for such minuscule lapses in productivity that they’re forced to piss in bottles because there’s no time for them to stop, even along their route. They’re not shooting for bonuses either— they’re just trying to not get fired. Does that sound like they’re happy? Do you think the bosses that created and enforce these requirements care if they’re miserable? I know one guy that got life-altering injuries as a tech school welding student. He was repairing a metal ladder above large underground storage tanks that the plant manager said had been emptied, triple-rinsed and dried. Well, he lied. They were full of miscellaneous waste chemicals. The sparks from the tig welder somehow ignited the gases in the tanks and he was blown through the roof of the plant and briefly woke up in the parking lot before waking up months later in the hospital wearing the silicone compression gloves save neck wrap he’d have to wear through his twenties to keep his skin grafts from falling off. In court, the plant manager said emptying and cleaning the tanks whenever people were going to be doing welding was just too expensive. He wasn’t fired. The medical expenses and facility damage were handled by insurance. Do you think he cared how miserable that boy’s life became? How about the private detectives their insurance company paid follow my friend around just in case they could snap a picture of us bowling or something they could use to prove non-compliance and deny his claims? Plant is still going strong today! They have had a few more explosions since, regrettably. Do think those types of stories are rare? Do you think you understand what working in a place like that is like based on your fast food experience? Of course business executives are making logical decisions based on the economics— that’s the entire fucking point. They’re doing that because that’s the way the system works. They didn’t create the system, it’s not their fault that the system works like that, but that doesn’t change that it is the way it is, or the effect it has on workers. > You say “few executives care if their workers are miserable” and that is the dumbest, most misinformed, wrong take on earth. Even if the answer is only one of pure self-interest in profit, having all of your workers hate their lives and the company itself is beyond stupid, and is not the plan. Got me! Always good to throw together a quick insult to make yourself feel better about not being able to put together a counterpoint, right? Saying I’m accusing executives of sitting in the c suite twisting their mustaches plotting ways to intentionally make their employees miserable is the “dumbest, most misinformed wrong” interpretation of what I said. Would you feel better had I said “few executives think twice about favoring all but the most trivial bits of profit over workers not being miserable?” Do you think manufacturing without union protections or worker safety laws would be better than in Victorian era mills or early 20th century mines? Why? Because executives care about their employees happiness beyond what it takes to keep them from quitting? If so, why isn’t that the case in China? If worker protections didn’t exist and the job market allowed it, do you really think that basic worker comfort and safety wouldn’t be traded for shareholder profits in a heartbeat? If you think that, you’re going to need some solid empirical evidence because that’s not the way humanity has operated historically. The only places in our country that support anything but high-skill speciality manufacturing are the places where people don’t have a choice. Look up a dozen run-of-the-mill production plants on Glassdoor and skip the reviews obviously made by HR— and then tell me that the people running those places are prioritizing worker happiness. The difficulty of profitably running a manufacturing business in the United States doesn’t change the fact that workers often bear the brunt of the efficiency measures implemented to make it possible. The author of this nice well-meaning article made some totally valid observations about reasons people don’t actively choose manufacturing jobs in this country when they have a choice — what’s not realistic is thinking we can make it all better just by changing the way we look at it.
analog31 2y ago
I work in R&D to support a high-tech factory in the Midwest. The products are fairly sophisticated, but the volume is too low to support full blown mass production techniques. So the workers have to be flexible and take care of process improvements themselves, which we encourage. We let them move from one cell to another, so they're not spending an entire career on one job. Something I've learned is that's hard to generalize about how factories work, or what it's like to work in one. My workplace is drastically different than a steel mill or refinery, for instance.
bongodongobob 2y ago
Perhaps if the workers owned the means of production, these jobs would be more attractive. Maybe the guy who just fronted the capitol to buy the property and machinery shouldn't be entitled to the excess labor of the workers in perpetuity.
- tonyhart7 2y ago
  well if all worker can save up little money to buy expensive machine that could work, the problem is they aren't going to do that that's why Tech sector is attractive, basically create money out of thin air well you still need pc but this cost is nothing compared to manufacturing
  - ty6853 2y ago
    The worker can buy a share of tesla or general electric and make roughly as good of returns as any other unskilled investor could hope. The people beating the stock market on capital investments generally are being paid in essence for other stuff they bring to the table besides money.
- m463 2y ago
  > Perhaps if the workers owned the means of production, ...somehow this reminded me of gig work...
cyber_kinetist 2y ago
The article fails at diagnosing the crux of the problem... which is that you need to deliberately weaken the value of the dollar in order to make manufactoring economically viable at any capacity (labor is just too expensive for products to be competitive globally). This means US needs to let go of its dollar being the reserve currency... which will not only mean the end of consumerism in the US (no more cheap imported goods), but also the US no longer being dominant in world politics anymore (and consequently the downfall of the neoliberal world order). Probably no US citizen will actually have the guts to go through this voluntarily... but noticing the current government deteriorating in real time with Trump and Musk we might actually see this happening anyway in a few years. The real issue is something called the Triffin dillema (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma) - a country that has its currency as a global reserve currency will inevitably have a huge deficit in terms of international trade. Everyone wants these dollars since it is required to participate in any economic activity, so dollars are continuously going to move out of the country, and the value of the dollar will rise even with an astronomically large trade deficit. This means that exporting will be very expensive, but importing will be cheap, which established the backbone of US consumerism (cheap goods!). Basically the majority of the middle/upper class are living out of the value of the US dollar (mostly working in "bullshit" professional jobs, since their actual real job is consuming goods), while most of the remaining necessary blue-collar labor to support the country (ex. agricultural jobs, since you can't offshore them) are done cheaply by illegal migrants and slave (prison) labor.
- tim333 2y ago
  I think the problem is more comparative advantage. Say the Vietnamese are good at making things in factories while terrible at making Hollywood type movies, while Americans are good at making things in factories and also good at making movies, it makes sense for Vietnam to do the factories and America the movies regardless of exchange rates.

32 points by HR01 2y ago

Plenty of US workers work in factories. They're churning out immense amounts of software. Some examples of this type of factory are Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft. Other people work in other types of factories - like music studios, where they churn out music that gets billions of streams. Singling out a specific type of production as this article does requires blinding oneself to all the other types of production happening in an economy. Assembly lines needed tremendous amounts of people to do essentially the same job, thus making the whole economy simpler to try to keep in your head at once. Today a tremendous breadth of goods are being produced so it's harder to see, but the opportunities are there - they just don't all look the same like in the very short era when factories dominated employment. The article (unintentionally I am sure) commits a fallacy of quoting absolute numbers of university graduates without providing comparisons (eg. population size differences between US and China). Even if the US produces fewer factory-capable workers per capita, modern factories manufacturing goods require less people to do the same thing thanks to automation, so there's not the same need to churn out people to work in them. Hence higher education is geared toward providing more diverse skills in the US than in China.

nickff 2y ago

I think this is admirable, but probably hopeless. Permitting and regulations draw out timelines (and increase uncertainty/risk), reducing returns on investment, while tax policy makes capital investment very expensive. The global North is has enacted many deterrents to manufacturing, and doesn’t seem very interested in lowering any of them. The reason that software and services have prospered while manufacturing has stagnated is not marketing, its incentive structure.

FredPret 2y ago

I’m an industrial engineer from the 3rd world who now works in software in the 1st world. The transition wasn’t easy and took many years. Make of that what you will.

Workaccount2 2y ago

No one. No one wants to work in the factory. The US is an advanced economy and the population wants advanced jobs with advanced pay. Stamping sheet steel all day for $28/hr in a hot warehouse? No thanks. Maintaining a login page for $64/hr from your couch? Yes please.

edflsafoiewq 2y ago
No one wants to work retail either. So what?
Kim_Bruning 2y ago
Who says factory work is all about stamping sheet steel all day? How about getting to debug your code with a forklift? O:-) Been there, done that. Overhead crane too! Or dealing with software crashes leading to hardware crashes ... using a hydraulic jack. Or "Kiiiim, it's an electrical hardware failure, I can't fix that!" "Well that, or we could ask this here electrotechnician who's standing right next to us?" Speaking of: A freelance electrotechnician brings in about Eur 100 per hour around these parts, and gets to go on adventures around the world, because they're always in demand.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > How about getting to debug your code with a forklift? O:-) What does that mean? You're... debugging a forklift, or using a forklift as a debugging tool?
  - Kim_Bruning 2y ago
    In my case: forklift as a debugging tool! If you write code for an intelligent conveyor system, at some point you're going need to do an integration test to see if it actually works. So far, I haven't had a chance to do the opposite yet; I haven't had a chance to debug any sort of forklift. Yet.
- ty6853 2y ago
  How much of that 100 eurobucks is liability insurance on getting sued for a gazillion dollars because you forgot to tighten a bolt once a decade after being kept up by a cranky toddler?

whatshisface 2y ago

Mechanical engineers are making average professional salaries which indicates that there is no supply problem. I wish these articles would occasionally check things like labor statistics. Here's another question for aspiring Soviet central planners: which successful American industry should be dismantled to free up the capital for rebuilding Guangzhou? The men and material have to come from somewhere.

ty6853 2y ago
>here's another question for aspiring Soviet central planners: which successful American industry should be dismantled to free up the capital for rebuilding Guangzhou? The men and material have to come from somewhere If serious I'd say 90% of the military. Take the skilled tradesman as the techs and the infantry as the line workers. Generally good, disciplined people and running a factory would bring production instead of destruction of Afghanistan or whatever other ideas used by the higher ups to abuse people that just wanted to defend our country.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Ironically having soldiers to supply goods and weapons for is the only thing backstopping most of American manufacturing today.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  But then, comrade, who will defend us from American imperialism? ;-) (Seriously though, the reason that wouldn't work very well, is that industrial production is too complex for a room full of people to organize from the top, down. It becomes too easy for false reports to be sent up the chain, and for bad instructions to be sent down the chain.)
  - ty6853 2y ago
    I hear kalashnokov rifles sell well.
jltsiren 2y ago

extr 2y ago

I'll work in a factory if it means I get to be an engineer. Adjust the machines, get results, tweak gizmos etc. Nobody wants to be an assembly line worker of course.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago
Manage IT for manufacturing for a bit. There are plenty of people that are happy to be assembly line workers at a job where they can just daydream but keep physically busy, and who would hate a office job where you are not physically active and have to be constantly mentally focused.
whatshisface 2y ago
Engineers work at desks too. Working at a factory isn't like working on your bike, and for most American factory workers it isn't a mind-numbing assembly station either. Factory workers are technicians, who learn the basic operating principles of the machinery, watch it for deviations from design parameters, and perform maintenance and repair according to instructions that come from drafters who work downstream of engineers.
- extr 2y ago
  Okay, well whatever the job is called where you go out on the floor and tweak the gizmos. I'll do that if I have to.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    That's a technician. Pay kinda sucks and the "big bucks" come from tons and tons of overtime and/or working 2nd/3rd shift.
    - snerbles 2y ago
      I was a controls engineer and frequently on the floor, usually directing the technicians and sometimes adjusting brackets myself. Industrial vision systems can be quite fussy. Agreed on the pay, it would have been good if it wasn't in California.

coding123 2y ago

[dead]

chefandy 2y ago

> Finally, we must ask a new question: not “Why doesn’t anyone want to work in a factory?” but “How do we make building things exciting, inspiring, and financially viable for millions of Americans?” This would require viewing workers as something more than fungible labor units whose success or failure is almost entirely a matter of their own performance. Few executives care if their workers are miserable— maybe they’ve got ‘retention’ problems, or ‘recruiting’ problems, both of which usually result in some HR-based initiative. I don’t see a executives taking that query seriously any time soon.

monero-xmr 2y ago
I worked in mega corporate retail and fast food from 16 through 20. Honestly it was fun, my coworkers and I got along great, we partied together, nothing about it was miserable. I think many elite leftists, like most people on HN, see everyone who works these jobs as miserable bastards and the jobs themselves as soul-sucking slavery. Few people are executives and look at things through the top management’s eyes. If you have an honest conversation without a diehard anti-capitalist and walk them logically through “cold” decisions a corporation makes, like layoffs etc, eventually you get to the point where they agree they make sense, but then justify themselves by arguing the entire system is corrupt and needs to be burned down and restarted with some sort of worker-democracy thing. You say “few executives care if their workers are miserable” and that is the dumbest, most misinformed, wrong take on earth. Even if the answer is only one of pure self-interest in profit, having all of your workers hate their lives and the company itself is beyond stupid, and is not the plan.
- silverquiet 2y ago
  Why did you stop working there at 20 then?
- chefandy 2y ago
  What most people viscerally understand as the worst is the worst they’ve experienced, and even if you intellectually understand that worse things exist, it’s easy to assume you relate to other people’s ‘worst’ far more than you do. My username isn’t based on a hobby— I am a classically-trained chef experienced in and intimately familiar with food service operations and labor from the retail concessions level to Michelin Star fine dining. Working fast food jobs can be tough, greasy, hot, and sometimes dangerous work, but it’s physically, mentally, and emotionally the easiest work in food preparation— almost no other job has been workshopped, designed, redesigned, re-outfitted, optimized and re-optimized for human interaction — and it doesn’t even pay the worst. Especially as a casual teen employee, it doesn’t hold a candle to working as an a la carte line cook, let alone in heavy manufacturing, or nearly any other blue collar work as an adult with adult responsibilities and needs. Even in the food industry — The cog-in-the-machine aspect of being a fast food worker doesn’t hold a candle to being a fine dining dishwasher, which pays less and is far more physically demanding, dangerous, monotonous, micromanaged, etc etc etc. Fast food work is more cog-in-the-machine-like than being a fine dining prep cook, but being a fine dining prep cook is much more physically demanding, stressful and skill-intensive. Lots of soul-crushing cog-in-the-machine work pays well because that’s the only way they can get anyone to work for them at all. Like working on the UPS truck loading line at the distribution point near where I grew up: the supervisors would walk around on catwalks above the docks with whistles and stop watches putting you on blast if they timed you loading fewer than X packages in a minute. Those jobs paid far better than other entry-level jobs in the area and made the chance of getting into the jobs people actually wanted— the delivery driver jobs— much easier. Those jobs were famously miserable, grueling, and dehumanizing and the people in charge couldn’t care less. They just kept inching up the pay until they could be filled because that’s the way business works. They didn’t think they had a problem with persistently understaffing the docs so it had to be run like a labor camp— they had recruitment and retention problems, which are a lot cheaper. And even delivery driver jobs these days are crap. People like trash truck drivers and corporate-employed Amazon delivery drivers interviewed often say they’re penalized for such minuscule lapses in productivity that they’re forced to piss in bottles because there’s no time for them to stop, even along their route. They’re not shooting for bonuses either— they’re just trying to not get fired. Does that sound like they’re happy? Do you think the bosses that created and enforce these requirements care if they’re miserable? I know one guy that got life-altering injuries as a tech school welding student. He was repairing a metal ladder above large underground storage tanks that the plant manager said had been emptied, triple-rinsed and dried. Well, he lied. They were full of miscellaneous waste chemicals. The sparks from the tig welder somehow ignited the gases in the tanks and he was blown through the roof of the plant and briefly woke up in the parking lot before waking up months later in the hospital wearing the silicone compression gloves save neck wrap he’d have to wear through his twenties to keep his skin grafts from falling off. In court, the plant manager said emptying and cleaning the tanks whenever people were going to be doing welding was just too expensive. He wasn’t fired. The medical expenses and facility damage were handled by insurance. Do you think he cared how miserable that boy’s life became? How about the private detectives their insurance company paid follow my friend around just in case they could snap a picture of us bowling or something they could use to prove non-compliance and deny his claims? Plant is still going strong today! They have had a few more explosions since, regrettably. Do think those types of stories are rare? Do you think you understand what working in a place like that is like based on your fast food experience? Of course business executives are making logical decisions based on the economics— that’s the entire fucking point. They’re doing that because that’s the way the system works. They didn’t create the system, it’s not their fault that the system works like that, but that doesn’t change that it is the way it is, or the effect it has on workers. > You say “few executives care if their workers are miserable” and that is the dumbest, most misinformed, wrong take on earth. Even if the answer is only one of pure self-interest in profit, having all of your workers hate their lives and the company itself is beyond stupid, and is not the plan. Got me! Always good to throw together a quick insult to make yourself feel better about not being able to put together a counterpoint, right? Saying I’m accusing executives of sitting in the c suite twisting their mustaches plotting ways to intentionally make their employees miserable is the “dumbest, most misinformed wrong” interpretation of what I said. Would you feel better had I said “few executives think twice about favoring all but the most trivial bits of profit over workers not being miserable?” Do you think manufacturing without union protections or worker safety laws would be better than in Victorian era mills or early 20th century mines? Why? Because executives care about their employees happiness beyond what it takes to keep them from quitting? If so, why isn’t that the case in China? If worker protections didn’t exist and the job market allowed it, do you really think that basic worker comfort and safety wouldn’t be traded for shareholder profits in a heartbeat? If you think that, you’re going to need some solid empirical evidence because that’s not the way humanity has operated historically. The only places in our country that support anything but high-skill speciality manufacturing are the places where people don’t have a choice. Look up a dozen run-of-the-mill production plants on Glassdoor and skip the reviews obviously made by HR— and then tell me that the people running those places are prioritizing worker happiness. The difficulty of profitably running a manufacturing business in the United States doesn’t change the fact that workers often bear the brunt of the efficiency measures implemented to make it possible. The author of this nice well-meaning article made some totally valid observations about reasons people don’t actively choose manufacturing jobs in this country when they have a choice — what’s not realistic is thinking we can make it all better just by changing the way we look at it.

analog31 2y ago

I work in R&D to support a high-tech factory in the Midwest. The products are fairly sophisticated, but the volume is too low to support full blown mass production techniques. So the workers have to be flexible and take care of process improvements themselves, which we encourage. We let them move from one cell to another, so they're not spending an entire career on one job. Something I've learned is that's hard to generalize about how factories work, or what it's like to work in one. My workplace is drastically different than a steel mill or refinery, for instance.

bongodongobob 2y ago

Perhaps if the workers owned the means of production, these jobs would be more attractive. Maybe the guy who just fronted the capitol to buy the property and machinery shouldn't be entitled to the excess labor of the workers in perpetuity.

tonyhart7 2y ago
well if all worker can save up little money to buy expensive machine that could work, the problem is they aren't going to do that that's why Tech sector is attractive, basically create money out of thin air well you still need pc but this cost is nothing compared to manufacturing
- ty6853 2y ago
  The worker can buy a share of tesla or general electric and make roughly as good of returns as any other unskilled investor could hope. The people beating the stock market on capital investments generally are being paid in essence for other stuff they bring to the table besides money.
m463 2y ago
> Perhaps if the workers owned the means of production, ...somehow this reminded me of gig work...

cyber_kinetist 2y ago

The article fails at diagnosing the crux of the problem... which is that you need to deliberately weaken the value of the dollar in order to make manufactoring economically viable at any capacity (labor is just too expensive for products to be competitive globally). This means US needs to let go of its dollar being the reserve currency... which will not only mean the end of consumerism in the US (no more cheap imported goods), but also the US no longer being dominant in world politics anymore (and consequently the downfall of the neoliberal world order). Probably no US citizen will actually have the guts to go through this voluntarily... but noticing the current government deteriorating in real time with Trump and Musk we might actually see this happening anyway in a few years. The real issue is something called the Triffin dillema (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma) - a country that has its currency as a global reserve currency will inevitably have a huge deficit in terms of international trade. Everyone wants these dollars since it is required to participate in any economic activity, so dollars are continuously going to move out of the country, and the value of the dollar will rise even with an astronomically large trade deficit. This means that exporting will be very expensive, but importing will be cheap, which established the backbone of US consumerism (cheap goods!). Basically the majority of the middle/upper class are living out of the value of the US dollar (mostly working in "bullshit" professional jobs, since their actual real job is consuming goods), while most of the remaining necessary blue-collar labor to support the country (ex. agricultural jobs, since you can't offshore them) are done cheaply by illegal migrants and slave (prison) labor.

tim333 2y ago
I think the problem is more comparative advantage. Say the Vietnamese are good at making things in factories while terrible at making Hollywood type movies, while Americans are good at making things in factories and also good at making movies, it makes sense for Vietnam to do the factories and America the movies regardless of exchange rates.