4 ms·

The jobs also generally suck. I've worked a wide array of blue collar jobs and manufacturing I always found some of the worst, even worse than stuff like gener

The jobs also generally suck. I've worked a wide array of blue collar jobs and manufacturing I always found some of the worst, even worse than stuff like general labor building houses or working on fishing trawlers in the Bering sea because at least that stuff wasn't nearly as rote. You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over. Do one thing wrong, your finger gets chopped up -- you think that sounds easy but wait until you're up all night taking care of a screaming infant and then have to come in so your family doesn't starve, then you make a simple mistake and now part of your body is gone. Often a overnight shift. I would find myself waking up at 2,3 am moving my arms but completely unconscious. Sometimes I would catch myself before I stick my hand into something that would break it apart. One place I was working, about half the people were missing fingers. I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right. Why we would trade away our comparative advantage in things like designing widgets and instead do the awful work making them is beyond me unless you are so desperate it's your only option.

potato3732842 10mo ago
Because in a lot of people's minds having ~1/1000 of your coworkers killed for every decade you work at the factory still sucks less than taking orders from some algorithm crafted in a downtown office by someone who wants to exploit you at best and hates you and your way of life at worst.
- mothballed 10mo ago
  In the factory you get both. With essentially zero chance to change the algorithm. When my father worked in the factory he found a way to manufacture the product faster and cheaper and just as safely, and rearranged the factory to do so. He was punished by management for altering the algorithm and also ostracized by fellow workers because they perceived it as reducing the demand for jobs.
  - potato3732842 10mo ago
    Yup, that does sure sound like a silent-generation or boomer era story. I'm sure pockets of that stuff are left but pretty much all of "those sorts" of "we don't pay you to think" workplaces either transitioned or went tits up over the course of the 1980s and 1990s as the Japanese management made its way to the US (though one could argue it's come back over the past 10-15yr). Now, of course if you are doing something that's as unskilled as unskilled gets or in a particularly perverse workplace you'll encounter those conditions, but they are absolutely not the norm. The business schools these days teach various flavors of "it's cheaper to run a workplace people feel doesn't suck". This stuff goes through phases to some extent. The 1920s and 30s were adversarial. The 1940s-60s were more cooperative. The 1960s-80s were not great. 90s and 00s were quite collaborative. Now we've kind of got another wave of "management knows best" and adversarial thinking that's waning.
  - almosthere 10mo ago
    That's the American dream story- always starts with dad getting yelled at for making things better and faster - the next sentence in the founding documents: So he went his own way and now we have NicoCloth Inc. which in the years since has become a global corporation.
    - potato3732842 10mo ago
      Pretty sure they regulated that out of existence in the past several decades. Now best you can hope for is to be bought out by the competitor of the company you left sometime before the 50 employee mark. (only partly joking, and that part is way smaller than I want it to be)
      - almosthere 10mo ago
        Well, I hope to think it's still possible.
themaninthedark 10mo ago
There are some people who like the rote work. You and I may not but some of the people I talk to like that they can basically "turn their thinking off" and get paid. >Do one thing wrong, your finger gets chopped up This should not be possible in the US. OSHA is still in existence(you could argue that the future state is unknown) https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1910/1910.212 https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19... >1910.212(a)(1) >Types of guarding. One or more methods of machine guarding shall be provided to protect the operator and other employees in the machine area from hazards such as those created by point of operation, ingoing nip points, rotating parts, flying chips and sparks. Examples of guarding methods are - barrier guards, two-hand tripping devices, electronic safety devices, etc. > a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right. When the safety on a machine fails, the machine should stop. If it does not, then the safety was not installed correctly.
- mothballed 10mo ago
  Sounds nice but not reality. The price of paying out a finger every few years is a lot cheaper than paying for maintenance and safety equipment.
  - cpursley 10mo ago
    Where was this? Because that's not true in the US, land of the personal injury attorney. My brother used to be a machine salesperson. He got a call from a law firm couple years after his company sold a machine asking about a particular one that was sold (not even by him) because their client lost a body part. Those payouts often end up in the millions.
    - afavour 10mo ago
      A payout in the million doesn't seem in disagreement with the OPs assertion that the payouts make economic sense for these companies. I think the picture you paint of the US is rosier than the reality. Brings to mind the death of a 16 year old working in a poultry processing plant: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/slaughterhouse-children-documentary-rcna129405 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/slaughterhouse-children... These companies know what they're doing.
mc32 10mo ago
Doing rote work is better than no work and living off the government. People in those rote jobs enjoy the camaraderie, the beers after work and putting their kids through school. Something an unemployed person has more difficulty doing. Even the great USSR had huge amounts of rote work. People found a way to live life.
- bpt3 10mo ago
  Sure, let's adopt the Soviet model of "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay" because what could go wrong there! You're basically asking every consumer to pay more for goods so someone can feel better about themselves personally (at the cost of someone who they don't share a country with). I'm not sure if you've met many people, but it's not a very compelling argument, nor a morally superior one due to the global impact.
  - mc32 10mo ago
    It’s going to cost the consumer one way or another. Either taxes, (cities still need to take in taxes, so if they lose taxpayers, their option is to levy more taxes), quality of life (more homeless, less municipal money for maintenance due to social costs, etc.) I’d prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don’t need new fashion every year. I don’t need new appliances every few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may be. At least he’s not calculating the cost of suicide and wondering if he’ll be around for the kids 18th birthday.
    - bpt3 10mo ago
      > It’s going to cost the consumer one way or another. Either taxes, (cities still need to take in taxes, so if they lose taxpayers, their option is to levy more taxes), quality of life (more homeless, less municipal money for maintenance due to social costs, etc.) It's actually not, because people aren't required to live near people who consume more in social services than they contribute in taxes. Areas like you describe exist, but basically contain the people who are unable or unwilling to leave an economically depressed area. Most people just leave. > I’d prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don’t need new fashion every year. I don’t need new appliances every few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may be. At least he’s not calculating the cost of suicide and wondering if he’ll be around for the kids 18th birthday. I don't disagree entirely, but most people do based on behavior. It's not a simple problem at all, including what is fair to consumers and the businesses themselves which have to compete with other companies that don't have artificially inflated expenses.
ryandrake 10mo ago
Out of all the many industries out there, I don't understand why we keep glorifying and romanticizing manufacturing and trying to "bring it back." I've also worked a few of these jobs and you're right: THEY SUCK. Depending on what you are manufacturing, it can be boring, stressful, stinky, physically taxing, or dangerous. And most of them, even the highly skilled ones, don't pay well. For the sake of our own society, we should be getting rid of these jobs, not adding them.
- almosthere 10mo ago
  Because there are 300M people in the US and not all of them can have your cushy SSE role. See all the homeless people - it's because we're selling them out.
  - dr-detroit 10mo ago
    [dead]
  - treis 10mo ago
    Maybe not literally all but certainly most. We hardly have any farmers or factory workers compared to what we had at one point. They've mostly moved onto cushy office jobs.
    - almosthere 10mo ago
      Most is 12%? This is the problem with HN. You're all so bubbled it's ridiculous to think sometimes a HN'er will say something like "If I were President."
      - treis 10mo ago
        You're using officer/administrator role for your number. The number of people who work in an office or sitting at a desk is much higher. I see numbers ranging from 40-60% for that.
  - yibg 10mo ago
gosub100 10mo ago
> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills We don't want to bring back their 3rd world safety standards. We just want to bring the jobs. Factory work can be less rote if teams rotate or their employer provides enough rest. Unions are a potential solution to this issue.
- runako 10mo ago
  > Unions are a potential solution to this issue This is part of the Labor vs Capital stuff I mentioned in my post. We're not likely to have strong unions again in the near future, so any jobs we bring are likely going to be dangerous in addition to carrying low pay. OTOH if we posit strong Labor, the good news is we have a lot of jobs now that we can turn into Good Jobs. We could, for example, make it so that any large employer pay their employees enough such that nobody who works for them full time (including contractors) is eligible for income-based government assistance at the state or federal level. We could choose to expand those rules to any organization over a certain size. There's a lot we can do to turn Bad Jobs into Better Jobs without boiling the ocean and moving industry supply chains.
MisterTea 10mo ago
> You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over. Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI presses himself. No one in that shop lost a finger. > I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right. I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with people outside of your country So the laborers in other countries where safety is ignored aren't people?
triceratops 10mo ago
> Why we would trade away our comparative advantage in things like designing widgets As China has shown over the past 20 years, that advantage erodes quickly if you stop making widgets altogether. It's very easy for widget makers to move up the value chain into widget design. And once they do, you're cooked, there's nowhere to hide. Not to mention, widget design can't absorb as much labor supply as widget production. And many people can't do widget design, still need a living, and would be perfectly competent widget makers. So...you gotta solve for that if you focus only on widget design.
MisterTea 10mo ago
> You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over. Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI presses himself. I ran the press, milling machines, lathes and saws. No one in that shop was missing body parts. Sure, its monotonous at times but that can be said about many jobs. A well ran shop should not put you in harms way. > I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right. I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with other people being subject to the same conditions.

potato3732842 10mo ago

Because in a lot of people's minds having ~1/1000 of your coworkers killed for every decade you work at the factory still sucks less than taking orders from some algorithm crafted in a downtown office by someone who wants to exploit you at best and hates you and your way of life at worst.

mothballed 10mo ago
In the factory you get both. With essentially zero chance to change the algorithm. When my father worked in the factory he found a way to manufacture the product faster and cheaper and just as safely, and rearranged the factory to do so. He was punished by management for altering the algorithm and also ostracized by fellow workers because they perceived it as reducing the demand for jobs.
- potato3732842 10mo ago
  Yup, that does sure sound like a silent-generation or boomer era story. I'm sure pockets of that stuff are left but pretty much all of "those sorts" of "we don't pay you to think" workplaces either transitioned or went tits up over the course of the 1980s and 1990s as the Japanese management made its way to the US (though one could argue it's come back over the past 10-15yr). Now, of course if you are doing something that's as unskilled as unskilled gets or in a particularly perverse workplace you'll encounter those conditions, but they are absolutely not the norm. The business schools these days teach various flavors of "it's cheaper to run a workplace people feel doesn't suck". This stuff goes through phases to some extent. The 1920s and 30s were adversarial. The 1940s-60s were more cooperative. The 1960s-80s were not great. 90s and 00s were quite collaborative. Now we've kind of got another wave of "management knows best" and adversarial thinking that's waning.
- almosthere 10mo ago
  That's the American dream story- always starts with dad getting yelled at for making things better and faster - the next sentence in the founding documents: So he went his own way and now we have NicoCloth Inc. which in the years since has become a global corporation.
  - potato3732842 10mo ago
    Pretty sure they regulated that out of existence in the past several decades. Now best you can hope for is to be bought out by the competitor of the company you left sometime before the 50 employee mark. (only partly joking, and that part is way smaller than I want it to be)
    - almosthere 10mo ago
      Well, I hope to think it's still possible.

themaninthedark 10mo ago

There are some people who like the rote work. You and I may not but some of the people I talk to like that they can basically "turn their thinking off" and get paid. >Do one thing wrong, your finger gets chopped up This should not be possible in the US. OSHA is still in existence(you could argue that the future state is unknown) https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1910/1910.212 https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19... >1910.212(a)(1) >Types of guarding. One or more methods of machine guarding shall be provided to protect the operator and other employees in the machine area from hazards such as those created by point of operation, ingoing nip points, rotating parts, flying chips and sparks. Examples of guarding methods are - barrier guards, two-hand tripping devices, electronic safety devices, etc. > a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right. When the safety on a machine fails, the machine should stop. If it does not, then the safety was not installed correctly.

mothballed 10mo ago
Sounds nice but not reality. The price of paying out a finger every few years is a lot cheaper than paying for maintenance and safety equipment.
- cpursley 10mo ago
  Where was this? Because that's not true in the US, land of the personal injury attorney. My brother used to be a machine salesperson. He got a call from a law firm couple years after his company sold a machine asking about a particular one that was sold (not even by him) because their client lost a body part. Those payouts often end up in the millions.
  - afavour 10mo ago
    A payout in the million doesn't seem in disagreement with the OPs assertion that the payouts make economic sense for these companies. I think the picture you paint of the US is rosier than the reality. Brings to mind the death of a 16 year old working in a poultry processing plant: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/slaughterhouse-children-documentary-rcna129405 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/slaughterhouse-children... These companies know what they're doing.

mc32 10mo ago

Doing rote work is better than no work and living off the government. People in those rote jobs enjoy the camaraderie, the beers after work and putting their kids through school. Something an unemployed person has more difficulty doing. Even the great USSR had huge amounts of rote work. People found a way to live life.

bpt3 10mo ago
Sure, let's adopt the Soviet model of "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay" because what could go wrong there! You're basically asking every consumer to pay more for goods so someone can feel better about themselves personally (at the cost of someone who they don't share a country with). I'm not sure if you've met many people, but it's not a very compelling argument, nor a morally superior one due to the global impact.
- mc32 10mo ago
  It’s going to cost the consumer one way or another. Either taxes, (cities still need to take in taxes, so if they lose taxpayers, their option is to levy more taxes), quality of life (more homeless, less municipal money for maintenance due to social costs, etc.) I’d prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don’t need new fashion every year. I don’t need new appliances every few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may be. At least he’s not calculating the cost of suicide and wondering if he’ll be around for the kids 18th birthday.
  - bpt3 10mo ago
    > It’s going to cost the consumer one way or another. Either taxes, (cities still need to take in taxes, so if they lose taxpayers, their option is to levy more taxes), quality of life (more homeless, less municipal money for maintenance due to social costs, etc.) It's actually not, because people aren't required to live near people who consume more in social services than they contribute in taxes. Areas like you describe exist, but basically contain the people who are unable or unwilling to leave an economically depressed area. Most people just leave. > I’d prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don’t need new fashion every year. I don’t need new appliances every few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may be. At least he’s not calculating the cost of suicide and wondering if he’ll be around for the kids 18th birthday. I don't disagree entirely, but most people do based on behavior. It's not a simple problem at all, including what is fair to consumers and the businesses themselves which have to compete with other companies that don't have artificially inflated expenses.

ryandrake 10mo ago

Out of all the many industries out there, I don't understand why we keep glorifying and romanticizing manufacturing and trying to "bring it back." I've also worked a few of these jobs and you're right: THEY SUCK. Depending on what you are manufacturing, it can be boring, stressful, stinky, physically taxing, or dangerous. And most of them, even the highly skilled ones, don't pay well. For the sake of our own society, we should be getting rid of these jobs, not adding them.

almosthere 10mo ago
Because there are 300M people in the US and not all of them can have your cushy SSE role. See all the homeless people - it's because we're selling them out.
- dr-detroit 10mo ago
  [dead]
- treis 10mo ago
  Maybe not literally all but certainly most. We hardly have any farmers or factory workers compared to what we had at one point. They've mostly moved onto cushy office jobs.
  - almosthere 10mo ago
    Most is 12%? This is the problem with HN. You're all so bubbled it's ridiculous to think sometimes a HN'er will say something like "If I were President."
    - treis 10mo ago
      You're using officer/administrator role for your number. The number of people who work in an office or sitting at a desk is much higher. I see numbers ranging from 40-60% for that.
- yibg 10mo ago

gosub100 10mo ago

> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills We don't want to bring back their 3rd world safety standards. We just want to bring the jobs. Factory work can be less rote if teams rotate or their employer provides enough rest. Unions are a potential solution to this issue.

runako 10mo ago
> Unions are a potential solution to this issue This is part of the Labor vs Capital stuff I mentioned in my post. We're not likely to have strong unions again in the near future, so any jobs we bring are likely going to be dangerous in addition to carrying low pay. OTOH if we posit strong Labor, the good news is we have a lot of jobs now that we can turn into Good Jobs. We could, for example, make it so that any large employer pay their employees enough such that nobody who works for them full time (including contractors) is eligible for income-based government assistance at the state or federal level. We could choose to expand those rules to any organization over a certain size. There's a lot we can do to turn Bad Jobs into Better Jobs without boiling the ocean and moving industry supply chains.

MisterTea 10mo ago

> You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over. Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI presses himself. No one in that shop lost a finger. > I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right. I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with people outside of your country So the laborers in other countries where safety is ignored aren't people?

triceratops 10mo ago

> Why we would trade away our comparative advantage in things like designing widgets As China has shown over the past 20 years, that advantage erodes quickly if you stop making widgets altogether. It's very easy for widget makers to move up the value chain into widget design. And once they do, you're cooked, there's nowhere to hide. Not to mention, widget design can't absorb as much labor supply as widget production. And many people can't do widget design, still need a living, and would be perfectly competent widget makers. So...you gotta solve for that if you focus only on widget design.

MisterTea 10mo ago

> You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over. Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI presses himself. I ran the press, milling machines, lathes and saws. No one in that shop was missing body parts. Sure, its monotonous at times but that can be said about many jobs. A well ran shop should not put you in harms way. > I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right. I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with other people being subject to the same conditions.