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..because the main reason it’s [jobs leaving US] happening is a radical increase in automation and robotics driven by the very set of technologies so fabulously
by zwieback 13y ago
..because the main reason it’s [jobs leaving US] happening is a radical increase in automation and robotics driven by the very set of technologies so fabulously enriching Silicon Valley’s .01%
Not so sure, I was involuntarily involved in shipping my own manufacturing engineering job along with many of our production staff's jobs overseas and it was not due to robotics and automation. We had a lot of automation in our US manufacturing but when production went overseas the robots went away and were replaced with manual labor. Most of our US jobs were higher qualified with operators and engineers working alongside automated equipment but our partners in Asia found that the robots were more expensive than manual workbenches and that it was hard to find operators and technicians that could keep up with automated manufacturing.
- pnathan 13y agoQuality dropped then due to manual workbenches. Why was this operation shipped overseas?
- zwieback 13y agoMaybe, maybe not. There are many variables: cycle time of each step, cost of raw material, cost of labor, cost of real estate, turnover of labor, etc. In the end you can dial in your desired quality at the expense of your yield. We tended to view high yield at a given quality level as the main goal but if you can afford to throw away 1% more parts at final inspection and still save money you'll be forced to do that.
- kiba 13y agoPresumably, due to cheaper cost of manual labor versus robots. However, that will change as manual labors demand higher wages, making robotic manufacturing much more feasible again.
- Vivtek 13y agoQuality only matters after the cost accounting is done. It's kind of a Maslow Hierarchy for large corporations.