this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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Heres the problem with the talking point of needing to bring manufacturing jobs back: we can't fill the manufacturing jobs that we have
I work for a company that sells services to warehouses and industrial facilities. We can't fully staff our locations, we can't keep most of the people we hire and neither can our customers, and it comes down to the fact that the jobs absolutely suck. Who wants to work in a loud, poorly temperature controlled factory with heavy equipment and a high risk of injury while doing backbreaking work when you could work at a store or resteraunt for not much less and put far less risk to your life, limb and sanity? Bring the automation on, these jobs need to become a thing of the past.
Sounds like the one thing you're not mentioning - pay - is probably shit.
If the salary offered was enough for a whole family of 5 to live of it, including a good house and a car, like in the old days, I bet you would have trouble keeping candidates away.
The "people don't want to work nowadays" arguments invariably forget to include the little detail that even a "competitive" salary in industry today is in real terms (of what it actually buys) nowhere as much as it was 50 years ago.
Most industrial jobs start at around 50-60k and in many cases it's the best paying work someone can get without a college degree.
Also I'm not saying "people don't want to work" I'm saying people have standards now and don't want to work in factories, because really, who would?
Right, two points:
Industrial job salaries relative to cost of living are still way less than back in the 60s. Even the "best paying work" in that domain still pays comparativelly crap given the real cost of living in the US in the present day. My point is that there has been a sistemic fall - across the board - in pay for all such jobs when compared with cost of living, and that's due to Globalization.
Office work in open-office or even cubicle environments isn't really better (at many levels) than factory work, and in some countries that kind of work tends to slip into personal time (such as getting calls about work when at home in the evening and weekends) - the kind of harm suffered by employees is different, not less, so people end up having strokes, hearth attacks or simply die from overwork (the latter more of a Japanese phenomenon) rather than the more physical kind of accident or consequences of physical overwork. Office work does, however, tend to pay more than factory work, so lots of people invest in higher education to work in an office doing mindless work and they're not going to apply for factory work.
Whilst office work pay has also been falling in the last decade or so, and now is actually not that much more than pay in a good industrial job, those people who invested in higher education are highly unlikely to admit to themselves their degree is worthless (and hence their time and money was wasted) and hence are unlikely to apply for the kind of work that doesn't require a degree even though sometimes they would be better of doing it, plus still now at least theoretically there are more opportunities for promotion and income growth in a shit office job than a well paid industrial job.