I don't know, do all the unemployed people in a America right now want to work on assembly lines in factories? I know, just because I don't want to doesn't mean everyone else thinks that way, but it just doesn't seem like the correct long-term fix for unemployment. Factory work just doesn't seem like a viable long-term career.
I suppose it's the non-hourly-wage assembly-line jobs that come with manufacturing that are desirable, but how many of those jobs would be created by making the huge investment to build factories and supply chains here in the U.S.? A non-zero number, but is there a more efficient way of creating career-for-life support-a-family type jobs in the U.S.?
It's not that they necessarily want factories, it's that they're looking for stable career for life jobs for people with _low skills_, which is the difficult part.
There are tons of openings in the US for plumbers, and (i believe, not sure post housing boom) also electricians, welders, pipe-fitters, etc.
The problem is that these are all jobs that require a few years of training, which the US system isn't very well set up for. The factory thing is an easy-out because we have this huge base of people who have basically no skills and we want (need) to absorb them into the economy as fast as possible, and without investing tons of money to train them. Even if we had this money, and the capacity to train them, dropping an extra 100k nurses (or whatever) into the system at once probably wouldn't be a good thing either.
This is a long term problem that we probably won't solve until we hit the point that we're educating enough people in the right things that competition for unskilled jobs hits more or less equilibrium.
The problem is that these are all jobs that require a few years of training, which the US system isn't very well set up for.
Automation is also making the skill/demand curve look more step-like I believe, where your value stays near zero up until you cross the "better than a machine could do" threshold, instead of scaling in some more smooth way. That makes it harder to get training on the job by just taking low-end jobs and moving up.
From what I've read about welding (e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/24jobs.html?pagew...), highly skilled, experienced welders are very much in demand. But, since low-end welds can be done by machines nowadays, there's much less demand for a welder with <10 yrs experience than there used to be. Consequently, there's no obvious path to get that first 10 years of experience.
I own a company that does quite a bit of welding, both manually and with a robot. Your comment "since low-end welds can be done by machines nowadays, there's much less demand for a welder with <10 yrs experience than there used to be" is slightly off the mark, but not far.
Our robot needs the skills of an experienced welder in order to set it up. It is extremely difficult to get it set up correctly if you don't know how to weld, set the wire feed, set the amperage, etc. Personally, I can't weld very well, nor am I good at setting up the robot. I rely heavily on my lead welder to get the settings right for the robot, and once it is setup properly (which can be a few hours or a few days, depending on complexity) only then can a less experienced non-welder type worker run the machine. SO my lead welder does the jig design, figures out torch angles and then an outside contractor comes in and does the programming (Windows CE, on a Panasonic arm). Since we manufacture many of the same parts day to day, we only need the contractor once a month or so. Jigs are designed for quick change, with pins to set them exactly in place.
The robot is excellent at complex work, as well as "low end welds". Without a skilled and experienced welder for the setups, it is just a useless hunk of metal. You are correct if you think that a lower skilled worker can operate it on a daily basis however. The operator does not have to know how to weld at all (just how to push the emergency stop button and yell for help). The NY Times article is speaking about welders that doing some of the most difficult welds of all, and finding a person with those skills is about as rare as finding a really awesome iOS developer who is out of work. The people who can do that sort of welding are few and far between, since it has to be flawless.
That's an interesting point, and one that further suggests that we're better off shifting to more services and less manufacturing for the low-end stuff.
Eventually automation might replace the bottom level of nurses and plumbers, (more so nurses than plumbers), but it will take _much_ longer.
I have some family/friends who are in that 'only high school diploma, no credentials/money/drive to go to a non-community college' trap, and one big barrier is that the training programs for Nursing Aides, Auto Tech, and even office/clerical have 1 year+ wait times. Even though they _want_ to gain these skills, they need to support themselves until they get into the program, and while they're working through it.
Even though there's great demand for the skills, and workers who want to gain them, the training pipeline just hasn't expanded yet.
I've long wondered why we're not investing more in skilled labor/vocational training as a country - any idea what the bottleneck is there? A lack of qualified instructors? Specifically, I think it'd be great if the govt. made training a valid alternative to "looking for a job" as a requirement for continued welfare/unemployment (might already be the case, but I've not heard of that being so).
From what you are saying, instead of investing in creating jobs for people with low skills, it would be better to invest more in helping people take the time to get training and education.
Seems like having more educated people that can get higher paying jobs, which give them more disposable income and more free time, would be a much bigger win for our society than simply creating more unskilled labor jobs.
As long as you have enough low skilled people to fill the jobs (ideally, teenagers and depending on your politics, immigrants), this is absolutely true.
The problem is when you fall into a situation like the one we have now, where you have hundreds of thousands of people who had decent paying low skill jobs and lost them all at once (over 5+ years, but close enough in econ terms).
The right thing to say/do long term is 'we should provide adequate training to help these people maximize productivity, as it's a smart investment', but in reality you've got tons of hungry, broke voters on gov't aid, significant political pushback against the government being the one to invest the money in them, and not enough training capacity. You can't build a nursing school overnight from scratch, or triple the capacity of every state's licensing board... So you're a bit stuck, both politically and practically.
The good news is that as the economy grows/recovers, low skill jobs will eventually re-emerge, shifted to whatever sectors they're now needed in. The bad news is that there's ramp-up time for doing this, and very little political will to support the idea that the government should fund it. These people take tons of government aid, which isn't cheap, and they vote. This tends to push politicians towards more protectionist and pro-low skill job rhetoric, ceterus paribus.
I should point out that it's probably not a no-brainer to all economists and policy makers to do this at all, there's significant dispute on if/when/how the government should pick winners in individual fields.
where you have hundreds of thousands of people who had decent paying low skill jobs and lost them all at once (over 5+ years, but close enough in econ terms).
You've hit the nail on the head. In the past when industries/jobs shifted it usually happened over a generation. People naturally retired and young people came into the workforce with more education and took jobs at the next rung up.
The current shift that happened, has happened so quickly that many people are simply left out of the job market skill wise. Hopefully young people today have watched and learned that jobs are not forever and that they have to always be pressing forward to stay current in a 'flat world' scenario.
Actually, I'd say this is a long-term problem that we won't solve until we stop expecting everyone to have a job and figure out some way to distribute out to everyone a piece of the value created by automation.
Some day we are going to expect only some people to have to work for a living? How are we going to choose the poor saps that have to work while the robots feed all the rest of us while we sit by our swimming pools?
A few other countries have it more-or-less figured out the basics, though without this future need in mind. Countries with a "guaranteed basic income" do this. There's also Milton Friedman's "Negative Income Tax" idea. At some point, we're going to be looking at world where few /people/ are honestly needed to do anything, and we will in fact need a way to support them. The post-scarcity society envisioned by some is probably no longer centuries away.
What's more interesting is how thinkers from various political persuasions have had their opinions on the matter converge to this answer while the dominant narratives (in the US at least) stay centered on variants of no-rules early Capitalism (Republicans/Libertarians), neo-Mercantilism (China), or 1950s union-jobs-for-life (Democrats), all of which seem increasingly untenable. Watch this (starts getting really interesting around 1:00) for more:
Simple: we don't set it up like that, with the few as slaves to the many. We just distribute a basic living to everyone, shorten the length of the work necessary for "full-time" status (or ideally abolish the distinction between part-time and full-time), and let anyone who wants extra go work for it.
I think this is a matter of "our" perspective being different. I also don't have hard stats, but I'd be willing to bet that the average HN reader is much better educated, with many more valuable job skills, and much more entrepreneurial than the average American as a whole.
Our economy has been transitioning from a goods/manufacturing-based one to a service-based economy for years. The question in my mind is whether or not this is sustainable in the sense of being able to provide decent, livable wages for the vast majority of the US population in a globalized economy. My gut is that isn't - at some point we need to make something real, not just sell each other services while a (relatively) small elite design things that are then made overseas.
The other thing to realize is that manufacturing carries with it a lot more than just assembly line jobs. Factories need some managers, but perhaps more importantly, they also need skilled technicians and engineers to optimize processes, troubleshoot problems, work on complicated assemblies, etc. I think it's reflecting a bit of an elite bias to say that "Factory work just doesn't seem like a viable long-term career"
I don't have numbers to back this up, but I think in general it would be a good thing for America as a whole, and for the American middle class in particular, if we began to move back toward being a country of "makers" rather than a country of "service providers."
I don't have numbers to back this up, but I think in general it would be a good thing for America as a whole, and for the American middle class in particular, if we began to move back toward being a country of "makers" rather than a country of "service providers."
From the data I've seen from a few Google searches, U.S. industrial manufacturing output keeps going up (with hiccups in recessions), but employment in manufacturing is going down due to increases in efficiency and automation.
Also, I think it's weird to put this dividing line between service providers and makers. I design and program websites for a living, which most people would call a service. But couldn't you also say that I "manufacture" websites? A cook at McDonald's manufactures burgers. A writer a newspaper manufactures articles.
Actually, the people who make the McDonalds burgers do count as manufacturers, since the burgers are made offsite and only warmed up at the restaurant. But it is stupid that doing the same thing in different places could change something from a service to an manufacturing job.
No, our employment has been transitioning from manufacturing to services. We make more things than ever before, ignoring small recession-induced blips.
> Factory work just doesn't seem like a viable long-term career.
The US middle class exists (or existed) in no small part precisely because of factory work. Many people have spent their entire lives in factories making a good living, some still do, more would if the jobs were available.
Automation is the obvious argument against long-term viability, but most factory jobs have never been automated, and probably won't be for years yet -- they've just moved.
And don't assume everybody can work in an office, nor assume everyone wants to. My father, who actually does work in an office, has for years, and is well respected in his job, would rather be building houses.
I'm working class, I come from a pit village in N. England, my father was a miner, my family were miners or steelworkers.
I now have a PhD in physics and work in aerospace, but I'm still working class! And for most of my life (certainly my academic career!) I was poorer than most working class people with union jobs on assembly lines.
Those words have slightly different meanings in England vs the US I think.
In the US upper vs middle vs working class is related to income and lifestyle. If you're a coal miner who somehow makes 80k/year (i just made that up, who knows if it exists) you'd be firmly middle class in popular discourse the US, despite the fact that you're in a working class job.
Similarly one auto-plant can pay union workers 70k (middle class) and non-union 30k (working class, or at least on the line) for the same job.
I think in the UK it's more delineated by job and upbringing than income, right?
Note that I'm just speaking out usage by normal people/media, those words (although usually avoided in favor of income deciles) can be given specific definitions in academic research.
In the UK class=job not salary. Approiximately; jobs needs a degree=middle class, owning the land = upper class.
Working on oil rig and earning 4x as much as a school teacher still makes that a working class job, the teacher is middle class. The rig manager is working class, the geologist is middle class.
But ultimately it's a personal identity thing. You can be a member of the royal family making furniture or a working class lad making avionics software!
I suppose it's the non-hourly-wage assembly-line jobs that come with manufacturing that are desirable, but how many of those jobs would be created by making the huge investment to build factories and supply chains here in the U.S.? A non-zero number, but is there a more efficient way of creating career-for-life support-a-family type jobs in the U.S.?