NYT: Manufacturing isn’t coming back.
NYT: Manufacturing isn’t coming back.
Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are vowing to engineer a manufacturing renaissance. Such promises evoke 1950s-era memories of strong communities full of ordinary Americans, many without college degrees, earning attractive pay and benefits for their hard work.
The author believes the US cannot get back to the fully functioning country we had in the 1950’s. That is a widely held opinion, so talking about this article is as good as any other.
Manufacturing bottomed out at around 10 percent of nonfarm workers by 2019. The numbers employed in manufacturing started to recover under President Biden and may continue to rebound.
The author shows her bias. If the bottom was in 2019, then it started to recover after that. Biden took office in 2021, so it wasn’t his policies that turned things around.
While women and immigrants helped offset the slowing growth of the native-born population, it hasn’t been enough: Two-thirds of respondents to a National Association of Manufacturing survey this past spring said that their biggest challenge was attracting and retaining employees.
Attracting and retaining employees is simple. Pay more and improve the working conditions.
Early in the summer, six years ago, a guy showed up at my door to inform me that a team from First Energy would be coming by the next day to paint the high voltage transmission towers on my property.
The guys were talking and laughing when they pulled up on a Gator. They grabbed their paint buckets, and got right to work. I chatted with the foreman as they painted.
The power lines are live, carrying 475,000 Volts. Most of the guys are not roped in. They are all in the bridge painters, but prefer working with a small team painting towers. None of them are immigrants, or as far as the foreman knew, the children of immigrants. They like the job because if they keep on schedule, they can leave early. They make about $80k per year.
I do not believe that there are any jobs that Americans will not do if the working conditions are sufficient and the pay is good.
The industry group further expects that an additional 3.8 million manufacturing jobs will likely become available in the coming decade, both as older workers retire and as initiatives enacted in the Biden administration come online…
Social Security and retirement plans are complicated, and seem like a scheme. There seems to be a sweet spot where one maximizes the monthly benefit. A person can lose money by working. Why not let people start collecting whenever they want, and if they continue to work, their benefits don’t change and FICA tax is no longer deducted. That can’t be done because the system is paying for people who didn’t put in enough to cover their own benefit.
The system needs sufficient flexibility to let people work. Part of that is eliminating the minimum wage and mandatory benefits. I retired at 61 years old. Plenty of people do. It isn’t unusual for people to be lonely or lack a sense of purpose in retirement. Retired people would be happy to work and be dependable if the conditions of employment were pleasant.
Another big difference from the earlier era: More modern manufacturing roles will require college degrees.
How could this possibly be true? A bachelor’s degree doesn’t prepare a person to work in manufacturing. I’m assuming by ‘worker’, they don’t mean management or engineering. Modern manufacturing roles don’t require a person to have a year of a social science, liberal arts and physical science.
Clearly, companies use a bachelor’s degree to screen for intelligence and maturity. If it was easier to fire people and easier to ascertain their quality, the degree becomes unnecessary.
The US is a big country with 340 million people and a corrupt class of elites. Stealing from the future and selling America is not a sustainable path to a prosperous future. Trump is the only politician that I’ve ever heard who is proud to put American citizens first. Everyone else is happy to manage the decline by borrowing money against future generations and importing people who will work for cheap. The second generation won’t work like that, so they import more unskilled and culturally incompatible people.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics didn’t go to physicists or developments in physics. I recently learned that Physics research is largely pointless and we have too many physicists for the productive positions available. If we have too many physicist, how do you think it looks for journalists, criminal justice, communications or psychology? Don’t get me started on grievance study majors.
Every department in the federal government can’t perform it’s core function. If industry wants to workers, and they aren’t permitted to just import cheap labor, then they better get involved. Everything is broken.
To get smart, diligent and resilient citizens, college and training programs have to be rigorous and focused. To get capable college students, we need K-12 education to stop screwing around. Many people won’t make the cut. If an IQ of 100 is scaled to average intelligence, then half of the population is below that. Many of them may end up working in landscaping, domestic service, meat packing, casual construction and other jobs currently filled by non-citizens. To get people to take those jobs, the workers will need to be paid well and treated properly. The elites won’t be happy with that, but if that is the worst thing that happens to them, they should be thankful.