How Does America “Reshore” Skills That Have Disappeared?
craftsmanship.net
craftsmanship.net
Unfortunately, over the last 25 years the US has decimated vocational education in the high schools while simultaneously convincing families that a 4-year college degree is the only way to a viable lifestyle. So we cram college-prep and AP classes down everyone's throats while we auction off the drafting tables and auto shop tools.
It's for the best, since there's nowhere for a voc-ed student to go after graduation other than community college. Meanwhile we've moved on to dismantling unions and apprenticeships and all the other things that tracked workers into the factories and guaranteed them living wages.
I'll let our European friends explain how they don't have this same problem.
However it would also naturally drive them to buy fewer things less frequently, which is anathema to capitalism in general. And indeed it would tend to slow innovation since a faster cycle gives new businesses more opportunity to replace an incumbent!
Note that this argument applies to software as well, although the "cost" to us is cognitive rather than economic.
Not necessarily. Such an effort would also have to go hand-in-hand with convincing local producers to make the very high quality goods you want people to buy.
I'm an American, but if I want high-quality, I tend to get Japanese stuff, since their culture seems to value quality more. American business culture seems to be more about cutting corners and settling for barely good enough in the name of short term profit.
Also, plenty made in the usa products are of high quality.
As for "Japanese" stuff, that's true: there's a bunch of Japanese-branded stuff that's made in China, and it's definitely not of the quality of Japanese-made stuff of yesteryear.
There are also problems with literal counterfeit Japanese products. One example I'm familiar with is Hakko soldering stations; it's apparently not to hard to find Chinese kock-offs who duplicated the case, packaging, and branding but otherwise use a substandard design with substandard components.
However, the people who posted about fakes all seemed to be saying the same thing: they bought it (usually on Ebay) from a seller in China.
Well, what do you expect?
Yes, if you buy something name-brand from a seller in China, who sends it directly to you from China, you can expect it to be a counterfeit.
Hmm, most of the mainstream are barely scraping along as it is, asking them to multiply their spend by a factor of 10 won't work unless their own fortunes also improve by a similar factor.
If manufacturing paid a living wage, we'd figure out a way to get people prepared to do it. It doesn't, and baring unions, never will again.
Especially for those that don't have the wherewithal or temperament to do school
There is a very direct relationship to consider here, because the consumers and the workers are often the same people. If one worker takes one week to manufacture an item which that worker is not willing to buy at a price of one week's wages, then they should not expect to be able to make a living from this.
What unions can do - and frequently have done - is raise the minimum price of goods and transfer some fraction of this to the manufacturing workers. If this makes the goods too expensive, then the factory closes down because people aren't buying them.
The cost of labour is substantially lower in various Asian countries. That isn't going to change, and you've effectively stated that you're unwilling to accept paying local labour similar rates. The conclusion you should be drawing from this is that the only way to make manufacturing work in this environment is to massively improve the productivity per unit of labour. You need to be getting away from people assembling things with their hands, and towards workers who build and maintain manufacturing automation.
Sadly, when this opportunity arose in the recent past, it was those same unions who tried very hard to block it, and were successful in that goal - manufacturing is still a laborious manual process.
Want to change this? Stop learning how to weld. Learn how to build a welding robot.
The manufacturing industry is not the tech industry. You can't produce physical goods with just your brain. Raw materials and machines play also part in the manufacturing cost, not just wages.
Back in the 70s-90s, the Japanese were beating the pants off the American automakers. But this wasn't because of price, at least not by the 80s. It was because the American companies weren't producing products that people wanted to buy. In the 70s, American cars were huge gas guzzlers, and with the '74 gas crisis, people wanted smaller, more efficient cars, and the Japanese sold them. By the 80s, Americans had finally figured out how to make small cars again, but they were crap, so people happily paid more for Japanese cars than for competing American cars. The Japanese cars were far more reliable, lasted longer, used less gas, looked better, were nicer in pretty much every way, so their higher cost was seen as worth it; only people buying solely based on price bought American cars. Labor rates were a factor, but not that much: by the 90s, Japanese labor rates were significantly higher than American labor rates, so to decrease costs the Japanese had opened many assembly plants in the US (but in places where they could avoid unionized labor, like Ohio and the South). The cars made here in the US still had great quality unlike cars made by the American automakers, and sold very well.
Today, we still see a lot of this: various Japanese and European automakers have assembly plants here in the US to take advantage of our cheaper labor rates, but their vehicles are still generally seen as superior to American-brand cars.
Basically, you can chalk it all up to management. The American cars have been undesirable because of poor decisions by upper management at these companies. You can't blame crap quality on line workers; they didn't design the car, they're just doing what they're told by managers and engineers. And engineers are constrained by the decisions made by management.
"Trade unions in Germany have a history reaching back to the German revolution in 1848, and still play an important role in the German economy and society."
Yes?
Welding properly is difficult and takes hundreds of hours of practice (at least). I encourage everyone here to take an intro to welding at your local community college to round out your skillset.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_San_Bruno_pipeline_explos...
But then, that's only to be expected from above-market-rate wages...
http://www.statista.com/statistics/217448/seasonally-adjuste...
http://www.statista.com/statistics/266228/youth-unemployment...
https://ycharts.com/indicators/norway_youth_unemployment_rat...
Just as unemployment in the US is not evenly spread over all states and industries.
One major difference between the Scandinavian countries, especially Norway, and the rest is that not only is vocational education alive and well but a person with a qualification in, say, plumbing or electrical installation work is not looked down on.
Of course Europe is not monolithic nor uniform. Nonetheless one can discern valid generalities. It is true that youth unemployment is generally quite high, and indeed constitutes a major social problem throughout the EU.
It's better or worse than average in some particular countries, but it's definitely a much bigger problem throughout Europe than in the US. Only Germany has a lower youth unemployment rate than the US in the entire EU.
* http://www.statista.com/statistics/266228/youth-unemployment...
* http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/... * http://www.statista.com/statistics/266228/youth-unemployment...
[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/norway_youth_unemployment_rat...
I can agree with most of what you said but your implication that dismantling unions is part of the problem is completely wrong.
Unions are part and parcel of the problem. They created an environment with such unreasonable costs and rules that businesses had no choice but to go offshore in order to remain viable.
For example, unions forced General Motors to continue paying full salaries to about 10,000 people who were no-longer needed due to automation and other improvements in manufacturing. GM, quite literally, had people going to "work" every day, go into this building and spend the day reading the newspaper and having coffee while being paid full wages with benefits.
And that's just one example.
Right now, in California, they are going to raise the cost of water, energy and gasoline in order to fix the infrastructure. Water pipes are in bad disrepair. Roads are a mess. So, we ask: What the hell have they been doing with the money we've been paying in taxes for decades? Well, they've been giving themselves huge raises, great benefits and ridiculous pensions. And, of course, not doing a fucking think towards maintaining the infrastructure. Taxpayers are suckers and unions are sinking us.
The usual meme is to blame offshoring on "corporate greed". The only people who say that do so because they have no clue whatsoever how business runs. Do you know who triggered offshoring? You. Me. Everyone. Consumers. The minute the first few companies started to offer lower cost goods and we started to buy them the fate of our industries was sealed.
Few would buy US-made blender for $300 when you could buy a Japanese, and later Chinese, made blender for $30 to $50.
So, if you owned a company making blenders in the US the choices were clear: Go out of business or offshore. Greed has absolutely, positively nothing to do with it. It's as simple as survival.
No, unions are a disaster. They served a purpose when they were needed. And, at that time they were a wonderful thing. Very important to understand that they were very good for our country. However, they devolved into beasts that each their very source of income. Today we can point at whole cities where this flawed interaction between unions and employers left a wide patch of devastation. Union bosses made out while unions members and industries got destroyed.
Manufacturing cannot return to the US or Europe except where a highly automated process can be implemented. And, even then, China has an absolutely massive advantage in that their supply chain is short and highly optimized. Our supply pipes are long, expensive and very inefficient.
Nothing is as eye opening as taking your own money, starting a business and instantly becoming exposed to the realities of taxation, government, labor, international commerce, supply and distribution chains, competition, sales and marketing. Most people love to talk about this stuff as if they actually had a clue.
Start a business. Run it for ten years. Then come back and read what you wrote and you'll find yourself answering back exactly as I have.
There's a lot more subtlety to this than meets they eye. In order to see it you have to have had years, decades of skin in the game and a solid understanding of business, which most people do not have. Yet everyone has an opinion.
Historical labor force norms made it more difficult to change jobs which mitigated this problem. In a sense the employer owned the worker and training made sense. Workers now own themselves, so it's up to the worker to invest in their own training.
Do we really want to go back to the older era?
Pay them money.
Why is it businesses never seem to see capitalism as the answer when it means they have to write checks instead of cash them?
Manufacturing will always happen where labor costs are lower (assuming the other requirements are in place), or lowest: automated. And American companies are already well into the process of moving production from Asia to Mexico.
One of the things that "drove out" manufacturers in the Bay Area were a slew of environmental regulations which added cost to the process with no customer visible benefit. That pushed manufacturers to use the same process where they didn't have those costs. And surprisingly places that witnesses the environmental impact of these practices didn't preemptively implement those controls themselves. So we have identical environmental damage elsewhere which was regulated out in the US.
So a more interesting question for me is how do we rethink this stuff in a way that understands the external costs of the activity and works in a way that makes those costs containable?
Looking at the historical effectiveness of tariffs suggests they are not effective at solving this particular problem, although if you were proposing something different, such as a national sales tax which would be applied to different products based on their country of origin then I would agree that hasn't been explored. But more specifically, using the power of the state to impose taxes as a means of repricing the effectiveness of capital can only work when capital is itself priced on the same basis. Arbitrarily adjusting the exchange rage for Reminbi to account for price differentials can (and does) happen.
What is worse, applying the tax allows practices such as child labor to be "priced under the tax" which does nothing for the children at all. Effectively rethinking the system such that a good can be manufactured in the US or nearby at a cost that both allows the humans involved to have a living wage, and one which makes sweatshops impractical, solves both problems, both increasing the standard of living for workers here and removing the market forces that enslave children far away.
I recognize however the essential truth in your suggestion which is the limit on anyone's ability to make systemic changes in a market can only reach so far. Altering the economics through taxation or tariffs is achievable through fiat and one has to weigh that against the negative incentives it creates.
If we could, the companies would pay for any necessary training. It doesn't cost much in the long run.
But of course we can't compete with that.
And it's not changing any time soon, with the yuan pegged to the dollar, and the existing trade agreements.
That's why Steve Jobs told President Obama "Those jobs aren't coming back".
Free trade isn't free. We can not possibly compete fairly with countries who employ indentured servants or slaves compared to our working condition expectations and wages. Nor should we.
We need fair trade if we want to keep manufacturing in the country. Further, I'd say it needs to be sustainable if we're going to ever correctly price in the true cost of a product into the retail price. That by definition includes the cradle-to-grave life cycle of a product and all of its constituent parts and raw ingredients.
Simple, figure out a way to approximate how much more it would cost if they paid the overseas workers US level wages, then tax it to make it actually cost that much more to US consumers.
I got a 4 year degree, realized it was worthless (BFA in Digital Art), and proceeded to go to trade school for a certificate in manufacturing.
Manufacturing sucks. For a hacker it is easy. I could quit today and be employed again by next week. The pay is good but not great.
For someone votech was meant for, I don't think they have the same mobility as I do.
Personally I keep looking to jump into development but I just haven't found the opportunity yet.
Siemens, VW and others made short videos on this (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPRURtORnis or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTl8w6yAjds)
Besides the PR benefits, it could be a cost effective way to determine which workers to hire in a way that is less risky than just hiring them outright.
It's no issue getting production back to the US is just wont be with any workers in there.
Not crucial to its argument, though.