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Comment by danvoell | Hacker News Reader

The biggest "gap" in manufacturing is the wages gap. Most new jobs in manufacturing require less skills than a Walmart greeter. They either stand around and press a button or stand around and pull a piece of plastic off a part. Manufacturers aren't willing to pay much more than $MinimumWage per hour for this job. The people who apply for these jobs are just a revolving door that cycle through all the local manufacturers once they get bored. And then manufacturers complain because they can't find someone who wants minimum wage and wants to press a button for the next 30 years and is dependable. They cite "work ethic". Technology and capitalism are the only one's we can blame in this situation.

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"Blame technology and capitalism"? Are you advocating that a higher minimum wage would fix this? How exactly would pricing labor above it's actual value cause MORE of it?

If these manufactured products can't be brought to market without the button pushers, the value of the button pushing is almost certainly higher than minimum wage.

In which case the minimum wage is unnecessary. I had one of these button pushing jobs (well it was more complicated than that, but still not demanding), and was paid well above minimum wage.

Exactly where I was going to go. Economies are about allocation of finite resources (labor being one of those). If a company is so poorly ran that it can't determine the correct price it's willing to pay for labor through cost-benefit analysis, I'd rather it not exist. Politically, we have a thing for making it harder for bad companies to fail.

Agreed! There are bad businesses making bad decisions all the time. Just waiting for someone to come eat their lunch. But we sort of shelter them from those consequences.

My only disagreement with you is that I'm happy for a bad business to exist as long as it can manage it. I just don't think we should save them from being destroyed by their dysfunction.

I guess I just mean I don't think we (government) should keep bad business afloat. If they can manage on their own, who am I to say it's bad ;D

I agree, bad companies should fail. But we discourage their failure because when they do, people are out on the street. And good companies don't spring up as often as we would like.

Employees' loyalty is also a value they provide - as proven by companies complaining about lack of it. Apparently this loyalty is not priced into the paychecks.

I don't think he's saying it would. I think he's saying that a hiring-employment gap means wages should rise. That brings in more employees, while pricing out some marginal job postings.

What we have right now is moderate unemployment, static wages, and an industry insisting they can't find employees. If we accept the article's premise that it's not about irreducible skill shortages (i.e. skills are available, or on-job training is an option) then something is badly wrong with that gap.

There's a known pattern where an industry yells about how they can't find employees until some external force solves the problem for them: usually rising unemployment or government-funded training initiatives and subsidies. This is especially rewarding if people get educated/trained into your industry specifically, and therefore can't easily change careers and get value from their labor. Basically you keep wages low and beat your breast until someone hands you a captive labor force.

So one possible explanation for this 'gap' is that employers are keeping wages sticky in the hope that someone else will come and save them from raising wages.

> Technology and capitalism are the only one's we can blame in this situation.

You can also blame the Government. The reason manufacturing wages are so low is because the few manufacturing companies left in the US can't compete with foreign manufacturing. It's hard to compete against companies that do manufacturing in countries with few to no labor laws. Tariffs on raw materials coming into the country are surprisingly high while tariffs on completed goods are low. That situation needs to be reversed if we ever want to increase the wages of factory workers.

If you mean making it more attractive for companies to produce here, sure, 100% agree. If you mean penalizing companies for leaving or pass a penalty on to consumers, 100% disagree. Let's make it easier to produce in this country, not harder to produce outside.

US governments have failed to foster and create a globally competitive ecosystem in which US manufacturing can fluorish.

Do we have new and more efficient ways to handle industrial waste?

Have we improved our transportation infrastructure so that raw materials can move more cheaply than in past decades?

Has government found less expensive and more fair ways to manage worker injuries and grievances (aside from lawsuits)? Has government reformed health care so that workers can take these manufacturing jobs without fear of being financially overwhelmed by medical bills should they be injured?

Are there tax or other incentives to create clusters of related manufacturing businesses in close proximity to one another?

Are their cleverly designed policies/regulations that US governments can use to legally (as far as the WTO is concerned) favor local industry?

I don't see this sort of reform happening in any significant way (except maybe Obamacare, which requires a lot of government subsidies in the form tax credits).

Where is the actual industrial policy innovation and reform in this country?

All that automation isn't free, though. As the interface on the front panel gets simpler, the maintenance technician's job gets more complicated. Hiring a skilled technician is hard -- they're valuable and their pay reflects it. At the factory where I used to work they often made more than college-educated engineers. (Engineers are exempt from overtime. You don't learn that in school!)

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