Factory jobs are booming like it’s the 1970s
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
He was in a desperate situation because he got saddled with debt trying to stay afloat during Covid, so he just does that and keeps his head down all the time while paying things off. Its a shame too, he was so close to retirement and now I don't think he will be able to.
I say this as someone that knows two pipeline welders in Wyoming. They were living it up with their time off. Who do you think bought all those side by sides in 2020 and 2021. You couldn't find one to buy no matter how far you were willing to drive. Do you think it was the office worker crowd buying $30k go-karts?
"Fifteen percent of your household income is going into retirement," Ramsey said. "That will make the typical family a millionaire in 14 years." https://www.today.com/money/dave-ramsey-how-retire-early-pay...
Of course, add another decade and you are at millionaire status. Or don't contribute any additional funds, and wait 12 years, and you hit millionaire.
Even as someone who is better off than others my age, it seems like retirement will be a long way off and tight. I was interested and looked up how I stacked up and it turns out I'm around top 25% for income by age and about top 1% (that's alarming) for savings. If it's shakey for me, how is anyone else going to make it? Property values and taxes aew sky high. So is medical care. Other stuff like groceries or parts/labor for home repair are rising.
So yeah, it does not look good in my eyes.
https://dqydj.com/retirement-savings-by-age/
https://cdn.dqydj.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/income-by-a...
What rate are you modeling your investment returns at?
Make 14k in two weeks while offshore, not have a dime to their name 2 weeks later when they're going back out.
But there were plenty of guys making 200k living paycheck to paycheck.
Those workers often have to pay out the nose just to eat ramen in plywood closets, the money doesn't go much farther than it would in a dense city.
Immigrants from 3rd world countries with zero formal education, zero real family experience with building wealth, save money like crazy in the US.
There's "building wealth" and there's just responsible money handling. Normal families handle money in responsible manner (have savings, avoid debt etc.) and such behaviors are passed to children. Pathological families can be doing all kinds of crazy things with their money - take up expensive debt for frivolous reasons, spend the whole salary up front and go hungry until the next one arrives, lose houses over small things (e.g. a guy in my family traded a large apartment for a much smaller one, a bottle of vodka and a dog) etc. Their lives is chaos, and that includes the financial aspect of it. A child in such conditions really can have no idea that it's not a normal way to handle money, and that it can be done much better.
People come to the dealership and ask for certain cars. Sometimes they do ask about payment ranges, and so you tell them. If they say "oh that's more than I thought, I was trying to keep it under $500 a month. Is that possible?" I tell them if it's possible via lease with $4k down or maybe on a 72 month loan. They decide. What else am I supposed to do? Go full Dave Ramsey on them and figure out if they can really afford $500 a month?
The FEW times I tried to save someone from buying an expensive used car I just KNEW would eat them alive in repairs, it was always taken very poorly, and that's with me doing it pretty tactfully in my opinion.
People that are the type to make bad financial decisions (in our opinions let's say) don't exactly take kindly to lowly 'car salesmen' implying they can't really afford something.
That's a counterfactual.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-close-look-at-sander...
To turn the example around. people in my dad’s village in Bangladesh—where you need to have kids to work on the farm—all believe in traditional procreative marriage. Is that a justification for ignoring their economic concerns?
It’s a very weird kind of “liberalism” that holds people’s attitudes arising out of their lived experience against them.
There is enough blame to be spread around for both major parties. Trump had his -15- 45 days to slow the economy. Congress printed trillions of dollars. Nearly every governor was more draconian than the federal government.
FRED graph: https://www.imagebam.com/view/MEE2BB0
I work in manufacturing as a software developer.
The lowest wage jobs are dominated by service industry jobs: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/occupation-finder.htm?pay=Less+than+...
The only manufacturing jobs in the <30k group are in textiles.
I don't blame companies but the government on any lack of manufacturing jobs. China is cheap and from what I understand they are usually at most 3-4x cheaper not 10 or 10x cheaper right? So that just means stuff costs a bit more and less net profit margins for companies right? Not ideal but it should be economically viable I would think?
I am just concerned there is a real chance of an eventual war with china when the west depends on them on so much but opposes them on a lot of things as well. Can the frenemy relationship last long?
A decade or so ago, my dad analyzed a part that came from his Chinese competitor. The finished Chinese part, including shipping, cost less than my dad’s company was paying for the raw materials.
He was still able to compete by producing a much higher quality product (found in nuclear power plants, chemical processing plants, oil rigs, and other places where quality really matters).
Anyway, my point is, I wouldn’t assume China is only cheaper due to labor.
Except you still need to compete with other companies who can undercut your product on price now. A few $ here or there might not matter for some, but most people are going to sort by price and buy the cheapest one. Now there are second order effects - the high volume sellers get economies of scale during manufacturing and better deals from suppliers when they buy in bulk. Now you’re competing with products who are priced much lower. How long before you go out of business?
All is not lost. You could potentially put a “proudly made in $country” tag on your product and charge a premium. You’ll go low volume, high margin. It’s viable and many manufacturers do it. But only the ones with a direct relationship with customers. A supplier making a tiny wizbang can’t sell them to Apple or Ford expecting a premium.
Look at the boom towns of Columbus, KC, Houston etc.
Now, if the market continues to cool down, it may be a different story.
> Store-risk metrics include average store compensation, average total store sales, and a “diversity index” that represents the racial and ethnic diversity of every store. Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity and lower employee compensation, as well as higher total store sales and higher rates of workers’ compensation claims, according to the documents
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/20/21228324/amazon-whole-foo...
It’s not real manufacturing. All the real components from screws to relays to sheet metal and injection molded plastic parts are made somewhere other than the US.
But yeah, if you export 300 787’s and A320’s each year, you’ll get the false impression the US is a manufacturing “powerhouse.”
And automotive and aerospace are not the two biggest sectors of US manufacturing. (Boeing was the largest exporter for years though, probably still is). Look it up.
The truth of the matter is the bulk of the components that matter in those products are made somewhere other than the US. The hard work is done elsewhere.
I just replaced a capacitor in my 2009 Maytag washing machine. Original capacitor was made in Mexico. The replacement was from Taiwan. The motor was made in China. Every product "made" in the US is a hodgepodge of imported components.
> You can look up that final assembly is manufacturing
I don't dispute that that's how it gets measured in official statistics, but I'm telling you it's a misrepresentation of what's actually occurring in industry.
I work for an OEM aerospace manufacturer. Fuselages get made in Mexico. Wings get made in Japan. Engines get made in Europe and most parts for them are sourced from Russia, which is causing major shortages right now. Landing gear are forged in Brazil. We used to do it all here in the US, now we have a paint booth and a service center. But hey, final assembly is manufacturing! The US is an industrial powerhouse!
Seriously, go look around your house. Show me a piece of furniture or appliance that was made in the US. You can't. You'd be lucky to have one that was assembled in the US. Shoot, your phone and computer probably weren't even made here. And if they were, again, the important parts that took all the work were probably made in Asia.
Believe me, I wish I were wrong. I would love to be wrong. But you saying I'm wrong doesn't change reality. Stop believing statistics that are built on lies and start believing what you can clearly see before your very eyes.
Most of the furniture in my house was made in the US, because I'm not poor. Furniture is one of the easiest things to buy American. Good furniture is not cheap but it's not out of reach for the middle class either.
The materials your house was constructed from were mostly made in the US: lumber doesn't come directly from the earth nor does sheetrock or siding etc. These materials are manufactured.
Most of the books in my house were printed and bound in the US from paper made in US papermills.
Most of my appliances were, as you are careful to point out, assembled in the US. All of the large appliances were.
Almost all of the food in my pantry, refrigerator, and freezer that is in boxes, cans, or jars was processed and packaged in the US: that is manufacturing. If you don't think that's hard work, you should try it.
If you have any medications in your house, they were very probably made in the US. The gas in your car was almost certainly refined in the US. Your shampoo and deodorant and other personal care items, unless you deliberately buy imported, were made in the USA.
The important part that makes my computer work was made in the US, and yours probably was too. Some other bits also. That is very high tech, capital intensive manufacturing, high value-add, and while Taiwan is basically caught up, the US is still very competitive.
Sorry about your employer's poorly implemented global supply chain fiasco, which pretty much identifies it even to people outside your industry. But it's not the whole story of US industry.
It's in dollars, which is very misleading and forms an incomplete picture of the ecosystem required to have true manufacturing ability. We do final assembly on an automobile and that gets registered as big $$$. But it's actually pretty easy to assemble a bunch of already-made parts. Much more difficult (and quite a lot of skill, built up over decades) to make the fuel pump from raw inputs! We lack completely the lower three-quarters of the pyramid.
By this same logic, I did $500 in manufacturing this quarter because I assembled two Billy bookcase... nah.
You don't know anyone because... we don't do a lot of manufacturing. The pre-made imported parts come into a handful of Toyota factories, and a whole bunch of very expensive SUVs come out. That's how you can get such a high $$$ number and not know anyone who works manufacturing.
You probably don't know anyone who works in manufacturing because you're in the demographic that reads hackernews. Using the automotive industry as an example is a big tell, you know, because a whole lot more than cars is manufactured in the US. Manufacturing is not a huge percentage of US employment, but it is much, much bigger than you think in raw numbers. Go look it up - 67,000 does not move the needle, though it's a big percentage of new jobs.
Manufacturing where there are environmental regulations will push improvements in efficiency and waste management too, making the process more efficient in the long run.
It's not such a big planet.
That's what the US should be focused heavily on.
Infrastructure generally, grid, wind/solar/nuclear, manufacturing.
And start expanding Medicaid upward (by incomes) and Medicare downward (by age).
Raise income taxes on the top 1/4, aggressively on the top 10%.
It'd be a good, modest start.
If that boosted the economy we’d be flying by now.
Weren't assembly and logistics workers all supposed to be obsolete by now?
1. Earliest iterations before 2012! https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Jobless...
2. 2013! https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Fut...
3. https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2020/01/23/robots-m...
4. The hype is still being sold: https://www.teaminternational.com/automation-future-jobs/
https://financesonline.com/jobs-lost-to-automation-statistic...
The US is going to have to double it's manufacturing base in the next decade as the world deglobalizes.
A lot of that will probably be more-or-less automated though.
Even CNC machines need people to program them, load/unload parts, tools, empty the chips, replace lubricant, etc. Parts have to be inspected, packed for shipping, etc.
There are a lot of people involved in manufacturing, the vast factories with no people in them and lights out are the rare exception.
Alternatively, governments may also choose to increase immigration.
Are they getting training on the job as well?
High skill positions often have vocational training, like welding or machining. Assembly work is learned on the job.
12.49/hour: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/food-preparation-and-serving/food-an...
13.22/hour: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/personal-care-and-service/childcare-...
13.11/hour: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/cashiers.htm
17.87/hour: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/production/assemblers-and-fabricator...
It’s not black and white but I would expect energy burdens to outweigh labor burdens for a good long while.
If the US needs to make up a shortfall, it will simply open up immigration more.
Good manufacturing jobs tend to be pretty good.
It’s not so simple when the labor crunch is being felt in vast regions of the globe and many (most?) developing nations are aging faster than the US and are older on average or will be over the next 10 - 20 years.
Yeah, this seems very doubtful. High housing cost + large student loan debt has delayed family formation which means fewer kids.
Need is doing a lot of work here. Recently our trade deficit recovered from a trough of growing at the rate of $100 billion a month back to $70 billion a month. For comparison, during the entire 2010s, it only grew by $40 billion a month. We haven't had a trade surplus since 1991, when we managed it for a quarter, and before then not since Reagan was elected.
Not really, and the USA trade deficit is going to get worse because USA stuff is more expensive due to exchange rates.
There is increased demand for usd because:
1) Europeans are sick of low/negative yields at home, and
2) some big non-USA borrowers issued debt in usd and must pay it back in usd.
2) this has been the case for decades and isn’t novel at all. It is noteworthy however when your usd denominated debt becomes much more expensive due to currency exchanges
Sadly, politicians were not able to say no to the US even when they were told to run full speed towards a 300m cliff.
The tech bubble continues to persist because people don't know where else to put their money. The tech bubble started because of the 2008 crash, investors needed a place to park their cash to see it grow, and tech seemed the best bet. That plus cheap capital meant throwing everything into tech no matter how ridiculous the fundamentals were.
If this is really a trend we'll see the expedited crash of tech as money floods into manufacturing.
Which assets in particular?
It's not even a case of Europe missing out, industry is actively collapsing over here.
Actually, EU did a good job regulating everything consumer into efficiency however for the industry there's hard limit how much energy you need. Renewables can't come soon enough.
Anyway, Eastern Europe is far from experiencing a manufacturing boom either.
But, since Poland joined the EU in 2004, the trend has reversed. There's now plenty of (mostly foreign-owned) manufacturing plants around the country.