Who wants to work in a factory? | Hacker News Reader

Who wants to work in a factory?

arenamag.com

32 pointsHR0164 comments

> Finally, we must ask a new question: not “Why doesn’t anyone want to work in a factory?” but “How do we make building things exciting, inspiring, and financially viable for millions of Americans?”

This would require viewing workers as something more than fungible labor units whose success or failure is almost entirely a matter of their own performance. Few executives care if their workers are miserable— maybe they’ve got ‘retention’ problems, or ‘recruiting’ problems, both of which usually result in some HR-based initiative.

I don’t see a executives taking that query seriously any time soon.

I worked in mega corporate retail and fast food from 16 through 20. Honestly it was fun, my coworkers and I got along great, we partied together, nothing about it was miserable. I think many elite leftists, like most people on HN, see everyone who works these jobs as miserable bastards and the jobs themselves as soul-sucking slavery.

Few people are executives and look at things through the top management’s eyes. If you have an honest conversation without a diehard anti-capitalist and walk them logically through “cold” decisions a corporation makes, like layoffs etc, eventually you get to the point where they agree they make sense, but then justify themselves by arguing the entire system is corrupt and needs to be burned down and restarted with some sort of worker-democracy thing.

You say “few executives care if their workers are miserable” and that is the dumbest, most misinformed, wrong take on earth. Even if the answer is only one of pure self-interest in profit, having all of your workers hate their lives and the company itself is beyond stupid, and is not the plan.

You worked in a fast food chain. Now imagine if you would have thought it was just as “fun” working in an Amazon Warehouse or being an Amazon driver with strict quotas.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de...

And yes this really happens. My (step)son who worked directly for Amazon - not a third party contractor verified it.

Before you ask how do I know he worked directly for Amazon both times, he showed up in the internal employee directory (PhoneTool) when I worked at AWS.

Amazon is a great place. My neighbor loved working there, now he works in the warehouse at a local museum of international repute. But he is a strong guy and prefers manual labor.

Andy is that you?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/02/amazon-sa...

Hundreds of thousands of people work in Amazon warehouses. It isn’t analogous to a sweatshop or a plantation. They pay well for low skilled labor with good benefits.

Here is an Econtalk episode about what working for Wal Mart is actually like, from someone who worked there, and why people prefer working there than the worshipped “mom and pops” https://www.econtalk.org/platt-on-working-at-wal-mart/

> burned down and restarted with some sort of worker-democracy thing

Pretty big difference between that and a worker owned place like Bobs Red Mill. We’re not talking about burning it down we’re talking about sharing profits and enabling workers to live comfortably too.

The thing you learn as you get more involved in a company is that the workers on the bottom are paid the highest percentage of the value they create. i.e. bottom tier workers have the lowest margins of all workers, they are already keeping almost everything they create.

So to "balance" this the only way to do it is to take from higher paid workers who already are getting paid much less than the value they create.

That's why these systems are so rare and why they frequently collapse. People _really_ don't like carrying others weight any more than they have to.

There is quite a bit of speculation here. Any sources to back up these feelings?

If those places are so fantastic and a win-win for workers and consumers, then more of them will naturally be created because of the superior profit potential.

What I will never support is the government putting a gun to my head to force me to create worker-owned businesses. You should win voluntarily with superior operating models, not the threat of jail.

Why did you stop working there at 20 then?

Since we're trading anecdotal data, I also worked in retail and fast food throughout high school (Walmart, Chick-fil-A, and Hollywood DVD). While I wouldn't necessarily describe my experience as miserable, at its absolute best it was monotonous and repetitive. I definitely don't remember any of my coworkers describing the experience as "fun."

The part about partying seems like a non sequitur, so I'll just ignore that.

And as to the statement about executives being concerned with their employees welfare, perhaps you should read a bit into the history of Foxconn.

> If you have an honest conversation without a diehard anti-capitalist and walk them logically through “cold” decisions a corporation makes

This missed the point.

The reality is, why should someone who's being laid off must think in a "purely logical 'cold' corporate way"? What benefit they could get by doing that? Compare to, say, just crying out loud for public support to pressure the corporate for a better term for themselves and the others?

Everyone is speaking for their own asses, with talk points that could advance their own interest. In a sense, it's a poetry contest, sure, with some logic involved, but mainly benefit driven and emotional.

> Even if the answer is only one of pure self-interest in profit, having all of your workers hate their lives and the company itself is beyond stupid, and is not the plan.

Based on the same train of logic used in your comment, I don't see why "having all of your workers hate their lives and the company" is "beyond stupid". The "purely logical 'cold' corporate thinking" only cares about worker retention rate in order to maintain a good enough production. Whether or not the worker likes or hates the job is simply not on the metric, well, thus of course "is not the plan".

So overall, I don't think the logic flows. A more realistic logic is that the corporate should not expect their employees to always act for corporate interests (especially during a lay off), and employees should not expect their bosses to always care about their hatred or happiness.

>The reality is, why should someone who's being laid off must think in a "purely logical 'cold' corporate way"

Because that is the only viable way. Your assumption is that the layoffs are a function of greed rather than a function of necessity. Your kids think they can't go to Disney world every year because you are greedy - obviously you have money look at all the stuff you buy. What they don't understand is that you would both love to take them every year and you know it's just totally unsustainable and would be incredibly financially irresponsible.

What most people viscerally understand as the worst is the worst they’ve experienced, and even if you intellectually understand that worse things exist, it’s easy to assume you relate to other people’s ‘worst’ far more than you do. My username isn’t based on a hobby— I am a classically-trained chef experienced in and intimately familiar with food service operations and labor from the retail concessions level to Michelin Star fine dining. Working fast food jobs can be tough, greasy, hot, and sometimes dangerous work, but it’s physically, mentally, and emotionally the easiest work in food preparation— almost no other job has been workshopped, designed, redesigned, re-outfitted, optimized and re-optimized for human interaction — and it doesn’t even pay the worst. Especially as a casual teen employee, it doesn’t hold a candle to working as an a la carte line cook, let alone in heavy manufacturing, or nearly any other blue collar work as an adult with adult responsibilities and needs. Even in the food industry — The cog-in-the-machine aspect of being a fast food worker doesn’t hold a candle to being a fine dining dishwasher, which pays less and is far more physically demanding, dangerous, monotonous, micromanaged, etc etc etc. Fast food work is more cog-in-the-machine-like than being a fine dining prep cook, but being a fine dining prep cook is much more physically demanding, stressful and skill-intensive.

Lots of soul-crushing cog-in-the-machine work pays well because that’s the only way they can get anyone to work for them at all. Like working on the UPS truck loading line at the distribution point near where I grew up: the supervisors would walk around on catwalks above the docks with whistles and stop watches putting you on blast if they timed you loading fewer than X packages in a minute. Those jobs paid far better than other entry-level jobs in the area and made the chance of getting into the jobs people actually wanted— the delivery driver jobs— much easier. Those jobs were famously miserable, grueling, and dehumanizing and the people in charge couldn’t care less. They just kept inching up the pay until they could be filled because that’s the way business works. They didn’t think they had a problem with persistently understaffing the docs so it had to be run like a labor camp— they had recruitment and retention problems, which are a lot cheaper. And even delivery driver jobs these days are crap. People like trash truck drivers and corporate-employed Amazon delivery drivers interviewed often say they’re penalized for such minuscule lapses in productivity that they’re forced to piss in bottles because there’s no time for them to stop, even along their route. They’re not shooting for bonuses either— they’re just trying to not get fired. Does that sound like they’re happy? Do you think the bosses that created and enforce these requirements care if they’re miserable?

I know one guy that got life-altering injuries as a tech school welding student. He was repairing a metal ladder above large underground storage tanks that the plant manager said had been emptied, triple-rinsed and dried. Well, he lied. They were full of miscellaneous waste chemicals. The sparks from the tig welder somehow ignited the gases in the tanks and he was blown through the roof of the plant and briefly woke up in the parking lot before waking up months later in the hospital wearing the silicone compression gloves save neck wrap he’d have to wear through his twenties to keep his skin grafts from falling off. In court, the plant manager said emptying and cleaning the tanks whenever people were going to be doing welding was just too expensive. He wasn’t fired. The medical expenses and facility damage were handled by insurance. Do you think he cared how miserable that boy’s life became? How about the private detectives their insurance company paid follow my friend around just in case they could snap a picture of us bowling or something they could use to prove non-compliance and deny his claims? Plant is still going strong today! They have had a few more explosions since, regrettably.

Do think those types of stories are rare? Do you think you understand what working in a place like that is like based on your fast food experience?

Of course business executives are making logical decisions based on the economics— that’s the entire fucking point. They’re doing that because that’s the way the system works. They didn’t create the system, it’s not their fault that the system works like that, but that doesn’t change that it is the way it is, or the effect it has on workers.

> You say “few executives care if their workers are miserable” and that is the dumbest, most misinformed, wrong take on earth. Even if the answer is only one of pure self-interest in profit, having all of your workers hate their lives and the company itself is beyond stupid, and is not the plan.

Got me! Always good to throw together a quick insult to make yourself feel better about not being able to put together a counterpoint, right? Saying I’m accusing executives of sitting in the c suite twisting their mustaches plotting ways to intentionally make their employees miserable is the “dumbest, most misinformed wrong” interpretation of what I said. Would you feel better had I said “few executives think twice about favoring all but the most trivial bits of profit over workers not being miserable?” Do you think manufacturing without union protections or worker safety laws would be better than in Victorian era mills or early 20th century mines? Why? Because executives care about their employees happiness beyond what it takes to keep them from quitting? If so, why isn’t that the case in China? If worker protections didn’t exist and the job market allowed it, do you really think that basic worker comfort and safety wouldn’t be traded for shareholder profits in a heartbeat? If you think that, you’re going to need some solid empirical evidence because that’s not the way humanity has operated historically.

The only places in our country that support anything but high-skill speciality manufacturing are the places where people don’t have a choice. Look up a dozen run-of-the-mill production plants on Glassdoor and skip the reviews obviously made by HR— and then tell me that the people running those places are prioritizing worker happiness. The difficulty of profitably running a manufacturing business in the United States doesn’t change the fact that workers often bear the brunt of the efficiency measures implemented to make it possible.

The author of this nice well-meaning article made some totally valid observations about reasons people don’t actively choose manufacturing jobs in this country when they have a choice — what’s not realistic is thinking we can make it all better just by changing the way we look at it.

I disagree with everything you said. But you have such passion, I encourage you to direct your efforts towards starting a new business, then promptly give all the equity to your employees so you can all be equal owners.

A lot of what I said was factual, and a lot of what I said was anecdotal, and none of what I said in either comment addressed employee owned businesses— what you think about what I wrote was obviously based on something other than I wrote, so great job writing a response that was even less useful and insightful than your first. Claiming victory exclusively over a position you assume someone holds while ignoring literally everything they actually said is just a sad, sad straw man argument.

There was a time when I would go point-by-point through leftist wall-of-text but I don’t care enough anymore. At a high level it seems you have a very fundamental issue with the organization of the private sector and how employees get treated. I disagree, I love the private sector and think it’s wonderfully organized.

I would encourage you to channel the rage into something useful like a business where you put your opinions into action. I would discourage you from having the government point weapons at me to do your bidding.

A) My wife and I both own small businesses. B) Being critical isn’t rage and dismissing criticism as blind rage is just an excuse to not have to grapple with difficult truths. C) Acknowledging the incentives to dehumanize workers is not leftism. It does not argue for workers to control the means of production or uncompromising democracy in the workplace. D) My political opinions don’t involve the government doing much of anything to anyone.

Any other opinions of mine you want to invent? Go nuts.

It doesn’t appear you have any opinions at all other than anecdotes that mean nothing. If you want to leave the system the same, we are in philosophical alignment, although I would deregulate it much further.

You’re making stab-in-the-dark arguments against what you assume my worldview is and I’m making it hard because I don’t fit into the preconfigured worldview bins you’re used to. Well, I’m not interested in turning this into some meta discussion that you feel more comfortable with and I’m certainly not interested in playing 20 questions until you can figure out things you disagree with me on without having to come up with a single specific counterpoint to any of the specific things I said. So I’m going to leave you to wrap this conversation up on your own.

I work in R&D to support a high-tech factory in the Midwest. The products are fairly sophisticated, but the volume is too low to support full blown mass production techniques. So the workers have to be flexible and take care of process improvements themselves, which we encourage. We let them move from one cell to another, so they're not spending an entire career on one job.

Something I've learned is that's hard to generalize about how factories work, or what it's like to work in one. My workplace is drastically different than a steel mill or refinery, for instance.

Mechanical engineers are making average professional salaries which indicates that there is no supply problem. I wish these articles would occasionally check things like labor statistics.

Here's another question for aspiring Soviet central planners: which successful American industry should be dismantled to free up the capital for rebuilding Guangzhou? The men and material have to come from somewhere.

>here's another question for aspiring Soviet central planners: which successful American industry should be dismantled to free up the capital for rebuilding Guangzhou? The men and material have to come from somewhere

If serious I'd say 90% of the military. Take the skilled tradesman as the techs and the infantry as the line workers. Generally good, disciplined people and running a factory would bring production instead of destruction of Afghanistan or whatever other ideas used by the higher ups to abuse people that just wanted to defend our country.

But then, comrade, who will defend us from American imperialism? ;-)

(Seriously though, the reason that wouldn't work very well, is that industrial production is too complex for a room full of people to organize from the top, down. It becomes too easy for false reports to be sent up the chain, and for bad instructions to be sent down the chain.)

I hear kalashnokov rifles sell well.

Ironically having soldiers to supply goods and weapons for is the only thing backstopping most of American manufacturing today.

Or there could a supply problem, but the employers can't pay more than their international competitors, or they will lose business. Global markets are unforgiving when the same quality of talent is available in multiple countries. If you are not better than your competitors, higher wages lead to a loss of competitiveness.

Labor force participation rate in the US is 78.1% (age group 25-64). The rest are neither working nor looking for a job. If you could raise the rate to the same level as in the average OECD country (81.9%), there would be over 6 million people more looking for employment. You could achieve a lot with the additional economic activity.

That plan, read literally, involves lowering the salary of mechanical engineers while putting more mothers to work.

That's what export-driven economies have been doing for generations. You can't compete if you are not serious about it.

Export-driven economies have been freeing pesants from the rigours of rural poverty for generations. I don't think destroying Brooklyn is a good idea.

I was thinking more about countries like Finland (85.2%), Sweden (89.2%), Norway (84%), and Denmark (84.5%). Or maybe Switzerland (86.8%) or Netherlands (85.4%).

"You could achieve a lot with the additional economic activity."

What are you trying to achieve, and why?

Yeah; a cursory look at salaries suggests the article is misdiagnosing. Most people work in jobs they don't want to do. That is why they are paid in the first place. I'm sure there are shelf stackers in the supermarket where shelf stacking is their ideal job and maybe one day I will meet one. But most would be just as happy to work in a factory instead.

The problem is that making factories effective in the US is probably illegal or opposed by the government. China did it by:

- Low salaries and not being fussy about conditions (broadly illegal in the US - minimum wage & a relatively heavy union presence). Note that it turns out salaries and conditions for the Chinese started improving rapidly regardless.

- Lots of new coal plants, transitioning to big build outs of renewables, nuclear & other investments looking for cheap options guided by what they can install in large quantities. Don't try that in the west; the government has historically been extremely hostile to 2/3 of that. Not sure what the environmental assessment situation is like for renewables in practice observe that Texas is the big US generator and I'd bet there is a regulatory link.

- Building lots of things like infrastructure. Appears to be legally difficult in the West as a whole otherwise more people would be doing it. The environmental and community impacts are not tolerated.

- Allowing factories to run even when the smog darkens the sky. Running the literal factories in the US would probably not be tolerated.

And the political support for all those policies is still there. None of them are going away any time soon. These are trade offs that make it hard to support an industrial society. We don't know how to run an industrial society without producing industrial amounts of waste. Nobody seems to know.

I think this is admirable, but probably hopeless. Permitting and regulations draw out timelines (and increase uncertainty/risk), reducing returns on investment, while tax policy makes capital investment very expensive. The global North is has enacted many deterrents to manufacturing, and doesn’t seem very interested in lowering any of them.

The reason that software and services have prospered while manufacturing has stagnated is not marketing, its incentive structure.

I'll work in a factory if it means I get to be an engineer. Adjust the machines, get results, tweak gizmos etc. Nobody wants to be an assembly line worker of course.

Learn ladder logic and PLC programming, go into factory automation and controls engineering.

I used to work at a packaging machine OEM. Lots of robotics, bespoke designs, and every day was like an episode of How It's Made. Very fun, but eventually I left to chase the SV startup circuit. All of my old co-workers still work there.

Engineers work at desks too. Working at a factory isn't like working on your bike, and for most American factory workers it isn't a mind-numbing assembly station either. Factory workers are technicians, who learn the basic operating principles of the machinery, watch it for deviations from design parameters, and perform maintenance and repair according to instructions that come from drafters who work downstream of engineers.

Okay, well whatever the job is called where you go out on the floor and tweak the gizmos. I'll do that if I have to.

If you like tweaking gizmos, find a factory that in some way puts a label on a glass bottle.

The equipment may have gotten better but in my time, entire careers went into making those labels go on straight and not jam up the machine.

Or work for the OEM that makes the gizmos themselves.

Weiler Labeling Systems comes to mind.

The first place I worked after school, that job was called "the owner," and he hired me for the same kind of role. It was a very small family-run manufacturing business.

For various reasons I outgrew the job, and work for a very big company today, but I still get into the plant on a regular basis.

One area where you can get that kind of work is a plant that actually makes the gizmos themselves, especially if they're fairly specialized or customized.

That's a technician. Pay kinda sucks and the "big bucks" come from tons and tons of overtime and/or working 2nd/3rd shift.

I was a controls engineer and frequently on the floor, usually directing the technicians and sometimes adjusting brackets myself. Industrial vision systems can be quite fussy.

Agreed on the pay, it would have been good if it wasn't in California.

After my dad left Vietnam, he got a degree in accounting. But he really didn’t want a desk job. He worked at P&G, a consumer goods company in the tissue plant for 20+ years and absolutely loved his job on the assembly line. It wasn’t back breaking labor at all from the times I got to tour it. They mostly make sure machines are running.

He retired at 55 and 82 now, he still has no regrets. FWIW, my mom retired from teaching at 53 and is 80.

I think in my head I just assumed "assembly line" = hard labor, like a sweatshop. Your dad's version of "assembly line" sounds like exactly what I'm talking about. I just want to keep the machines running.

Manage IT for manufacturing for a bit. There are plenty of people that are happy to be assembly line workers at a job where they can just daydream but keep physically busy, and who would hate a office job where you are not physically active and have to be constantly mentally focused.

Plenty of US workers work in factories.

They're churning out immense amounts of software. Some examples of this type of factory are Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft.

Other people work in other types of factories - like music studios, where they churn out music that gets billions of streams.

Singling out a specific type of production as this article does requires blinding oneself to all the other types of production happening in an economy. Assembly lines needed tremendous amounts of people to do essentially the same job, thus making the whole economy simpler to try to keep in your head at once. Today a tremendous breadth of goods are being produced so it's harder to see, but the opportunities are there - they just don't all look the same like in the very short era when factories dominated employment.

The article (unintentionally I am sure) commits a fallacy of quoting absolute numbers of university graduates without providing comparisons (eg. population size differences between US and China). Even if the US produces fewer factory-capable workers per capita, modern factories manufacturing goods require less people to do the same thing thanks to automation, so there's not the same need to churn out people to work in them. Hence higher education is geared toward providing more diverse skills in the US than in China.

Perhaps if the workers owned the means of production, these jobs would be more attractive. Maybe the guy who just fronted the capitol to buy the property and machinery shouldn't be entitled to the excess labor of the workers in perpetuity.

well if all worker can save up little money to buy expensive machine that could work, the problem is they aren't going to do that

that's why Tech sector is attractive, basically create money out of thin air well you still need pc but this cost is nothing compared to manufacturing

The worker can buy a share of tesla or general electric and make roughly as good of returns as any other unskilled investor could hope. The people beating the stock market on capital investments generally are being paid in essence for other stuff they bring to the table besides money.

> Perhaps if the workers owned the means of production,

...somehow this reminded me of gig work...

The article fails at diagnosing the crux of the problem... which is that you need to deliberately weaken the value of the dollar in order to make manufactoring economically viable at any capacity (labor is just too expensive for products to be competitive globally). This means US needs to let go of its dollar being the reserve currency... which will not only mean the end of consumerism in the US (no more cheap imported goods), but also the US no longer being dominant in world politics anymore (and consequently the downfall of the neoliberal world order). Probably no US citizen will actually have the guts to go through this voluntarily... but noticing the current government deteriorating in real time with Trump and Musk we might actually see this happening anyway in a few years.

The real issue is something called the Triffin dillema (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma) - a country that has its currency as a global reserve currency will inevitably have a huge deficit in terms of international trade. Everyone wants these dollars since it is required to participate in any economic activity, so dollars are continuously going to move out of the country, and the value of the dollar will rise even with an astronomically large trade deficit. This means that exporting will be very expensive, but importing will be cheap, which established the backbone of US consumerism (cheap goods!). Basically the majority of the middle/upper class are living out of the value of the US dollar (mostly working in "bullshit" professional jobs, since their actual real job is consuming goods), while most of the remaining necessary blue-collar labor to support the country (ex. agricultural jobs, since you can't offshore them) are done cheaply by illegal migrants and slave (prison) labor.

I think the problem is more comparative advantage. Say the Vietnamese are good at making things in factories while terrible at making Hollywood type movies, while Americans are good at making things in factories and also good at making movies, it makes sense for Vietnam to do the factories and America the movies regardless of exchange rates.

No one. No one wants to work in the factory. The US is an advanced economy and the population wants advanced jobs with advanced pay. Stamping sheet steel all day for $28/hr in a hot warehouse? No thanks. Maintaining a login page for $64/hr from your couch? Yes please.

That $28/hr puts you close to the median wage in the US.

https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

Who says factory work is all about stamping sheet steel all day?

How about getting to debug your code with a forklift? O:-)

Been there, done that. Overhead crane too!

Or dealing with software crashes leading to hardware crashes ... using a hydraulic jack.

Or "Kiiiim, it's an electrical hardware failure, I can't fix that!" "Well that, or we could ask this here electrotechnician who's standing right next to us?"

Speaking of: A freelance electrotechnician brings in about Eur 100 per hour around these parts, and gets to go on adventures around the world, because they're always in demand.

> How about getting to debug your code with a forklift? O:-)

What does that mean? You're... debugging a forklift, or using a forklift as a debugging tool?

In my case: forklift as a debugging tool! If you write code for an intelligent conveyor system, at some point you're going need to do an integration test to see if it actually works.

So far, I haven't had a chance to do the opposite yet; I haven't had a chance to debug any sort of forklift. Yet.

How much of that 100 eurobucks is liability insurance on getting sued for a gazillion dollars because you forgot to tighten a bolt once a decade after being kept up by a cranky toddler?

It's even more extreme than that. A lot of Americans would rather do an email job for $70k a year than weld hulls together in a shipyard for $100k a year.

When I was studying engineering I applied for every highly paid blue collar and trades job imaginable to try and escape a career at a desk. It isn't as easy as some think to get into. In the end I received my engineering degree before anyone would give me a chance, 5 years and thousands of failed applications later.

No one wants to work retail either. So what?

I’m an industrial engineer from the 3rd world who now works in software in the 1st world.

The transition wasn’t easy and took many years.

Make of that what you will.

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