Comment by forgotoldacc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by forgotoldacc | Hacker News Reader

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This is precisely the problem.

Plus, even assuming there existed lots of people to fill the gap, why would they sign up for manufacturing jobs? They pay like crap. Unions and worker rights have been gradually chipped away at for years and now they're straight up chainsawing them. Why work a monotonous job that pays at or just slightly above minimum wage, has skills that aren't really transferable should you decide to change careers, is rough on the body and doesn't even provide proper health care or sick days to rest, and employers will call you in during natural disasters with the threat of firing you otherwise and then leave you to literally die while pretending it's not their fault when you do die? [1]

It's companies and the government saying, "We want everything, and in exchange, we'll give you nothing. And you will be happy." No American sees their kid growing up and thinks, "I hope my child will one day work long hours at a factory." People in some countries do, and it's because those jobs are a step up from the current standard. Factory jobs in the US are, in many cases, a step down and that step keeps lowering. High tech/high skilled manufacturing can be an exception, but the bulk of the jobs they're hoping to bring back aren't that.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/11/02/g-s1-28731/hurricane-helene-t...

> Plus, even assuming there existed lots of people to fill the gap, why would they sign up for manufacturing jobs? They pay like crap.

Maybe that's just you talking from a position of relative privilege (e.g. as someone who's likely an extremely well-paid software engineer or some adjacent profession), and not really understanding other people's situation. Not everyone has a pick of the perfect career that ticks every box.

It's very well document that there are lots people bitter those manufacturing jobs got off-shored, and lots of communities that wish they'd reopen "the plant."

I'm from a very poor Appalachian town. My only option to better my life was to get up and leave.

People from my hometown do talk about the good old days. People worked at union factories and my grandfather worked a well paying railroad job. My no-name town of 1000 people had a train station that made it possible to go to NYC. My grandpa got paid a handsome retirement from the railroad company. When he died, my grandmother was able to receive his benefits.

My hometown votes against building railways. The station has long crumbled. They vote against unions. The factories are long gone. They've voted against any sort of retirement benefits. The elderly are struggling and depending on churches handing out food.

Even if those factories come back, they'll be paid less than my ancestors did. They'll never have an affordable link to cities hours away. They'll never get the retirement benefits my ancestors had. And if you mention giving them these benefits, they yell and say they don't want them. The youth in my hometown who worked hard in school (we somehow had a decent school, all things considered) used their education as a ticket out. Now the people there are pissed and they're coming for education next.

These people don't want "the plant." They want to be young again, without understanding that their youth was great because my ancestors busted their asses to give us great opportunities. They squandered everything that was given to us.

Since you grew up there, what was their rationale for repudiating pro-labor policies at the ballot box?

The guys on TV told them the people who supported it were communist and unions are for lazy people and welfare queens. They were told by the people on TV that if they vote against this, then those people will have worse and they'll have it better.

45 minutes down the road was a town with a large black population. When people talked about "those people in (town name)" being lazy or "those people" getting jobs or "those welfare queens" somehow benefiting from anything, everybody knew what they were talking about. It was better to be racist instead of caring about the future of their children

Now, decades later, it's still the same. "Welfare queen" isn't the word that's used much anymore--everyone knows it's used as a substitute for various racial slurs and it's hard to deny it. Instead, they complain about DEI and woke. They replaced the word, but the meaning is the same. They still deny that it's meant to refer to "those people", but they always mention "that" town name when talking about it.

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

- Lyndon B. Johnson

This is very telling. The American Empire didn't even work for Americans. Who really benefitted? Just the Elites? Why should common people care about propping up an empire if the people in power don't bother about them. For context, read this thread.

https://x.com/yishan/status/1906592890845028405

Many if us can’t read threads because we don’t have accounts there anymore.

https://nitter.net/yishan/status/1906592890845028405

> The original architects of American global power did something very clever that no other empire had ever done before: they deliberately hid the instruments of their power.

> Specifically, they institutionalized the hard power of the post-WW2 American military into a "rules-based international order" and the organizations needed to run it.

> ...

> The reason they did this is because repeated use of hard military power is fragile and self-defeating: it engenders resentment and breeds defiance.

I think a similar thing happened to the people with the ideology of markets: they're presented as some neutral, optimal thing, but they aren't. They encode biases and preferences that suit powerful interests, which can take a lot of effort for a common person to discern. But since there's no leader or decision-maker to point to and defy, so it's hard to organize people about the problems, and then it's hard to point them at the right root cause/solution.

Spot on. “The market” is presented like it’s some state of nature, some law of the universe like physics. It’s been said Slavoj Žižek, Mark Fisher, and Fredric Jameson, but it appears Jameson was likely the first:

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

> Why should common people care

because, like Yishan is saying, they don't even realize the 'empire' _is_ working for them. We sit around in absolute physical security, awash in cheap goods, able to travel anywhere, finding our cultural and technological products in demand across most of the world, ...

We only feel want in areas like medicine and education where protectionism and prejudice have prevented us from fully enjoying the benefits of that position.

32 years after my father died, I still only get 1.9x the pay he used to get for manual labour. Given that inflation goes roughly double every 20 years, its clear I am getting less pay then he did. I also had to leave my village, because there were simply zero good opportunities to work in IT. The young leaving rural villages are pretty much common, and has almost nothing to do with how people vote. Neither in which country they actually reside. Its a downward trend, everywhere.

I'm sorry to hear that. That's genuinely painful to read, but it's a reality that I've seen reflected elsewhere.

I tend to think about Feynman's Challenger commission report whenever I come across stories like yours, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

For a successful society, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. And yes, nature will come for us all be it pestilence or disease, or a storm that washes it all away. Nature never stops.

We created civilization and society as a way to escape nature's wrath. To become something more, to rise above the muck, and when we degrade that we will inevitably go back to the muck.

Reminds me on 'the town' in the book Damon Copperhead.

My background is very similar. Grew up in a small, poor mountain town that once boomed with industry but today is crumbling to dust as the population becomes increasingly elderly and young people either leave for greener pastures or abuse substances in order to escape their reality and succumb to addiction.

The industry that once fueled the town is long gone and isn’t ever coming back, and as you say even if a new industry moved in the jobs it’d open up would be so grueling and abusive that it wouldn’t be a net improvement to anybody’s lives, thanks to all the worker protections stripped away over the years.

It’s not enough to “just” make jobs available. They need to be good jobs with proper protections and support that allow people to thrive.

They squandered the sacrifice of their parents, and now they're asking their children to sacrifice for their benefit.

It isn't just "reopen the plant" - it is "reopen the plant and match economic conditions in the time period from the 1950s-1990s".

Just reopening won't bring back the comparably high wages from that time period.

> Just reopening won't bring back the comparably high wages from that time period.

It's a start though. If the plant stays closed, those "comparably high wages" certainly aren't coming back. If the plant opens, there's a chance.

There's a lot of "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" protecting a shitty status quo: "don't do that because it doesn't fix X," implicitly requires that one solution fix everything perfectly all at once.

That's a helluva defense of nuking our trade relationships and sparking a trade war.

Like it wasn't perfect but it sure was preferable to what's about to come.

We could have kept that and implemented policies that were far less painful and far more likely to increase wages.

> We could have kept that and implemented policies that were far less painful and far more likely to increase wages.

Yeah, but we didn't, so this is what we get.

That's why, ultimately, I blame Democrats for Trump. They had many opportunities to improve things, but they chose to ignore the trouble and prioritize other stuff more amiable to their increasingly upper-class base. The root cause was their neglect of the building pressure, Trump is just the explosion. They keep claiming they're the competent and responsible ones, but they are just irresponsible in a different, more subtle way.

You'll find many leftists that agree. The flubbing of so many social issues while moving with the exactitude of a striking cobra to maintain their stock-trading rights, disrupt upstart progressive campaigns, and shield financial markets from the concequences of their own actions, has lead many to recognize that we might be getting KSed. They walk the walk, yeah, just a different one from what you figured just a moment ago. Duckstep? No, the other fowl play.

I'm not saying it has to be perfect.

I'm saying that this outcome will never exist because more has changed than just the plant closing. If we coupled "reopen the plant" with "the plant makes entirely new things" and "the plant trains local workers to take these jobs" and "the plant pays above local service/construction wages" and "the plant will be successful in geopolitical competition" and "the plant can do 10x the amount of business due to advances in automation to get to the same level of employment" and on and on.

We could solve _each_ of these problems, absolutely - but they are all interlocking parts of a wicked problem. Blowing up the economy and threatening a global recession won't actually solve any of these.

> Blowing up the economy and threatening a global recession won't actually solve any of these.

But neither will the status quo.

Do you assume it can't get worse? Or that 10 other things could not get worse?

Like, much much worse?

> Do you assume it can't get worse? Or that 10 other things could not get worse?

> Like, much much worse?

It will at least afflict the comfortable, otherwise they wouldn't be so opposed.

And that's fine. We've been running on a twisted "win-win" logic in this country for a long time: no policy can be pursued where the working class "wins" unless the well-off also "win" (because if they don't, there will be much whining), but if the working class loses it's "Who cares! They've got to suck it up and adapt. Be more grateful and go fill the holes in your life with cheap shit from Walmart."

Enough of that, and a lot of people rightly stop caring if things can get worse. Trump is the chickens coming home to roost. If people didn't want this outcome, they should've gotten together to fix the problems with neoliberalism.

Are there problems? Sure! But "fixes" that just makes everyone* worse of helps.. nobody.

> Enough of that, and a lot of people rightly stop caring if things can get worse

I get the feeling, but it's still dumb: "My neighbor is playing loud music, so I'm going to burn down the block. Ok, so I don't have an apartment anymore, but at least hes not plying loud music anymore!! Win!!"

* well, not the rich. They will be fine, at least in the short to medium term

Yes, the hard part is convincing owners to part with their wealth in order to fund better pay. This is partly because they themselves are wrapped up in a massive obligatory apparatus; call it "the financialization of the economy." I'm by no measure a Trump supporter, but I do hope that what we're seeing is a proper crash that wipes out some of these folks. Once defaults are rampant, you'll have destroyed a lot of wealth, but also a lot of the obligations that necessitated all of this shifting of wealth upward in the first place. You'd also have a lot of very sophisticated people in the clock-in line, suddenly very interested in pay equity. That's one of the happier scenarios, at least.

I worked in a factory. I agree with gp. Don't you dare speak for me.

> Why work a monotonous job that pays at or just slightly above minimum wage,

If you torpedo the economy so people have no other sources of income, raise the price of all goods, and cut of all social supports and programs, people will have no choice but to take jobs they would have turned their noises up at before.

Draining the swamp is winning!

This. It’s the primary feature of the long term plan.

>They pay like crap.

Then raise the wages. Yes that means products get more expensive, but so be it. The economy will find a new equilibrium. White collar workers will see their purchasing power decrease, but factory workers will see it increase.

>No American sees their kid growing up and thinks, "I hope my child will one day work long hours at a factory."

Maybe its just me, but I think theres something seriously wrong with society if people have existential dread over the thought of having to produce the things they consume. If the production of it is so unethical, it shouldn't be consumed at all.

> Then raise the wages.

The same people proposing bringing back all these factories also want to lower wages.

The dread isn't over production. It's about the conditions they face while producing them. Americans dream about having a small farm and doing their own woodworking and blacksmithing or doing so with a small community. They don't dream about working on a factory line and being fired if they miss a day due to being sick. But at the same time, if someone else says they don't want this, they call them lazy and say the kids don't want to work these days.

It's an odd paradox.

And high skilled manufacturing still exists in America. That work is often paid decently and people are fine with working those jobs. The problem is tariffs being made to bring back low skilled manufacturing, and the desire to make the standards of employment lower in the US so that it's feasible.

> Americans dream about having a small farm and doing their own woodworking and blacksmithing or doing so with a small community. They don't dream about working on a factory line and being fired if they miss a day due to being sick.

They dream about being treated better than that, but this is a big cultural gap. There are a lot of Americans who do, genuinely, dream about working somewhat hard factory jobs. They feel proud and fulfilled that they work in the steel mill just like their dad and grandpa and great-grandpappy, and they want to make sure their son will have the same opportunity.

F-Them... I want a future of Star Trek replicators that can molecular print most of the stuff I want. Heavy engineering seems to still need at least some high energy refinement though. (Or at the very least, replicators with different composition.)

> Then raise the wages.

Then no one will be able to afford the products the plant is going to build.

They were able to in the 50s/60s/70s. So why not now?

The line must go up.

Everyone in the United States was much more well off in the 50s/60s/70s as they had just won a huge war that left most of their competitors factories completely destroyed. There's no economic boom today.

Because there was a shift to shareholder capitalism. Everything is done to increase shareholder value.

The triumph of conservative ideology has broken the unions. No individual factory worker has the leverage to negotiate a better compensation package against the professional management team at Gap or Deere.

The 80s was a period of explicitly designing for this condition; it's just taken a while for the ramifications to be acute. Although it's been obvious for decades that we were headed here.

You mean back when rich people paid serious taxes?

> "They were able to in the 50s/60s/70s. So why not now?"

Because the 50s/60s/70s was the post-World War II economic boom for the US. Unless you're volunteering to endure World War III so that the next generation can enjoy that kind of boom, that is not going to happen again.

Wealth inequality. Increases in productivity are going to the top, not the worker. It's also why social security is going broke. It could be funded if you remove the cap. Removing the cap wouldn't be necessary if there weren't such a wealth inequality problem.

The ultra wealthy are hoarding wealth then telling the rest of us we can't afford things we've afforded for over 50 years.

It's a vicious cycle. But at the end of the day it's the _company_ that has to entice workers.

The _company_ also has to stay competitive to make money.

Won't even have a product if you can't convince people to work for you. Believe it or not, its actually the workers who do most of the work.

I don't understand this line of reasoning.

If you build a product that is too expensive to be competitive, nobody is going to buy it. You will not earn money and will not be able to pay workers salaries.

What is controversial in this statement?

The tariffs are high, but not 1,000% or whatever. If the alternative is "build new factories in the US, substantially raise wages and benefits for employees to encourage them to leave service positions for these roles, and then spend time training them" then the furniture from Vietnam with a 50% tariff is still going to be cheaper.

the good production worker's wages came from the unions. the GOP is fervently anti-union (with the exception of the police union maybe). they also oppose minium wages. there is no reason to think they'd support wage raises.

Wow I guess that WEF quote was true but just within boundaries of USA.

> rough on the body and doesn't even provide proper health care or sick days to rest

That's why I'm bullish on human shaped drones controlled with full-body trackers. If you could do most physical jobs without being physically near the area you'd open them to more women (so widening the potential workforce) and improve on-the-job accidents statistics.

and (of course) the company will record the data so that the robots will be able to learn via imitation learning ASAP

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