In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate. Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!
Western labor is never going to compete with Asian labor, so it's no use even trying. If we want to have any chance of matching what China is already doing (let alone beating it), we're going to have to invest an absolute fortune in automation and streamlining: reduce the number of unique products, reduce the part count, reduce the number of vendors, reduce the distance to vendors, and automate everything you can reasonably automate.
Make it capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive and we might be able to keep up.
I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Basic survival for rural poor is a car.
When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison.
Lol, Asia is a big and diverse place. Are you really claiming that American society is more primitive than that of farmers in the arse end of Gansu?
Hint, one of those areas is more likely to have flush toilets.
Book is a bit heavy going but well worth a read
The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan fits your sentence, although early 20th C. He studied mathematics from a revision book he had access to in a small place in India then wrote a letter to GW Hardy a professor at Oxford with a range of new and strange results but expressed in the idiom of the revision book.
Some parts of East and Southeast Asia might have been working on paving roads and building schools even just one generation ago. To think they still are "like that" is legitimately an insult to them. That part is largely done and they're moving on.
Would the rest of the world even care anymore? Everyone from Canada to New Zealand is now making plans for long term disconnection from the US. They will not let the next Trump boss them around like they have been this past year. The reputation is torched and so if the US launches another populist movement that leads nowhere and collapses the country as a result why should the other 95% of the planet care?
People from Vietnam, Iraq and many other countries would probably disagree with you
>People in backwards places like rural...
That's not actually true. You want to visit rural Asia and compare.
In rural Asia there are a lot of people who don't have electric, they don't have cars.
Though I don't know why rural is even a topic here. Factories don't exist in rural areas, this exist in cities and towns where the workers live.
It’s always important to talk about rural citizens because politicians pretend that they don’t exist. The rural poor have a lot in common with the urban poor, but are separated both deliberately and by inertia.
"Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis is a good counterpoint.
Industries don't exist in isolation, so these effects propagate. If you can't make cars, you probably won't make good tanks. When we assess the value of a local car industry, how do we account for the "use it or lose it" nature of retaining knowledge built up by industry? Part of learning and skilling up is actually doing the thing you're learning about. It's no surprise that the country the West has skilled up in the pursuit of greater profits is now it's chief rival.
And of course, all of this is before we ask questions like what metric is used to determine the benefit. Efficiency in particular is rife with competing definitions that fit various niche use cases, and for which the underlying assumptions may not be obvious. E.g. thermodynamic efficiency is often calculated using the lower heating value of a fuel, the reasons for which are good, but typically left unstated. A layman comparing thermodynamic efficiencies where differing methods are used might draw an erroneous conclusion if they don't understand that there can be differences.
Chinas value imho is that they are willing to take on shorter and shorter production runs. They have figured out retraining and logistics to the point that they can have 20 customers who only need 1000 - 12000 parts per year, on the back of their 3-4 flagship clients who keep the place running with scale orders.
Still fail to see evidence of that. I wouldnt go around making such a huge blanket statement, without even london horse manure crisis level evidence.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts...
With the exact right approach and enough luck, you can conceive that automation can replace the bodies at the rate they are lost demographically and thus avoid the crisis of underemployment or the crisis of insufficient labour. To far one way or the other and it ends in tears.
Time will tell, and it could all go horribly, terribly wrong, but if any country can thread the eye of that needle, it would be this one.
Factory automation design as a service is already a huge sector but it can get a lot bigger. Of course the capital barrier to entry to standing up a factory for some widget will go up, but the unit price might not. It remains to be seen how far into the low-end, low-volume, high-SKU-count that process will reach. Maybe things like standard-ish robotic cells will allow agility in the factory. If being able to make one-off parts in a highly data-driven factory is Industry 4.0, maybe that's Industry 5.0!
Presumably it will become less possible to spin up production of, say, a whole new design of a speaker in a few days with some new tasks for the workers and some rejigging of basic machines, but it sounds like a sector that will see some interesting progress in the next 50 years.
The thing that no one has cracked yet is that sitting 30 people down at a belt and telling them to follow the manual is easy and flexible and while it's a skill, it's not very technical. Designing the line to do the same thing is hard, fiddly and very, very technical. Whoever does that needs to know the machines available, the sensors, IO, networking, wiring, power, PLCs, HMIs, access paths, be able to design and spec anything custom, etc etc. You also need to feed back to the designers if one aspect is hard to automate (poking through wires is a good example). Even loading workflows: You can't just shout "duo kai" at the machinery as you trolley a palette of magnets to the head of the belt and expect them to get out of the way.
That, combined with the outlay of the machines themselves, limits things you can make with it. The kind of factory in your video seems to a very typical Chinese SME where there are 50-200 people in a simple warehouse with some basic equipment and they contract assemble. These places do not generally run the margins you need to stop production, acquire several million in automation and design services, and start up again.
Fully or just highly automated systems thus get used for high-volume stuff that doesn't change much in a run. Cars, phones, that kind of thing are the classics. Food production also due to the massive volumes.
The floor on where it makes sense to even think of automation is, however, lowering quickly. It's not just Siemens NX that can do it any more, factory management platforms are sprouting from everywhere from Huawei's ERP to Hangzhou student bedrooms, and there are other SMEs starting to do this work at lower costs for smaller outfits.
As long as manual CMs exist and are cheaper, CheapNShit Speakers doesn't need to design its product for automatic assembly, even though it definitely could if it needed to. That creates a kind of "snap to automation" where something that wasn't ever automatable suddenly gets automated, because when the machinery is close enough, the last few sticking points are designed away and suddenly you can do it.
Like I said, the real acid test of when this becomes really useful (or dangerous to the workers, depending on perspective) is when you can quickly reconfigure a production line to make the Black Friday CheapNShit 2000+ speakers rather than the ones you made before. The CMs currently will do that with a WeChat message, a new manual and a palette of parts and have them on a truck tomorrow.
This is likely a place where "AI" will find a home, whatever happens to the chatbots. It's things like allowing a fairly generic robot to pick up a new kind of speaker case and put it on something else without having to have an engineer write a program or even G-code to do it.
Also like AI, this isn't quite like last time when the US lost its manufacturing to China. The US lost low-medium manufacturing to China based on, basically, labour costs. Then it lost the high end on labour and automation that means as long as you have the machine you don't need the expert US workers and network effects because everything you need for that is available within 2 hours in Shenzhen.
China losing the middle-high end to cheaper places implies that automating most of it will remain so hard that it's always more expensive in TCO terms than the cheapest global labour. If labour is only a small part, this is not necessarily true or it may be true only for some products (clothing is a good example of something traditionally hard to automate fully).
On the other hand, automation getting to that state also means the US, or anywhere, can get the manufacturing back if it wants to, by competing not on labour costs, which is unlikely within the next decades, but on the technology and network effects that make it possible to acquire, stand up and run these kinds of line quickly.
I London where I live you can't really afford to buy a house or things like that if you got a job manufacturing anything that's globally competitive which is why manufacturing is basically gone here and people get jobs in finance and the like. We used to have a factory in the London outskirts but it got knocked down and replaced with apartments long ago.
I don't know if it's addicted to easy money so much as the people earning easy money push up the cost of living and force others to do similar to afford to live in the same area.
But I was shocked by how efficient and modernised their factory was, including really rigorous quality control, advanced testing setups, dedicated jigs everywhere just for the testing… and then one video was of an office worker who spent her day making sure everything runs smoothly, juggling customers, orders for parts from vendors, and getting ahold of the right people when something was going wrong.
Incidentally none of my 10GTek stuff has ever failed.
Slight nuance - they have spent a [reasonable amount of money] automating production.
The trick to automating something that ‘isn’t a car’ is often to put in small bits of low-cost and flexible automation that can be moved around and repurposed. IMO this is often what we are bad at in the west - companies can/do setup massive automated sites at huge expense, but there aren’t the skills/infrastructure to do this at the lower end of production (eg if you want to deploy one AMR in the west the AMR companies don’t want to talk to you, and there isn’t really an easy way to get one yourself without talking to an integrator which will charge tens of thousands which will wipe out the benefit, and we don’t have the skills within most small production companies to get a small robot arm/AMR working without external integrators - but a one-AMR deployment might be a more common scenario in China).
It must be a huge expense with risk to design a new factory, automate it end to end and push live hoping the market expectation for the product exists and the automation is as good as planned.
Whereas if you have a manual production line you could have a massive advantage as they can automate out sections ongoing and it allows engineers to build skills in this also as they go.
>The overall number of robots added in China last year was 295,000, compared to 27,000 in Germany, 34,000 in the US and just 2,500 in the UK.
Not really, American manufacturing is already automated. Manufacturing jobs have steadily decreased[0] while output has increased (or stayed steady) in manufacturing since the early 2000's [1]. There is only one reasonable explanation for this -> automation.
While it is true that the Chinese are indeed automated their manufacturing, it still doesn't negate the fact that companies like Foxconn still have 200k employees in China.
IMHO the real reason you'll never see manufacturing come back to the USA is because you can't convince people who are already in less manually intensive labor conditions to go back to more manually intensive labor conditions. Said differently, it's easier to get someone who's family has spent decades doing back breaking work in a rice paddy to work in a factory for slightly better pay than it is to do the reverse.
[0] - https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling...
While it may be boring to someone who use used to doing knowledge work, there are a lot of people who need jobs who aren’t going to be doing knowledge work. They need something.
I worked fast food for a shift before I quit. I found that much more boring and hated it much more than the factory. I’d rather see people employed making stuff domestically rather than have yet another drive-thru window in town.
I grew up in a small town with two fairly decent sized factories. That was a solid job prospect for a lot of people coming out or high school that didn’t know what else they could do. It gave those kids options and kept them in town where they could buy a house, raise a family, and spend money supporting other local businesses. Now they’re both closed and the city is hunting for ways to bring businesses to town. My brother-in-law is driving 100+ miles per day to drive to an area with more jobs opportunities. I’m sure if there was a local factory gig he’d probably take it and save a ton on gas, not to mention getting back 10 hours per week of his time.
I think economic benefit goes beyond just having the lowest price. Having good jobs for people in the country means they have money to spend. If people make next to nothing, all they can afford is Temu quality. This is bad for the citizens, bad for US businesses, and bad for the environment. The only winner is China.
Tariffs won't resolve this issue. Either the goods becomes too expensive to import and are made here or the aren't.
In the case that they're made here then some other good will no longer be produced (if you could magically make both then you would've in the first place). And so your citizens are worse off because they produce the same amount (or less) and pay more for it.
In the case that they're not made here then you just pay more in tariffs and are worse off.
The problem with global trade is that when you trade 10 apples for 10 bananas it doesn't need to be distributed to your citizens equally. So if you go from an economy producing 5 apples and 5 bananas where everybody gets one of each to one where 3 people get 8 apples and 10 bananas the other 2 get 2 apples the GDP still grew from 10 to 20 but people are worse off. Throwing in tariffs to get back to the 5 apples 5 bananas will cause a recession.
The better solution is to increase the top tax rate and redistribute 2 additional apples and bananas to the bottom 2 and then everybody is still better off.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out why Trump & Republicans want tariffs as opposed to a higher tax rate.
More like 2-4 at this point, if we're talking about China.
That isn't how it works. Details matter.
A local factory can save a ton of money because it can be more just in time - you don't have to build excess because of shipping times. (shipping costs can also save a lot of money for a local factory).
The states have lots of cheap reliable power (not perfectly reliable, but close enough). If your production line is mostly automated (or could be) the states are cheaper - there isn't much labor anyway.
Production close to engineering makes for a lot of savings because when a part is designed you can get a prototype to testing faster.
there are lots of other factors, and most are not in the favor of local production but there are several that are. Where you fall is an optimization problem and there is no one right answer for everything.
Industrial electricity rates are pretty much the same in China and the US, from 8-9c/kWh. In both countries, however, electricity is going to face upward price pressure from AI datacenters.
> Production close to engineering makes for a lot of savings because when a part is designed you can get a prototype to testing faster.
This already exists in the US. In California, for example, there are many specialty prototype manufacturing companies that focus on this problem specifically. They are adjacent to the r&d firms designing the products.
That's not the type of manufacturing that the recent debate over reshoring is about. It's about production scale manufacturing - creating an American Shenzen with an equivalent amount of jobs - and very soon. But any such capability will be heavily automated, so it won't produce the equivalent jobs.
Compare the build time between Tesla's battery factories in the US and China and consider how many batteries they can sell during the time difference.
Building a factory loses money until the factory starts making products. Good or bad, regulations that cost _time_ are the biggest issue. Labor costs matter but they affect the margins that can be somewhat compensated for by products not needing overseas shipping. A company, especially a new one, can go out of business in the years it takes to build a factory in the US.
My family owns a small plastic manufacturing plant in the US. This is the biggest problem they face. The western worker's appetite for a low skill monotonous manufacturing job is very small. The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
Paying higher wages might help retain employees (or not! there are jobs people just won’t keep doing no matter the pay) but doing so could easily increase costs to the point where your product is uncompetitive in the market. It also might just be worth having higher turnover in order to keep prices low.
I do not believe this common claim.
Even $10,000/yr more might not be enough to move the needle all that much on a job that’s backbreaking, monotonous, and with little prospects for career growth. Especially if you have a limited pool of applicants due to your location.
Ludicrous only from the perspective of the employer. Everyone wants something for nothing.
The fact is that regular Americans (i.e. not exploited, immigrant labor, or oppressed out-groups) used to do manual labor and manufacturing in the United States. They took pride in their labor. People haven't changed, the economics have.
As for your last paragraph, the oil fields have been able to meet their need for employees for the most part, and that ticks every one of your undesirable factors. So what gets workers there? Pay.
What happened? Cost disease [1]. All of the big ticket things in that lifestyle (except for the car) skyrocketed in price relative to inflation.
The problem is that American bosses will never hire these kind of people. They can never pass the interview game.
Better pay + benefits than the most rock bottom lowest possible pay + benefits is really pathetic.
And based on the vagueness of your claims, we can assume full-time hours are also out of the picture, meaning no health insurance.
On top of that, tyranical small business owners are usually a nightmare to work for.
Q: Do you ever use an online job service to advertise jobs and collect applications?
Asking because my 5 sons all learned that job portals auto-trash applications w/o a job history (1st time job seekers).
Other viable but never-seen applicants: Minimal or sporadic job history, the most minimal of criminal records, the wrong zip code.
Seen but never hired: Fully qualified people who are awful at job interviews.
I appreciate the answer. And I understand that you may not have more-granular info than this.
But I am wondering what how jobs were advertised prior to utilizing ProbOff/CL. Maybe the answer is this. There was no avenue to get job listings in front of the most likely eyeballs.
Son #1 got employed there early but it turned out that a small group had a deal with management and got 100% of the work. New hires went out on one job immediately and then never again.
Outside of an urban area, you won't necessary be overwhelmed with resumes. If you portray your job realistically, you'll get people realistically interested in your job.
Bit of an aside, but if anyone else is in this position and trying to reach the eyeballs of jobseekers who aren't actively using portals, I really can't recommend local Facebook groups enough.
A post from a real account (not the business) saying "Gizmo Plastics are hiring line workers for $18/h, anyone interested?" will get some guaranteed traction. In my small town Ontario groups, I've never seen a post looking for laborers go ignored.
It rather feels lately like civilization is the project of putting up as many catch-22's as we can.
I’m just thinking that people already spend a lot of time just consuming content, so if it were possible to watch YouTube while at the factory, maybe it wouldn’t be as unpopular.
Today with not just unlimited music (with no adverts), but the vast amounts of audio books you can listen to, it's even more appealing for people with limited financial obligations.
Yeah, I can't make that work. Only my most routine work can be done with the TV on (and providing it's my 5th rewatch).
I grew up doing homework with the TV on and still sometimes work with a tiny video overlay showing some anime or tv show.
You basically pay attention to a small part of it, and switch focus as needed (pause your task or pause the video). You'll still miss a lot of the video but you just don't care.
I know this is unthinkable to some people but I've met more than one person who does it, so it's not ultra-rare. Possibly related to ADD/ADHD? I don't know.
If you look away from your job you might lose a finger,.. or *gasp* even worse, stop production!
I always found the laws prohibiting drivers from wearing earplugs (some exemptions for motorcycles) and the like pretty funny.
US employers are not legally required to make accommodations for people who simply want to listen to music at work.
Today's vehicles already have a lot of sound deadening (and good stereos) and it is becoming a problem for emergency vehicles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lvTBmBDPno
> US employers are not legally required to make accommodations for people who simply want to listen to music at work.
So it would be reasonably possible, but since it's not legally required they'd rather make their workers miserable for no benefit, and then complain how difficult it is to hire people?
I do agree with the sentiment that employers should take more efforts to make their jobs enjoyable to do. But some job sites have things that can kill people. The reason that heavy machinery beeps when it backs up is because people died at work before it did.
But, have you ever driven a quiet vehicle in an urban area where there are plenty of objects to block your line of sight? It is quite easy for a emergency vehicle to sneak up on you in a modern vehicle even when you are paying attention.
It's really a simple relationship -- if you block sound, it makes it harder to hear things.
This is exactly the reason why newer emergency vehicles have things like rumbler sirens. These sirens don't do anything to make people more attentive, but what they do is generate frequencies that are more likely to penetrate into modern vehicles.
Classic example of being unwilling to concede the argument.
I think you may start to understand the requirement once you realize the issue is where attention is and is not placed, instead of what sense is being exercised.
I mean, think about it. The recommendation was to consume forms of entertainment. In the factory I worked, there was a mandatory safety rule where you were required to establish eye contact with forklift drivers. Why is that a requirement?
Even setting aside the forklift, having music playing reduces your ability to hear a coworker shout "Help, my clothes are caught on the line. Push the emergency stop".
YouTube cannot be allowed - you need to be ready to work when the line moves the next part to you. There are also safety concerns with watching youtube instead of the various hazards which are always there.
I went to a panel discussion at a conference last year. Operations managers agreed labor was their biggest challenge. The manager for the promotional materials company who was probably around 60 discussed how he has loosened up a bit the last ~15 years. If someone sends a couple texts and it slightly impacts the units they (personally) do per hour, it was better than being super strict and losing employees. He had to adapt because the mentality was far different than when he started in the workforce.
I agree it won’t matter too much, they’ll automate more so they won’t need this many people.
Speaking of which, I don’t really know your business, but a post starting with “my family owns a business” and ending with “we lose workers to Walmart even though we pay them more” (with no specificity as to how much more)…. This really comes off like a problem with the business itself, not the overall market.
I see this all the time at an automotive plant. UAW wages are good, especially after the last contract, but we still get people who struggle putting a sticker on a car for an hour straight before their break or task switch.
UAW wages are "good" but you have to realize that you are competing with a service economy's leftover labor pool. All the good candidates left your manufacturing town already to get a job in an office tower where "good" UAW wages aren't really much to write home about.
For the last multiple decades graduating students have been facing a declining manufacturing job market where it makes just about no sense to get into manufacturing when they can get a degree and work a desk job with better pay and actually be in a job market that's growing over time rather than shrinking.
UAW wages are "good" but only compared to other jobs that are probably in the bottom 50% of desirability, and you're under constant threat of plant closures or the shift toward non-union plants in places like Alabama and South Carolina.
And oh yeah, you're stuck in some declining semi-rural rust belt manufacturing town rather than getting to live your best life in a vibrant growing urban area.
A full 35% of Americans have a bachelor's degree or higher, and those numbers are even higher when you are looking at states/counties that have the major population centers. The county map makes it look like basically every urban area has at least 40-50% bachelor's degree attainment, with standouts like the Boston area having some counties with over 60% attainment.
Almost 30% of Americans work remotely at least some time during the week.
So, basically half of the urbanized population has better options than working in a factory.
In China, working a factory is being compared to a much worse prior standard of living that was much more recent. Today's factory workers were yesterday's subsistence farmers. Americans haven't experienced that level of widespread poverty in at least 100 years.
That seems wholly reasonable to me. Expecting humans to be able to do work like that, and especially to get satisfaction from such work, seems like the aberration.
In the 90s as a high school kid, I made $14/hr as a farmhand when the minimum wage was $4.75. They’d hire 4 crews of 4 guys each and we’d lose about half through the summer. They were great family to work for, but the work was hella hard. You could go retrieve shopping carts for $4.75 an hour and smoke weed all day, and many of my former coworkers did.
If job A pays 80k and job B pays 100k, but job A is 40h and job B is 60h, then job B pays worse. They pay more but not better.
I also don't see offshoring manufacturing as inherently problematic or being out of sight, out of mind (of course exploitation can happen, but that's not inherently a part of offshoring manufacturing).
Workers in China, Vietnam etc are paid significantly less, but their cost of living is less as well. Plus unlike in the west, where manufacturing jobs are not desirable, in places where those manufacturing jobs land they typically provide an economic opportunity that isn't otherwise there.
Basically, why not have high cost of living places produce higher cost goods that pay more, and low cost of living places produce lower cost goods that pays less?
If you mean in terms of general economics, why are some countries cheaper than others, I’m not really qualified to make a statement there. I’m also not talking about if it’s right or wrong. But it is the reality today.
The few factory jobs I've seen were not only monotonous, they were needlessly soul crushing.
For no reason at all, you had to stand for hours on end. Your only breaks were lunch and smokes. Bathroom breaks were monitored like a crime. And you were afforded no distractions from the task, 100% focus required.
Coupled with no care put into making someone feel actually appreciated and the end-products being MBA shrinkflated garbage nobody could be proud of, it's not shocking that no one in their right mind would want to work there.
I’m definitely going to find a way to slip this into a conversation.
Of what?
Of getting on disability (back pain)
And getting more (from the govt.) to sit at home and cook up conspiracy theories on the Internet
How much higher is the pay? Cause the first thing that crosses into my mind is oil rigs, where they get paid more than many software engineers I know do, and there's a huge number of people doing the work happily despite the gruelling conditions. I realize not every business can pay Big Oil salaries, but still, it might be worth thinking realistically about whether your pay & benefits really are better than Walmart's (who are the number 1 employer in the states AFAIR, so they must be doing something right).
One was for a semi-skilled manufacturing position. A little more than just assembly line, but nothing super special or niche. The other was a janitor position at the local public school system.
The differential was not huge, but the janitor paid more. Probably less hours too.
I'm SUPER doubtful of this.
When I last bumped into this, the local Amazon warehouse paid more than all the local manufacturing. It wasn't even close.
Local manufacturing got used to being a local monopoly and being able to underpay. Now that they're not a monopoly, all they do is whine and complain.
Tariffs were supposed to fix that, but now I don’t know if they are effective at all.
The Smarter Every Day scrubber demonstrates that is not true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
The problem is that the US has systematically destroyed all the ecosystem required to manufacture by outsourcing everything.
Maximally efficient is minimally robust.
However, yes, the US (and the West in general) were uniquely victims of elite betrayal, where the financial and business elites decided it was best for them to outsource manufacturing, while telling the urban mass and politicians that this was "everyone's best interest". The current political and now geopolitical disaster followed.
The financialization of America and the UK in the 1980s was a failure in all respects. Stock buybacks made legal, factories closed, Wall Street as an engine of growth. It was all fiction.
General advice is if you’re down on your luck and need a job, you can go there and be at $25 an hour in a few months (step pay increases are mandated by the union). It’s not for everyone but it certainly has less turnover than the local McDonald’s which starts and stays around $14.
Unions should do a better job of marketing to employers that they can supply a trained work force. For example the IBEW here always has a full book of apprentices. An employer can get a qualified electrician along with an apprentice basically guaranteed.
Unions need to quit their management is evil message as well. Unions can do good, but when they call all management evil and breed resentment I can't blame companies for not wanting unions around.
The above is US centrist - in other countries the Unions don't do this.
1. Give up and just outsource manufacturing and be ok with it
2. Invest heavily in automation, technology etc so we remove cost of labor from the equation. Or at least heavily minimize it
3. Put up trade barriers to artificially raise the cost of imported goods, which is what the current admin is trying to do, at least officially
1. leaves us dependent on other potentially adversarial countries, 3. increases the cost of goods sold so puts a burden on the population. So seems like 2. is the only way to go, if the country can get behind it. But it also inherently won't add a lot of jobs.
As for your responses. 1 who is "us" 3. I mean some would be automated etc. There is actually data on how little the cost of labor adds to different parts of manufacturing. 2. You at least have a sustainable economy (I dont mean that in an environmental sense)
They're not mutually exclusive of course. There can be some national protection via tariffs on some types of manufacturing, while investing in automating some other types and just completely ignoring others and keeping those offshore. Problem currently is there doesn't seem to be a much of a strategy.
So we have a set of ad hoc policies (or EOs), that don't seem to have an overarching goal.
I certainly want clothing manufacture back in the U.S. with a focus on using renewable (ie. not microplastic based) textiles to make articles of clothing that don’t wear out in a year or two. I have a handmade pair of pants I bought at a local thrift store that were locally made from domestically produced denim. Got them for $4. New ones from the person who makes them would be around $40-$75. They are custom fitted to you, although I got lucky and the thrift store had one in exactly my width and height.
So far they don’t have any rips, years, and the cuffs aren’t fraying.
My brand new Levi’s and Wrangler’s have fraying cuffs and are much more prone to getting tears because of the thinner fabric. They also seem to stretch after washing or wearing them a long time and then don’t fit as well.
Toys? I want toys for my kids that aren’t full of lead or cadmium, and are something besides battery operated beeping rubbish or something with a screen. I’m glad to pay $25 for a wooden toy. I bought one locally made in Chico, CA at a store called “Chicomade” where everything was locally made.
I don’t see why fast fashion with clothes you need to throw out sooner due to planned obsolescence and plastic trash toys.
Problem is for the most part that cannot be done. There is a market for made in USA, where people are willing to pay more for higher quality, more sustainable, local etc, but it’s still a relatively small market.
Just like airline tickets. People complain about lack of space and bad food, but when presented with the choice most people still pick the cheapest option.
Politicians who are optimizing for votes from a large and ignorant base that hasn’t thought through any of this.
but employs less people as it automates.
I'm guessing that US needs a similar nation-wide service to connect gig-workers of all sorts to factories specifically.
They are gradually not replacing staff as they retire or the occasional person quits on the factory floor due to automation. Their biggest challenge is who will own it in the future - the son and grandson have fully taken over from the founder, but nobody else in the family is really interested.
If every creative job is gone to the AI beast then there will be people willing to do factory work since nothing else will be available.