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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.