Let's bring those jobs back... How?

Great Debates
1

So, rural white america has spoken. And they have said to stop ignoring their needs, to stop ignoring their plight. They have said, rather loudly, that their needs will be forefront before anyone else’s are addressed.

Okay, let’s work with that.

In other threads, I have indicated that their best bet is retraining and relocation, where I was asked, “Why should the rural people have to move?” My response that they should move to where the jobs are was not taken well.

So, I am not sure what would be best to do. What exactly is it that the rural americans are expecting?

If you are in a town that whose economy centered around a single factory or mill, and that place of employment has shut down, what solutions do you want to see? What solutions do you expect? If you are worried about your factory closing and moving the jobs offshore, how do you want your jobs to be saved?

I can see how to get these people jobs, if they are willing to retrain for the jobs in demand, and relocate to where they are, but I do not see any good way to bring the jobs to them.

If we impose penalizing tariffs, so that imports are virtually nil, that may help a bit, but automation takes more jobs away than offshoring does anyway, so even if the factory is producing widgets again, it is not providing nearly as many jobs, and even fewer that they are qualified for.

So, serious question, to any and all who are on the side that the rural americans should be able to stay where they are, without learning or developing any new skills, how is this to be accomplished? How are we going to bring jobs to them? I am at a loss myself, and I have yet to have heard any sort of proposal that would address this issue.

2

I have it on good authority that wages are too high and people have to go out and work really hard.

How do we bring those jobs back? We race to the [DEL][COLOR=“Black”]top[/DEL][/COLOR] bottom!

CMC fnord!

3

Retraining and relocation is one of the top down economic solutions to job losses. But it always seems to run into the cussedness of people.

Or, in other words, it’s easy for someone outside the situation to say ‘just retrain and relocate’. But when it’s you it means uprooting your family, disturbing your kid’s education and breaking away from friends, loved ones and locations that might be a part of your existence from the moment you were born.

Such moves are exceedingly hard for people. Doing them - or facing the possibility of doing them - breeds resentment. That leads to voting for people who will promise to deal with the problem and allow people to live like their parents lived.

I’m willing to bet we try some form of increased protectionism and tariffs at the border to try to make our goods more competitive. I know common economic thought it that this will place a drag on growth but we trade off such things all the time. The minimum wage, labor laws, OSHA and so forth all place a drag on growth. It’s a matter of finding the balance that suits the current political climate.

At a minimum, I’d like to see Trump try something like that and a showdown appear between Trump and the free market extremists in congress. That should be a hoot.

4

There is a problem with the idea that manufacturing jobs have gone away. The problem is that no one wants to do them. The average age of factory workers in America is now in the mid-50’s. I talk to lots of factory managers, and almost uniformly they will say that one of the biggest drivers of automation and outsourcing is that they simply can’t find Americans willing to work in factories. Millennials especially seem to reject factory jobs. And we aren’t talking about boring assembly-line drudgery or sweat shops, but high-tech factories making interesting things, jobs working with computers and robots, etc.

I talked to one manager in an aviation factory who said his biggest fear is what is going to happen when the current workers retire, because they have many open job listings and just can’t fill them. He’s worried about losing decades of experience and local knowledge because the aging workers lack young apprentices to teach their hard-won lnowledge to. He said young people show up for an interview and either turn out to be uneducated or too demanding, or they see what the work entails and don’t respond to follow-up requests. So now they are forced to outsource more of their manufacturing.

5

Oh, I’m sure there will be huge lines of people waiting to assemble iPhones for minimum wage when Trump forces Apple to make them in the US.

6

I think saving jobs goes beyond a factory closing in rural area. It’s also the six figure IT worker forced to train someone from India on a HB1 visa to do his or her job for half the going rate.

7

Yeah, and I wonder if they’ll install bars or safety nets on the windows to keep workers from committing suicide.

8

Often “retraining” means more than just learning a new software product, power tool or management process. It can mean fundamentally changing the way you might have been working for your entire life.

Compare these workers:
A farmer spending 15 hours a day doing hard outdoor labor
A factory shift worker pushing a button on a factory floor for 8 hours a day
An old time office worker sitting in a desk 8 hours a day pushing paper
A modern remote office worker connected with a smart phone 24/7 doing nothing really but sending emails, making PowerPoint decks and sitting on WebEx calls from his home.

I suppose the flip side of that question is “who do they think is supposed to show up and bring jobs?” I suspect to rural people, they just see government, big corporations, urban centers, etc as just some big monolithic “they” who doesn’t give a shit about them.
The reality is that we can’t “bring jobs back” because many of the jobs that are gone are gone forever. We are in a period of massive global societal restructuring. In a few years, “work” is going to look completely different from how we know it now.

Because (IMHO) you either need to be Tony Stark smart designing cutting edge shit, or you end up doing some boring job watching a process run. I studied engineering in undergrad. I know like one classmate who went into it as a career for more than 2 seconds. The rest went into banking and finance or consulting firms like Accenture or Deloitte. The ones from better schools like MIT and Stanford go out to Silicon Valley to deign apps for transposing funny faces on your smartphone camera pics.

9

Trump and the GOP Congress are not going to bring back any manufacturing jobs. They are not going to come up with innovative ideas that could create new industries. They are not going to retrain or relocate.

They are going to build prisons.

Privatized prisons solve many problems:

[ul]
[li]Dissent can be suppressed[/li][li]Scapegoats (Muslims first) can be eliminated (and their property seized: bonus!)[/li][li]Jobs can be supplied to the base–not good-paying or pleasant jobs, but jobs nonetheless[/li][/ul]

And most importantly, perhaps, a new class of oligarchs with buy-in to the Trump administration can be created–at no cost whatsoever to Trump. Privatization, of course, means that taxes that used to go to the service being provided (schools or policing or prisons or what have you) now go into to pocket of the privatizer. He is then free to spend as much or as little as he pleases, to provide the service. (There may be ‘regulations’ that ‘require’ certain things be provided, but we are talking the Trump Administration, here.)

It will be massively enriching for those who agree to play ball with the Trump administration. Trump’s Appalachian and rural Wisconsin and rural Pennsylvania voters might not be particularly thrilled that their new jobs are in private prisons, but then again they might genuinely enjoy the sense that they are Part of Something Important (i.e. the locking up of dissidents and people of the wrong religion and people of the wrong skin color)–as we humans tend to do.

10

The iPhone is not coming to american assembly lines, I believe that when Donald spoke that line, it had more to do with making Apple repatriate their overseas cash hoard. Cook says he would like to repatriate it, but not at 40 percent. China says that should Apple pull the production out of china, then they can’t sell the iphone in china any more, which means that some knock off that looks like the iphone will sell in china, and it would probably be made in that same foxconn factory.

Bad news all around for Apple, but repatriating the back money would be the least worst option.

11

Forbes

There’s no way you can squint hard enough to make it about money, not production.

12

That’s not what Trump said.

13

Hold, Contain, Roll back

Any company that has plans to move to Mexico or other location’s should be aware that NAFTA may no longer be in existence in a few years, and NAFTA 2.0 or FTA 2.0, depending on which way the administration goes may send their global business plan into the shitter, depending on what level of tarriffs are being discussed.

End the HB1 program, grandfather current visa holders till the end of their term. Dry up the pool of candidates that Silly valley has available, it was not just regional coal and auto workers that voted trump in.

Get heavy with china, and if that means taking the world into a trade war, then so be it. Lets see if French minister Hubert Vedrine’s observation was on the money.

14

It’s even worse than that. I remember when going to career fairs when graduating from engineering school and seeing that nearly half of the interviews were for Arthur Anderson (now Accenture), Deloitte & Touche, and other “professional services” companies, and they were basically snapping up anyone with some background in C/C++ or post-calculus mathematics. I did an interview with AA just for grins even though I didn’t have any interest, and after twenty minutes I honestly couldn’t tell you what they did, and I’m not sure the interviewer knew, either beyond repeating “project management consultation” like that means anything. I haven’t kept in touch with any of my classmates who went into the field but I have had to work with a couple of those companies for various reasons, and as far as I can tell you really develop no salable practical skills that apply to anything outside of the management consultant industry. We had one team come in to developed “metrics” on a big overarching product lifecycle management system (which itself was an enormous clusterfuck that was eventually abandoned shortly before the company went under and was liquidated to a competitor), and the metrics literally made no sense whatsoever, to the extent that I had to argue a point of fundamental statistics with one of the senior application engineers. Out of a team of twenty-odd people, maybe two or three were doing any real coding or planning and the rest were just “managers” who didn’t actually have anything to manage.

As much bitching as there has been about NAFTA and other free trade agreements, the practical upshot is that they have dramatically increased effective purchasing power of consumers by access to goods manufactured less expensively and displaced many of the negative effects such as domestic pollution (by offsetting to nations which have less control and regulation, of course). The downside is the jobs associated with manufacturing those products have gone away, and they are not going to pay acceptable wages without raising the cost of the products, reducing purchasing power, notwithstanding that much of the infrastructure to produce those products no longer exists at the scope of supporting domestic production. Protectionist tariffs and cancelling free trade agreements is a short term and ineffectual measure that will not only slow growth but will not result in bringing the jobs back to the places hit by loss of manufacturing. The “Rust Belt” is not going to get back lucrative automotive jobs because the fundamental way that cars are manufactured and the logistics behind sourcing the thousands of components has completely changed.

That being said, obligatory relocation is probably a worse answer, since it will presumably take the people most able to relocate and retrain (e.g. the young and most capable) and leave everyone else in decaying towns and small cities where there is insufficient revenue to support a service economy to provide employment for unskilled workers, with the resulting breakdown of civil structure. The real answer probably has to lay in a significant amount of government funded infrastructure development to create work that has some kind of real value and utility (and is sufficiently distributed to not require mass relocation) combined with some version of guaranteed minimum income (shudder). Where the money comes to pay for this, along with Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid for the increasingly aging population is…unknown. In fact, we’ll probably have to think about restructuring the economy and the entire approach to public finance as well in a post-manufacturing, purely market driven economy, bringing the abandonment of the Bretton Woods system to the final conclusion.

Stranger

15

Yeah, I was reading between the lines, since apple came back and said that to make the same profit on the phone, by making it stateside, would make it prohibitively expensive domestically and would have to distribute in china via the black market, if china kicks them out.

16

IIRC, some smartphones would cost $14,000 apiece if assembled in the USA.

17

I think the gold and jewel encrusted ones cost a bit more and they are done in America

18

Scrap wage floors and require able bodied people to work if they receive government benefits. Enact government benefits so that anyone in need receives them. Now you got people working, things being produced, and people with enough to get by.

19

What jobs are people working at, and what things are being produced and who are they sold to? Be specific.

Stranger

20

$2,000.00 based on this estimate from 2014. But it might not even be possible to build an iPhone here. None of the internals are manufactured in the US, nor the casing, etc. All those facilities would have to be built and that cost would have to be included in the higher cost of the iPhones.