Comment by lnsru 5 hours ago
Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most can’t. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.
> 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.
> the best luck they had was getting in good graces with local probation officers & craigslist classifieds.
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.
Obviously, the “higher pay and significantly better benefits” are not actually significantly better. I’d rather we address that than just exploit some other workers overseas where they’re out of sight, out of mind. Honestly, it seems like tariffs on imported goods would be the way around this, but also, we need to be sure that money is going to the people doing the work, not just the owners.
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.
Wrong. Kids brains are fried from phones / social media so much that they struggle with repetitive labor.
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.
I guess most of these jobs don’t allow for music or YouTube to be used during work?
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.
Having worked at a very simple factory job that involved hot-pressing plastic-aluminium film into shapes, yeah, that would end badly. It's unskilled job, that doesn't mean it's mindless.
If you look away from your job you might lose a finger,.. or *gasp* even worse, stop production!
> Watching YouTube though?
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).
Music might be allowed - though the factory is often loud enough that it isn't really practical. You still need to be able to hear the safety signals though.
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.
Feels like there are a bunch of factories like that in the Midwest even now. There's a Honda factory near the Columbus, OH area where you have a bunch of employees doing absolute monotonous work all day like checking if a screw is the right shape or something. These jobs are slowly getting automated but it's not like no one would do them if they are available.
Should hire us autists and allow us to program via voice commands and augmented reality.. i would love something almost automate-able while doing something that also needs higher brain functions.
If they're losing employees, then they must not have that much higher pay or better benefits for it to be worth it to work there. I don't think you can easily blame it on the job being monotonous...
The job being monotonous is clearly enough of a downside that significantly higher pay and benefits are needed to attract talent.
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.
Except you can't just zone away in a factory job. Workers need to pay attention if they don't like injuries. It the job doesn't need much skill, it doesn't necessarily mean it's easy or safe.
We need actual data to decide how significant is "significant." Otherwise you will just have businesses complaining no one wants to work for "significantly" higher pay (a whole $0.05/hour more).
> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
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.
If people don't want to work for you, then you have to pay better and/or improve working conditions. There is nothing more to it. There has never in the history of the world been anything else to it.
There's nothing wrong with "western workers". There's something wrong with your family.
I think you're being too hard. Working at a Wal-Mart is much easier than a factory job, considering the latter is usually dangerous, and has more RSI risk.
It'd have to pay at least double, and me being in a predicament, for me to gamble with my health, and only until I find a better option.
Some jobs are just inherently bad. People do them, if there are no better jobs available. If you increase the wage, people will do the job for a while, until they have reached sufficient financial stability. Then they can afford to switch to another job that pays less but provides a better quality of life. Or to retire early in extreme cases.
That's fantastic! Wouldn't it be tyranny to make people spend their whole lives doing such a job? It's good that people do it for a while for a good wage and then move on.
> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week.
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.
Using people for manufacturing fundamentally will never be cost competitive compared to cheaper markets. There are really only a few ways to resolve this in my view:
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.
1. Ok then what do you make? 2. A bit too late for that given that China is also highly automated. 3. You would have to be serious for this to work.
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)
Typically as economies advance there is a shift to services and higher value add / higher skill manufacturing anyways. That can be the explicit strategy for the US as well. Focus on renewables, high tech, aerospace etc instead of the lower margin / lower skill manufacturing.
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.
The USA and the west in general is 40 years deep into this crisis and recent developments have not actually made a shift in that trajectory.
The slight problem with how AI is currently being marketed is that AI is going for the fun and creative jobs that people want to do, not the dull and repetitive jobs that nobody wants to do.
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.
> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.
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.