Eh, I don't want more people working in manufacturing. I want more people enjoying their lives and maybe robots doing that sort of job. Ew, me and my progressive thoughts.
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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No no, you have this wrong. We want factories, but it should be all robots and the people that don't own factories should simply kill themselves.
I really like this chart because it highlights how, despite all the awful shit that happens every day, we are more alike than we are different. It's gonna take a lot to undo the propaganda, hatred, etc., but if we focus on Class instead of other ways of being divided and conquered, the change everyone wants can eventually happen.
That's the utility of unemployment, to force people into factories. Coming soon.
This is what always gets me as someone who works in manufacturing. We go though people like clockwork. Finding someone who wants the job, can do the job, and can learn the process is such a monumental task. The sad part is the money is there. You'll get paid better then people with degrees. Still they don't want to do what it takes.
I worked at a place that had consistent mandatory overtime. I never saw the outside of the factory except to just sleep and then go back again. There was no upward advancement whatsoever. And it was completely unsafe where people would eventually snap and sometimes have to be dragged out by the private police that they hired. Also, when you enter the place, you go through turn styles. Almost as if you're in prison or something. The people that normally want to bring manufacturing back to America are the people that have like a 1950s view of the world. But working in a factory in modern America, it's not really appealing because of how you're treated and you actually get a really low pay. You have no protection under the law. Especially if you're living in a right to work state. And everyone around you is toxic. Thinking that one day their ship will come in, they just need to step on your neck. And I didn't puss out and I saw people come and go and I even worked my way up to different positions. I didn't want to be like the guy getting dragged out and my health was declining so I quit that shitty job and I'll never do it again.
Exactly
That has not been my experiencing for most manufacturing, including a lot of skilled manufacturing. Every manufacturing job I've done has either paid complete garbage, or has been so mind-numbingly simple and boring that it could be done by trained pigeons.
Give me a solid union manufacturing job, where I'm earning enough on a single income to own a small house and raise a family, and I'd absolutely go back to manufacturing.
That's exactly where I work today but I'm telling you you wouldnt make it past temp.
Mind-numbing boredom, I'm guessing?
You're probably right; I've got pretty severe ADHD, so staying on task with boring shit is HARD.
I have always assumed that I wouldn't be wanted. Helping build stuff looks neat, but I am getting old, raised in the boondocks, only have a high school degree, and am autistic. It is my guess that no one would want the likes of me, because there are many other people who are more capable and desperate.
From my experience wisdom goes a long way as an operator. It takes wisdom to know 99% of things you don't understand can be explained pretty easily if you are curious and not afraid to ask questions. Lots of operators think they just need to show up and "do the job." That's true, mostly, but if you instead show up, do the job, and learn the process, you'll become invaluable.
Eh, our techs don't make shit imo. We are in a high cost of living area, and they make better wages than unskilled labor, but it's nothing like it was back when I was a kid. If you talk to the old heads, what they were making 25 years ago is less than techs make today, not even accounting for inflation. The thing is, the reason we had well paid techs then was strong union membership. If they bring jobs back, the Republicans for sure aren't going to make it a union job, and if they do bring back manufacturing, it'll be in a bunch of shitty "right to work" states, and people will make shit wages. The people in said states are too dumb to unionize, and will keep voting for their oppressors
As someone who started right out of school, it took years for my income to start to surpass some of the more experienced operators. No its not hundreds of thousands but it's in that 70,000 to 90,000 range for people who don't sleep on OT.
Yeah, but you shouldn't have to work OT in order to make a livable wage. People should have a work/life balance where they aren't going home from work and immediately falling asleep.
It's there, honestly, I'd work OT while being a salaried employee. But your attitude towards it is the exact reason people don't want these manufacturing jobs. So you're only proving my point.
But your attitude towards it is the exact reason people don’t want these manufacturing jobs
The very idea that that should be a necessary part of a manufacturing job, or any job, is, IMO, "problematic". Too many people have bought into the idea that we should pursue capitalist ideals to the detriment of everything else. I'm not advocating for a socialist utopia (okay, I am, kind of), but you should be able to go to your job, put in eight hours, and go home. If you're constantly doing OT, then the workplace should hire more people.
Where I am, 70-90 k is an absolute shit salary is my point. It might be great where you are, but where I am, that's not buying you a house. That's about what our more senior technicians make, but the entry level guys make like $25-28/hr. Almost every office job at our company pays more. I love turning bolts, but it's objectively harder work for less money, and that is why I don't want those jobs.
Where do you live? Not exact location but rural or major Metropolitan area? It matters a lot.
I'm surrounded by tech companies and a crack house costs $1.4 mil
Right. These are manufacturing jobs in rural to small cities. Top end of jobs for unskilled workers.
Why the hell would you change the word to manufacturing vs. factory?
Is there more to this survey? Is someone just cherry picking these two questions?
I think it's obvious people have a much more negative association with "factory job" than "a job in manufacturing". A factory job very much brings the ideas of assembly lines into people's mind. A job in manufacturing could bring that, but it could also bring ideas of engineers, designers, etc.
This is either a garbage survey specifically wording one question differently to get the outcome they wanted; or someone picked two questions that should not be directly compared like this without context.
Even the fundamentals of the questions are different. Its not Americans would be better off, but America. Which is a question asking if the nation would be better off, not the individuals living in it. Where as the next question is from the perspective of an individual living in the country.
As an aside, I've worked in factories, they do indeed suck to work at and I will never again go near that work. Mostly because of the types of people. Asshole bosses and reactionary dipshit co-workers. Office work is boring and a little soul sucking but at least the people are chill and generally progressive at office jobs.
I'm specifically talking about the wording of the survey questions. If you've ever worked on making survey's and collected good samples for it you quickly learn how much the questions you ask and the way you ask them impacts the results.
An obvious example being surveys asking Americans about "The affordable care act" vs. "Obama Care". You can swing the results by double digit percentages just by changing the name of the same policy.
But taking the results side by side in a vacuum from this so you can get clicks is all financial times cares about.
The article is written so you think "Americans want others to work in factories but not themselves" but if you think about even the numbers with these poorly worded questions for more than a second they actually make sense.
1 in 6 people you survey are gonna be over 65 and retired (assuming you had a representative sample). And even more are gonna be "old"
More are gonna be college educated and already working in a comfortable job.
Obviously many people are going to answer "well, no it's not for me obviously"
It's actually still a large percentage that want to work in a factory considering everything. Which is the opposite of what the article is trying to imply.
It’s actually still a large percentage that want to work in a factory considering everything. Which is the opposite of what the article is trying to imply.
I mean, if you question the survey so fundamentally then you shouldn't take much of anything from it. Including the opposite conclusion.
For instance, you also have to consider the opposite group: the number of people who are unemployed and people who aren't even participants in the economy but would prefer to be due to financial hardship. Desperate people might accept even awful work as an improvement, even if they'd prefer a completely different job overall if it was available.
And obviously, a lot of the people who perceive factory work as an improvement to their working lives even when already employed are probably thinking about it by mentally associating with the benefits of steady unionized work.
Where I live, basically none of the factory jobs that exist are unionized and are nearly all contract based through 3rd parties.
You and another person didn't fall for FT's propaganda.
Here's the survey.
44 people ITT got trolled.
Thank you. I have spent too much time arguing with idiots that misuse statistics. The wording in the question being different was a huge red flag.
People have been brainwashed to hate unions, so they equate the good jobs that can support families with factories instead. There's nothing special about a factory job, except that a factory is difficult to close down when workers unionize.
What we need is high unionization, including sector wide unions.
I feel like there are a lot of dimensions to this. I am a huge proponent of manufacturing, but yeah a lot of factory jobs suck. The problem is, they don't have to. Modern factories are way better than old ones, and could be even better if we as a culture prioritized making jobs less soul crushing rather than access to cheap shit. I also feel like people who haven't worked in manufacturing don't really understand what it's like in a modern facility. I think there's this idea that it's working at an assembly line or going out and turning a bunch of valves all the time but nowadays 99% of it is just sitting at a computer watching numbers. I wouldn't want to be on the floor at my current job but I've worked other places where it seems a hell of a lot better than most other jobs available to non college grads.
Another issue is that modern manufacturing sites are super automated. Very few people actually work at them, at least the ones in America. You can have a plant that makes millions of pounds of plastic a year that employs 60-70 people, which is less than a typical Walmart.
Is it true that modern factory jobs are sitting at a computer? I've watched a few "how stuff is made" videos and am always amazed at how much labor goes into almost every step.
I work in automotive and sometimes visit the plants. We still have a lot of manual labor because it is hard to automate certain things. But newer production lines definitely require less people as more steps are automated. We also are starting up the implementation of robots in the warehouses after running several proof of concepts in the past years.
Anyway, there are still plenty of factory jobs that are not just sitting behind a desk, but office space is increasing for sure as one automation engineer can now run a set of robots that does the work of what 10 people used to do.
I suppose it depends on what you're making but in my experience new plants are incredibly automated. Then again, I work in chemicals and not consumer goods, which probably has a bias towards automation
These are the same fucknuts who dream that once all the "illegals" are gone, their innumerable American neighbor enemies, too many to list but all the groups that aren't almost exclusively white, fake Christian, conservative, and pro capitalism exploitation will be forced to harvest their dinner in the fields for minimum wage or less for 12 hour days as they laugh in victory and mock our sunburn.
Won't ever happen, but it's what they believe is their endgame. In truth, a lot of farms will go under and a new great depression they have to suffer too will occur. But it'll be our faults for refusing to work under the conditions undocumented migrants were invited to do under the lie big corpo pushed for psuedoslave labor that their children would have better opportunities as a result.
To me, a silver lining of this national collapse is that we'll no longer be able to dupe swaths of desperate people in bad situations with drug gangs into coming here only to end up in another kind of bad situation with robber baron gangs.
This goes a long with some of the other silver linings of the world no longer being subject to our soft power bullshit propaganda machine. Bullshit, our number 1 international export, followed by tools of mass human murder, aren't you proud? The world should have kicked us to the curb for our actions decades ago. We've been toxic since the Red Scare, and a straight up global poison since Reagan.
Only about 10% of the working population in the US is in manufacturing, so 20% more people that would want to work in manufacturing is quite a lot. It's impossible to undo the automation that has happened to date, though. Worse, if more people work in manufacturing, the pressure on wages and the pressure to automate can both increase.
Even if we stop all imports and make every finished good purchased in the US here, it's far from enough to bring us back to the historic levels of employment in manufacturing.
20% is a lot. Goes to show that the working conditions in the US are bad.
Thanks, as much as I think whatever the US government is doing rn is dumb and self-destructive, it's important to clarify these two charts don't contradict each other.
This feels deceptive
People are willing to do something that is worse for them, but in the long term it would benefit their country
I'd be better off if I worked in a factory but they paid me $250k. Balls in your court, factory owner.
Capital wants us all to serve until death. Don't fall for their factory bullshit. We shouldn't waste our lives burning down the planet for their "profits". We need degrowth, leisure. etc. to save the planet and ourselves.
I'd definitely be on both blue graphs. As a current college student, I technically would be better off because I'd have a more stable income than just financial aid, which in the current administration I'm worried is shakey, even if I am in a state that isn't completely bending over to the whims of the president.
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