That's the problem - you don't. By definition, the kind of efficient, highly-automated manufacturing you're thinking of doesn't need many unskilled or semi-skilled workers, but it does need skilled and experienced engineers and machinists. It needs a massive and complex ecosystem of suppliers and support.
The depletion of America's industrial base has created a massive skills gap that would take decades to remedy. You can't create a new Silicon Valley with a bunch of bootcamp graduates and some wishful thinking; likewise, you can't create a manufacturing economy through sheer force of will.
This reminds me of a conversation I had at a New Year's party not too long ago - a gentleman I'd never met before and I got to talking, and in the process of getting to know one another (however much you can know someone after 4-5 drinks at a black tie party you go to once a year), he bemoaned the issues he was having trying to open a US branch of his company. Apparently medium scale sheet metal forming operations in the States have all but disappeared - everything is either outsourced to China, or is small scale, high precision work that can't meet demand of more than N hundred pieces a week. It's a boring issue - "oh no, there's no one to subcontract this work to, you have to buy from China for X percent of what it would cost to do here" - but speak volumes as to the loss of a critical component of that manufacturing ecosystem.
>Apparently medium scale sheet metal forming operations in the States have all but disappeared - everything is either outsourced to China, or is small scale, high precision work that can't meet demand of more than N hundred pieces a week.
I can personally confirm this. Very unfortunate, and I'm positive it's helping stifle innovation. Having to go to China for your custom sheet metal needs (with the communication difficulties and shipping times involved) can be -really- debilitating.
You can get custom sheet metal work, if you're willing the pay the price and possibly are in the right industry. Sheet metal, welding, carpentry, pipefitters, and pretty much every trade are in massive demand in shipbuilding/repair.
NNSY fails a significant portion of welder applicants just because they can't lay a proper weld. They pay... a lot of money.
"the price" being something borderline extortionate, in many cases. And there aren't a lot of options. In China there's someone everywhere that can do what you want; in America, you'll have to search.
You can get lucky and find someone with some brakes and benders that does cheap work for farmers, but people like that are usually extremely hard to find and mostly in rural areas.
And yes, welders do make more than someone at McDonalds or doing landscaping, but the myth of the super-high paid welder is mostly that. I just looked up NNSY welder salaries - average of 49K, and that's with a lot people there being experienced and there for a long time.
Completing the welding apprenticeship at NNSY results in an hourly wage of $29.73. The overtime pay schedule at NNSY. The issue online is complicated because NNSY also has "shipfitters/welders". They are paid substantially less than production welders. Production welders at a repair yard like BAE/Colanna/Lyon make in the range of $27-$30. They also make significant overtime.
I agree that the myth of the super-high paid welder is mostly fabricated, but when it comes to shipbuilding at a nuclear yard it's a lot higher than you would expect.
Driving around Newport News, Groton, or even Birmingham is like being on another planet economically speaking.
But I definitely see the point, as most of the suppliers are sized for defense, not commercial industrial volume.
And from their perspective, I get the choice. Why risk expansion, when the trend has been towards free trade and offshoring? A 100x customer who decides to switch suppliers in a year isn't a win. At least DoD is a semi-reliable customer.
Driving around Newport News is like driving around a desolate shithole. There are very few nice neighborhoods in the area. Newport News and Hampton are the worst cities in the Hampton Roads area.
I got chatting to the bloke next to me on a long haul flight from the UK to Japan. He was going there to buy a printing machine (he was a printer) and when I asked why go all the way to Japan he told me that, basically, only Germany and Japan make printing machines any more. He even pointed out that the pulp he bought was from abroad.
I wonder if freight companies receive subsidies though - lots of airlines certainly get subsidies - that might change things in favour of more local producers. Maybe.
It's because people have been pushed to both sides of that; manufacturing used to be a comfortable middle class job, but it's shifted to the sides, being a high value, specialist job on the one hand, and a low education required job of handling incoming finished or half-finished products coming over from abroad.
This, exactly. America has manufacturing talent, but not at the scale required for a manufacturing economy. (Source: ~2 decades in global manufacturing.)
Interesting. I wonder what the logic is; usually tariffs are chosen based on trade volumes with the targeted country. Maybe there's a sense that mining or other raw materials businesses need more help than firms higher up the value chain.
While this might be true, in the same decades you could have a handful of skilled machinists teach the robots / AIs. The thing about AI anything is that each individual unit gets better with fleet upgrades.
Highly-automated, "clean" manufacturing is all well and good for billion-dollar highly-capitalized, politically-sheltered megafactories, but what about the other 90% of manufacturers?
Manufacturing is a dirty, dangerous, manual business. I think the small guys will tell you that environmental regulations killed manufacturing in the west, not labour costs. We've been living in lala land with it all offshore, out of sight. If US/EU-level environmental regulations got applied and enforced globally, we'd be sent back to the stone age. Not to mention the litigation risks, intellectual property risks, trade union cartels, needing to hire an electrician to change a lightbulb, etc. (All added up, it's hopelessly calcified, but whatever...)
Don't get me wrong - I really care about the environment - but most regs here are just to look good, not actually about stuff that matters. And pushing it into the third world, where they don't protect the environment at all, is counterproductive.
>Manufacturing is a dirty, dangerous, manual business.
It can be, but it can also be clean, safe and highly automated. Fly-by-night operators that run dirty and dangerous shops are not the basis of a sustainable manufacturing economy. China is just damned good at manufacturing. They have everything that is needed - skills, capital, logistics - at an immense scale. They don't offer a cheap but inferior substitute for western manufacturing. They offer speed, flexibility and scalability that western countries could only dream of.
Xi Jinping has a degree in chemical engineering. His predecessor Hu Jintao has a degree in hydraulic engineering. His predecessor Jiang Zemin has a degree in electrical engineering. That is the fundamental reason why China is a manufacturing superpower - for thirty years, the government has been run by people who actually know how to make stuff.
Tell that to Germany, stricter environmental regulations and a very healthy, highly developed manufacturing sector. They might not have all of their supply chain made locally but Germany makes the machines that makes machines so if needed they could ramp up their internal manufacturing quite quickly, doesn't seem to be the case for the US.
Well Germany has been so fortunate as to be a member of a currency union, where they are the leading industrial base, thus giving them a artificial low currency as an advantage as well. This helps manufacturing quit a bit.
State was defined by political borders, country by geographical borders. For much of human history states were countries. The blurring of the meaning of these words I believe started around the 18th century as transportation, and thus the ability to rule further away, progressed.
I agree that in today's colloquial usage there is little distinction between the two.
That's completely insignificant compared to having the dollar as the global currency in the oil trade. Countries that sell oil for dollar can only spend those dollars on American products. It's as if the USA produced all the oil in the world and sold it for profit. Meanwhile Germany's unfair advantage is that it's prices on products are slightly lower than they should be.
It is actually the other way around: this keeps the US dollar artificially high, hitting on exports, and it is completely not true that these countries can only spend dollars on American products: they can spend on anything they want, the dollar is just a currency, you can use it to buy products from Russia, China or Nigeria.
Economists recognize Germany’s unique position that is overheating their manufacturing center. If the DM still existed, it would be ~50% more valuable than the Euro.
That's the problem - you don't. By definition, the kind of efficient, highly-automated manufacturing you're thinking of doesn't need many unskilled or semi-skilled workers, but it does need skilled and experienced engineers and machinists. It needs a massive and complex ecosystem of suppliers and support.
The depletion of America's industrial base has created a massive skills gap that would take decades to remedy. You can't create a new Silicon Valley with a bunch of bootcamp graduates and some wishful thinking; likewise, you can't create a manufacturing economy through sheer force of will.