nein51 said:
EatMoreSalmon said:
nein51 said:
You don't need vocational skills to do factory work
Then what is Tim Cook talking about.
Whatever makes people feel good. It might not be $2/hr in a factory in China any more but it's damned sure not $20/hr with a union re-negotiating every 6 months.
Factory work is not skilled labor, it's mindless, repetitive labor. The UAW (as an example) wants you to believe it's skilled labor but it just isn't.
I totally agree that baseline assembly is not a very skilled job despite what the UAW might tell you. But those jobs are being eliminated by automation. The ones that remain are highly technical, and require a different level of skill that we don't produce en masse domestically. No better example than the fact we produce less than 200,000 engineers per year at all levels (graduate, post graduate, etc.) while China produces 2 million.
The politicians will talk up auto manufacturing, but the manufacturing we want back in auto are parts like batteries and engines, not to mention other industries like semi conductors, pharmaceuticals, high end electronics, and even defense. The UAW can pound sand. They literally wanted in their last contract that the company could not automate and a shorter work week. There's a microcosm of why we can't get manufacturing back from a labor perspective.