If the West is serious about friendshoring, many more will need to carry out manual work — albeit aided by robots. And yes, that means university graduates.
There’s definitely work to be done so that production of goods becomes once again an esteemed endeavour. It’s problematic that factory work is as undesirable as locally made things are desirable. It’s a cultural thing now and it’s silly.
It’s not inherently undesirable, but often enough extremely unattractive.
Low pay, bad working condition, no sense of accomplishment, hardly any upwards mobility. Why would I do that, if I have better options?
Here in Germany, people used to take pride (and sometimes still do) in working for VW or Daimler, they had a sense of belonging, pay was good and there was at least a feeling that your company took care of you. That is pretty much gone.
I know a lot of people that work in union manufacturing jobs that have a real sense of pride and feeling of accomplishment about it. Gotta say, having time off, extra money, and voice in how the company treats you probably goes a long way, because some of those same people hated their non-unions jobs before.
Absolutely. But for some reason, capitalism hates if workers are happy, so you have to press them harder and harder.
These jobs you’re describing are becoming rarer, and not only in manufacturing. I’m a software developer office drone and I’m financially very well off and have pretty good working conditions, but my work is mostly meaningless, if I’m honest. Not that the product I’m building is useless, far from it, but there’s so much that removes me from actually feeling valuable, that I might as well just dig a hole and fill it up again.
We need to put more effort on automating factory jobs, but having them be supervised by techs 24 hours. It makes for nice monitoring and maintenance jobs, as long as they are paid according to the value their machine brings.
There’s definitely work to be done so that production of goods becomes once again an esteemed endeavour. It’s problematic that factory work is as undesirable as locally made things are desirable. It’s a cultural thing now and it’s silly.
It’s not inherently undesirable, but often enough extremely unattractive.
Low pay, bad working condition, no sense of accomplishment, hardly any upwards mobility. Why would I do that, if I have better options?
Here in Germany, people used to take pride (and sometimes still do) in working for VW or Daimler, they had a sense of belonging, pay was good and there was at least a feeling that your company took care of you. That is pretty much gone.
I know a lot of people that work in union manufacturing jobs that have a real sense of pride and feeling of accomplishment about it. Gotta say, having time off, extra money, and voice in how the company treats you probably goes a long way, because some of those same people hated their non-unions jobs before.
Absolutely. But for some reason, capitalism hates if workers are happy, so you have to press them harder and harder.
These jobs you’re describing are becoming rarer, and not only in manufacturing. I’m a software developer office drone and I’m financially very well off and have pretty good working conditions, but my work is mostly meaningless, if I’m honest. Not that the product I’m building is useless, far from it, but there’s so much that removes me from actually feeling valuable, that I might as well just dig a hole and fill it up again.
We need to put more effort on automating factory jobs, but having them be supervised by techs 24 hours. It makes for nice monitoring and maintenance jobs, as long as they are paid according to the value their machine brings.