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Comment by j2kun | Hacker News Reader

IIRC manufacturing is like 3% of American jobs. Not sure why the American people care so much about it. It's gone and not coming back.

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>Not sure why the American people care so much about it. It's gone and not coming back.

Because millions of older, former Obama voters in the rust belt can recall when their small towns weren't chained-shut shitholes drowning in drug abuse, hopelessness and commercial devastation.

It was when the plant was open.

Those people, out of desperation, have given us Cheeto Jesus.

in the post-war decades, manufacturing provided a huge number of well paying jobs for people without college degrees. relegating those people to part time retail and uber precariat is bad for everyone.

I don't disagree, but that does not change the fact that we will never bring manufacturing back in that way.

Look at Germany, rather than throw their manufacturing sector under the bus in favor of financial engineering and management consulting, they continuously upgrade their manufacturing culture. So maybe they don't make shoes there but they are building the robots that the rest of the world is using to make shoes and cars. You need skilled workers for that and you need to constantly be reinvesting in your people. The neoliberal approach throws your population under the bus as quickly as possible as they are not deemed worthy of investment.

>The neoliberal approach throws your population under the bus as quickly as possible as they are not deemed worthy of investment.

Absolutely. In fact, that's not just neoliberalism, it's capitalism generally. The fundamental interests of the producers and of the persons above them who legally appropriate that which is produced will never meet.

Cooperative ownership and governance of the means of production is the only way out of this problem. Not ESOP, not profit sharing -- only worker ownership.

What I don't understand is why these huge numbers of unemployed workers (which must depress wages to the minimum) aren't like catnip to labor-intensive industries. It's like having our own little China/Vietnam/Bangladesh within our own borders.

Is the minimum wage too high or something?

>Is the minimum wage too high or something?

I would ask in response: why does anyone still believe that the supply of something, rather than the demand of it, overdetermines the price of a thing?

This seems at best an incomplete worldview. At worst, it's the epitome of thoroughly discredited supply-side market theology.

There is unemployment because there is no demand for labor in these areas largely because the main employer in the area decided to pad profits by getting labor supplied from brutally poor people living in unregulated nations.

But if the employer could pay less for labor in the U.S. then perhaps they would have kept the jobs here. That's what I meant by asking if the minimum wage is "too high".

This isn't related to supply-side economics. Just the basic idea that price floors (like minimum wages) can exclude the price point at which supply and demand would be in equilibrium, specifically by suppressing demand by keeping the price artificially high.

>But if the employer could pay less for labor in the U.S. then perhaps they would have kept the jobs here.

The notion of a sustained equilibrium between supply and demand is a real-world fiction to begin with, but even if it was not, we can never forget that fulfilling employers' true demand for labor includes putting children to work in coal mines and chaining humans for sale. True demand for labor is unfulfillable, so I think we have to recognize that using pricing mechanisms alone to frame what are fundamentally commercial and political questions is a mistake for all concerned.

Companies that make the robots that make things outsourced their robot production to China a few years ago so it's only a matter of time before the Chinese steal that tech, too.

The problem, then, is education and retraining. Send all these people to community college. It's dirt cheap and that's what they're there for.

Community college as a 50 year old in Kansas gets you what? An $8/hr, 35hr/week call center job without benefits?

That is the kind of negative stereotyping that we need to stop, now. Community colleges train people in most trades at a basic level, and they care more about your success in the workforce than most big colleges. I personally know many people with successful, fulfilling careers who started at community college. Maybe not stuff that people on HN would find glorious, but far better than disgruntled stagnation.

Retraining to do what?

You can't think of any jobs that an education can provide?

For tens of millions of low skilled middle aged workers that will afford them a good standard of living?

No. Can you?

Farming is the same way. Fewer people than in previous decades but we are manufacturing more and growing more food now than ever.

So why do the fresh eggplants at the store come from Mexico and all(!!!) of the frozen fruit come from Mexico, Honduras, Chile, Peru, the Balkans(!?), and Canada?

Because it is more efficient to do so. Either those crops require more labor, different climate, or are lower yielding, etc. than what we grow locally. If it paid more to grow those crops, we would grow them.

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