The US South’s manufacturing renaissance comes with a heavy price

Having an inventory also means that a hitch in production will incur contractual penalties under a JIT supply contract. The customer doesn't care when the shipping container was loaded with parts at the supplier's facility, just when it arrives at their loading dock.

FWIW, this was a well established practice in Soviet Union - top factory performers got prizes, medals and other rewards for beating expectations. [1][2][3]

Of course, this also tends to tempt the management to raise the required quotas over time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_emulation [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_worker_of_Communist_Labo... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement

Be very thankful software developers are in such high demand because there will be a time when that little competition will not be viewed as some sort of team morale boosting exercise but just another bit of frivolous spending to be eliminated. It may not happen in mine or your working career, but it will happen eventually.

The reason that you can have such activities at work is because you are providing a service, software engineering, that has a high demand but is in short supply. Also, this usually isn't done with the goal of increasing productivity... it is done to maintain morale and make the company fun to work at so you dont leave. Not many experienced workers particularly enjoy these races, like employee of the month because it eventually becomes a way to abuse workers.

In a former life, I was a claims rep for an auto insurance company. We had a competition to do the most claims per day at rhe lowest cost. It was terrible. We were mobile, so one component was driving through Los Angeles traffic to someone's car or body shop. It encouraged people to drive like maniacs, skip all their breaks, and to stiff the customer on auto claims, which was shortsighted because they lost customers from us stiffing them and evetually were sued because this competition essentially limited our breaks. These things almost always end in a race to the bottom once labor supply increases or demand for labor decreases.

History is replete with horrific examples of competitions and quotas amongst low skilled. workers/slaves. In the oxymoronic(al) Congo Free State, colonial Belgium enacted a labor policy demanding a quota of rubber. If not met, workers, their wives, and their children would have their hands amputated. Article if you are interested :http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/35/181.html

> That is why most sweatshops suck they aren't run by decent and this wouldn't work.

It has little to do with the moral character of people running the sweatshops, although that does not absolve them from being pieces of shit. It has more to do with the economic system, its incentives, and consumers turning a blind eye to the origin of their products. The Stanford Prison experiment showed how normal people could turn into monsters given the right conditions.

The thing is, the incentives to the executives making these decisions is skewed. If they avoid investing in safety equipment, they make their bonuses, which can add up as long as nothing too bad happens. Yet if there is a serious injury costing the company millions, the worst thing that can happen is they lose their jobs. For senior executives, the bonuses can be larger than their base salaries, so the upside is larger than the downside.

>That said, I think the 'faking disability to avoid factory work' type of person is mostly conjured up in support of particular political views. I'm just saying I'd not even be mad if it were the case.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but let me explain why I included that: In a lot of small towns that used to have coal mines or were factory towns for one company there simply are no jobs, so it's not that they're faking disability to get out of factory work. They're faking disability because they need money and they don't want to move away from everything and everyone they've ever known.

I hated it so very much. We had to do credit checks and stuff, so they wouldn't let us have anything to do when it was slow. Towards the end of my time there they changed something and we started getting more call volume, that sucked. It became just hours and hours of talking about the same thing again and again.

> Aside from the fact that I've never met anyone who makes 'good money' doing this type of work, I personally don't blame anyone who does this long enough to eventually fake a disability or something. In fact, I'll happily keep paying high taxes if it supports that kind of 'disability'. No human should be forced to do that kind of stuff in this day and age, least of all in a developed nation.

So apparently the call center in the bigger city a few hundred miles away had a union. Doubt it made the work better but they were getting several dollars an hour more than us. We got 10+bonus, they were getting 15 or something.

My views changed as I got to know them better. Most of them didn't really choose entrepreneurship or freelancing, but saw it as the only way out of the low-wage, unschooled college side-jobs that they were still doing. Most of them would've probably benefitted from a few years of work experience in an existing organization, and most of them, when asked, would take such a job over freelancing or their 'startup'.

What I find most disturbing is the rather popular narrative (around here) of how self-employment and entrepreneurship are things to aspire to and preferable over employment. A lot of these friends buy or bought into this narrative without any idea of what a 'real job' is actually like. Quite a few of them are doing this whole bootstrapping thing by choice, or claim they do, but I can't help but wonder how much 'choice' this really is when they're actively pushed in this direction and where there are really no good alternatives.

I get the same vibes from this situation that I get from the perennially single people I know who claim it's by choice; they prefer being alone. It might be true, but it feels like a lie (or at least a way to feel a bit better about things).

The thing is: this is all wonderful for me, in theory. I have a huge supply of very smart, motivated people who are willing to work for a pittance or even just 'intern' for me, all just for the promise that my shitty startup-idea will take off. I don't take advantage of this, but it's tempting and I'm sure many others do.

Yes, everyone wants those jobs, or, jobs, to stay. But almost no one working today has a job that looks anything like a job of 100 years ago, and I doubt anyone would want those jobs.

Almost every job worked today is going to disappear, or change beyond recognition that it's still the same job.

Those lost manufacturing jobs are just among the first of the current set of jobs to disappear. Yes, it's painful and tragic; not because those specific jobs were lost, but because we have mis-managed the idleness of the people whose jobs vanished.

The fix is not to cling to jobs that the free market says should not exist, and that consumers also say should not exist by buying the cheapest available products, often products not previously available. Some of those consumers are the very ones that have lost their old jobs.

The only way for those manufacturing jobs to stay or come back is to never buy anything that didn't exist 50 years ago, and to stay out of Walmart and Amazon and everywhere else that sells anything at all from outside America.

Who starts?

We've lost the recognition that the reason we band together into communities and governments is to support each other. We've come to act as if "I've got my support, sorry you lost yours" is the proper way to treat each other.

We need to stop being so punitive and miserly, automatically blaming people for their condition. How anyone got anywhere doesn't much matter. How we move each other to the next better thing is what we should be focusing on.

I despair that we can get anywhere near that as long as quarterly, my bonus, my election thinking allows the few to stay a few steps ahead of everyone else. We treat each other as social petri dishes, and we're quite willing to throw the experiment materials out if it doesn't fit our data, our view of how we think the world is and how it ought to be.

- The Marshall Plan (1950's?) was mostly with Europe where there were/are reasonably strong protections against exploitation, so there wasn't the same "race to the bottom" dynamic as there is with, say, China/Mexico/SE Asia today.

- Europe's population is a lot smaller than China and their industrial base had just been destroyed by WW2. An economy that's overall protectionist and otherwise strong can absorb the costs of a little free trade, it's doing a lot of free trade that dials up the pain society-disrupting levels.

- Costs of transport have gone way down since the 1950's (more available capital, technology, standardized shipping containers, cheaper/better communications, etc.)

In 2010, AL parts plants had 50% higher rate of illness and injury than the national rate. That gap has narrowed since.

The incidence of traumatic injuries (a different category) in AL is still 9% higher than Michigan’s.

Also:

> In 2015 the chances of losing a finger or limb in an Alabama parts factory was double the amputation risk nationally for the industry, 65 percent higher than in Michigan and 33 percent above the rate in Ohio.

(Emphasis mine).

This article could do a much better job laying out the numbers, that’s for damn sure.

Why is that in Bloomberg's interest? Great question. That's what I'm wondering.

A snake is where a red hot slab of steal comes off the rollers and flails around the factory floor.

To provide a counter to the idea that "bringing back manufacturing" will be a panacea to that which ails the middle class. I think the article is transparent in its agenda.

The cognoscenti recognize that lobbying is but one of multiple levers they could pull.

I've wondered when we might see someone pitch to YC a technical solution to what unions do, without the cruft that can come from human influence (losing sight of purpose, developing corruption, etc). Is there even a way to do it?

Unions create fat cats at the top, but it's still better overall for the rank and file to have them than not have them.

Trump's promises have never included the caveat of poorer conditions or lower wages, as far as I'm aware, and I see little evidence of blue collar workers intending to make any sort of tradeoffs in that regard. What he has promised, however, are "more jobs and better wages."