America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back

Re:America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufac... by rlpb on Thursday April 17, 2025 @02:33PM (#43720555)

Staff who’ve been around a while, understand how a company operates and can seed that understanding into new staff are more valuable to companies. For example: if every worker were replaced with an equally skilled worker tomorrow a company regardless would not be able to function. It therefore makes sense that a senior employee can demand a higher wage [than a new starter] even if their direct productivity is no different and so a gradient in wage for seniority is exactly what one would expect to see in a free market.

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Re:America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufac... by charlie0 on Thursday April 17, 2025 @07:49PM (#43723489)

If you replaced every worker with someone else of equal skill of course manufacturing company would continue to operate.

Making employees replaceable cogs is what industrialization was completely about. It's what happened during globalization. Think about all those seniors who lost their jobs when the factory went overseas. That was successful in large part because the distinction between a junior and a senior is not that great.

There would be some exceptions here for management and execs, but we are not talking about them here.

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Re:America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufac... by rlpb on Thursday April 17, 2025 @09:03PM (#43723903)

> If you replaced every worker with someone else of equal skill of course manufacturing company would continue to operate.

No it wouldn't, because a senior worker wouldn't be around to say things like "oh yes we use a jig under this circumstance that we keep over here <points>". Every business has ton of institutional knowledge like that.

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Re:America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufac... by silisili on Friday April 18, 2025 @02:18AM (#43725515)

It turns out, that isn't worth much. Because they upended the factories and sent them to Mexico and China overnight without a person to point and say where the jig was. Seemingly, they figured it out.

To be clear, I'm not actually disagreeing with your point, I do think it's important to have those people. But companies felt otherwise.

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Re:America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufac... by vel0city on Friday April 18, 2025 @02:59PM (#43730927)

At least in the instances I've been aware of, they usually weren't really "overnight". Usually a good bit of knowledge transfer or actually moving institutional people, sometimes having the other factory coming online in parallel so they can tweak processes, etc. Usually a years-long process. I think few truly overnight shut down one factory and opened the other with those other people having zero knowledge or training on specific processes without experiencing big issues.

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