Ross Perot's "giant Sucking Sound" Warning Proven Correct - Carrier

[Mike Kennedy]

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/watch-1-400-people-learn-030718813.html

 

[DTB]

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/watch-1-400-people-learn-030718813.html

Mr. Perot had my vote as will Mr. Trump.

How different things could have been.

I still would like to see a detailed breakdown on the costs associated with manufacturing in the US. Labor costs, regulation costs compared to shipping costs from outside US.

That honest detail might surprise many.

 

[DTB]

The biggest problem is that when these firms leave the employees scramble to other types of jobs and that makes it that much more difficult to bring those jobs back where the experienced workers are gone.

 

[Meandering]

The biggest problem is that when these firms leave the employees scramble to other types of jobs and that makes it that much more difficult to bring those jobs back where the experienced workers are gone.

Is that to say that,

where they are going,

experienced workers are there, waiting for them to show up and hire them?

 

[DTB]

Is that to say that,

where they are going,

experienced workers are there, waiting for them to show up and hire them?

Not at all. These companies use all the newly found free cash flow to set up these places with the latest high tech equipment where needed. Eliminates a lot of the skill required.

Then thye ship the items back and expect the newly unemployed workers to buy the item. There has to be an end to that somewhere sometime.

 

[Tom Woolford]

There is another thread going right now about why Americans Are So Angry. This is why. Apparently our government is not going to be happy until this country looks like Calcutta or Bombay.

 

[Meandering]

Not at all. These companies use all the newly found free cash flow to set up these places with the latest high tech equipment where needed. Eliminates a lot of the skill required.

Then thye ship the items back and expect the newly unemployed workers to buy the item. There has to be an end to that somewhere sometime.

As much as I like to pick on dark factories, and the automobile trade. Believe it that dark factories really only work well for the assembly phase, and some minor electronic circuitry manufacture. All other types of manufacture require people albeit far fewer people that it did in the past.

Even when you're rolling coil after coil of steel into tubes, sure the "machines" handle it but each machine has to be adjusted for the Rockwell of each steel coil, and changes in temperature can impact the ability of the steel to flex at the proper tension. Non vacuum formed plastics are still mostly bent and glued by hand, because differences in temperature/humidity, gas complexity of the plastic and a variety of other issues do not lend themselves to consistent machine only operations.

If I need a brakeman or a CNC operator, sure it's nice to hire one off of the streets, but I'll tell you about a dozen or more such people that were shipped over seas to train the people in other countries to do that work. Here, most any mechanically inclined, typically intelligent person with common sense can be taught to run a CNC in a few days. Welding is a good skill job. I worked in a steel factory that had "Tony Tech" 2 days of how to weld, how to clear a bird's nest from the machine, and the proprietary parts nomenclature and required angles, put people with these 2 days of training into the assembly line, and they welded just fine for years.

Even operation of the auto-welder still needed people to load the material, unload the finished material, and a couple of forklifts to move the material, and a couple of QC checkers making sure the welds and angles stayed consistent through a run, so that the vibrations of the machine did not change the settings.

The "lack of skilled labor" is a farce. A smoke and mirror not to hire.

.

 

[DTB]

Marion I agree with some of your post, however there are entire industries that have gone away and won't be able to rev up again. One was the precision optics industry. My family was in it and it was one of the first to face huge competition from outside the US. Nobody cared because frankly nobody even knows about the optics industry.

The industry shrank and shrank until there were only a few firms left that could make world class optics. The big boys went over to CNC type equipment because they didn't have the skilled workers to do it. With CNC they could still make parts, they just weren't any good. We had to "touch 'em up" for them until our Germans were too old to do it any more.

We could have gone the CNC route at a cost of 4,5M per "pod" We ran 15 "pods" at one point. It was tough on my Dad, being a proud, stubborn German but he was able to see the light and said "We are going to take our money and go a different direction, we are not going to make bad parts." and with that real estate become our primary focus.

These shrinking industries coupled with the propaganda war that has been waged for 40 years that factory jobs are not good jobs is what got us here.

 

[Meandering]

We went through some of that, not with optics but with medical implant devices. There was a move to go water jet and laser instead of the CNCs. We had a computerized lath that was just a phenomenal thing to watch though. It did things no manual lath operator could ever do.

But it still stands that "reving up" is reving up regardless if it's here or Guam, or Korea or Hong Kong. Your "best" workers are those that are familiar with YOUR machines and YOUR processes, and that is company specific, not taught in schools. Sure a handful of engineering types are necessary for the programing, the machine manufactures have operating training courses, none of which are more than 6 weeks, many of which are a week or less. 3D cad was a new thing when I was leaving that industry. But even so, more automation results in less "talent" needed that is "taught" in schools, producing "skilled" workers.

The foreign completion has always existed, but had previously been mitigated through trade barriers. Once those trade barriers are removed, the sad fact is "costs" must sink to the lowest available to level the competition playing field, which means a loss in standard of living in higher priced areas, and not necessarily a rise in the standard of living in lower cost areas. But to decry a lack of "skilled labor" is a false flag to the true issue of cost. Trade barriers are still maintained by some of our trading partners. Personally I believe the relaxation of our trade barriers was too drastic and needs to be redone, instead of blaming the potential labor force for not being "skilled" enough to have a job.

.

 

[ucbruin]

Mr. Perot had my vote as will Mr. Trump.

How different things could have been.

I still would like to see a detailed breakdown on the costs associated with manufacturing in the US. Labor costs, regulation costs compared to shipping costs from outside US.

That honest detail might surprise many.

I don't know who this should scare more, you or me.....

I voted for Perot too!!!!!

Really!!!