I feel like to get a lot of young people into it, it doesn’t just need pay, but also some of the comforts of other jobs. As in: if I can work from home vs going into a workshop from 9-5 5 days a week, even if I’d be paid more I’d prefer to work from home. Other jobs can offer perks like that, but for a lot of manufacturing jobs that’s clearly not an option- so many reduced working hours/days would work. But I think when there’s already a shortage on employees, companies don’t want to also cut down on the hours they’re working.
Comment on I Tried To Make Something In America (The Smarter Scrubber Experiment) - Smarter Every Day 308
SippyCup@feddit.nl 6 days ago
Hey it’s me a tool and die maker.
I can say at least that my company and the larger manufacturers in my town are spending enormous sums of cash getting students in to the trades. It’s not just tool and die that’s suffering, most of the “skilled” trades are bordering on geriatric.
A lot of the kids entering the trades are farm kids, which is another problem entirely. The average age of farmers in the US is close to retirement too.
aidan@lemmy.world 5 days ago
SippyCup@feddit.nl 5 days ago
That’s kind of a pipe dream.
The reality of manufacturing is that unless people are physically in the building, the business isn’t making money. Tool and die is largely a support role. We’re not just making the tooling, we’re making sure the press is still running all day.
That means that if the machine is running, we have to be here. The machine has to run frequently to make sense. They’re simply aren’t enough people for a 4 shift rotation, which is what we’d need to have reduced hours. We struggle to fill 2. Right now we’re running 3 maintenance shifts and 2 production, and that’s more than most manufacturers near me can handle. The labor just isn’t there. We’ve tried 4x10 shifts and that’s difficult to sell to 2nd and 3rd shifters. About half of first shift couldn’t make it work. But it didn’t really matter, ultimately.
The reality is that most of the building is working 5 ten hour shifts and a 6 hour Saturday for the foreseeable future. Could we attract young people with fewer hours? Maybe. It’s manufacturing and it’s a hard sell regardless. I love my job, I work with a lot of people who love their jobs, and that includes guys on the floor who do little more than plug parts in to machines. It can be immensely satisfying work, but it’s hard, dirty, and loud. Ask 50 teenagers if they’d rather stand next to a punch press every day or throw burgers out of windows through college, 49 are gonna throw burgers.
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Sounds like people need to take an interest and the only way to do that is make them happy or make them money. Paying more will put bodies at stations and make them want to be on-site for as long as they get paid. The rest is people management.
SippyCup@feddit.nl 5 days ago
And, don’t forget the magic word: unionize.
Zenith@lemm.ee 5 days ago
You could offer more money, better benefits, better/shorter hours, vacation time etc. I’ve heard young people are really motivated by all of those things
This feels like “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”
Zenith@lemm.ee 5 days ago
That makes me so happy to hear! I kept thinking that during this video, that he’s putting the cart before the horse. Made in America is important sure but the cost is significantly more which is problematic when you’re an working class person who literally doesn’t have the cash to buy American made, we need to be sending our young people back to trades not say everyone needs college! I’m a 2004 Graduate and so many people in my class went into so much debt and for what? A barely above minimum wage desk job? I was a pariah for not going to college but going to a tech school.
If we don’t have young people in these trades, making fair wages, we have no middle class and if we have no middle class he’s going to run out of $75 scrub brush buyers sooner rather than later.
The video got really close to being a dog whistle to me a few times he did mention he wanted to talk about unions, then didn’t, I just felt like there was so much focus on “manufacturing is actually good for the US” - and it is, I’m a leftie but I agree we do want some manufacturing jobs, especially the high skilled ones, but almost no focus on how we keep these industries alive, and grow them, and how important it is that young people can access this training and why it’s important to bring education into the conversations about “made in America” - high skill manufacturing isn’t going to sprout up over night, it’s why he struggled so hard to source parts, and the video very much framed this industry as something that is an organic industry that will just be there if we buy it… which feels dishonest if we look at the bigger picture and all the lack of both knowledge and experience that will really make this industry struggle