NeedToUseYou
Posts: 2297
Joined: 12/24/2005
From: None of your business
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Argghhhh, all this talk about manufacturing.. I used to be in the same boat, in thinking that manufacturing has any future in the employment scheme. It doesn't as far as line workers go.
What do I mean?
Well, I've worked in several factories, low grade unskilled labor jobs. I worked in a bottle factory for example, you know the only reason they needed line workers at all? It was to search for bottle defects, essentially 80%+ of the employees were functioning as defect sensors, in 20 years I'm 100% sure they will have sofware that can handle identifying and rejecting such defects.
My Second job, was at a lighting factory. Guess what I did there, essentially the same thing, I assembled lights, with the aid of robots, my function was to check for defects in between processes primarily. As in I functioned as a visual defect detector. Again, a factory employing a 1000+ workers, essentially about 700+ were defect detectors.
My 3rd Factory job (a few months), was very crude in that I simply made sure the machine didn't get out of alignment. A job made completely useless with more sophisticated computing.
As far as every "factory" manufacturing job I've had they will 100% not exist in the very near future. I have to laugh anymore at the notion that employment is going to be based on manufacturing going forward. It's simply not going to be the case at all, trust me on this one. The jobs going forward are going to be in information, engineering and technical training (to fix the robots, by robots I don't mean full robots I mean like the arms that assemble things, the computerized screw machines, the visual defect detector, etc..).
So, people stop looking towards the past, manufacturing TV's will not provide more than a few jobs to your children, whereas in in the past they provided thousands for the exact same number of TVs.
I'm mean do people understand, Every product cycle requires less cost and higher quality than the previous cycle by the contracting party. This neccessates removal of humans slowly but surely with more reliable, dependable, computer controlled methods of manufacture.
Manufacturing as far as a major employment factor, is a slowly dying dinosaur.
It's time to stop thinking like it's last century. Watch documentaries on modern factories and this will become readily apparent.
Edited to add....
See what is happening is a company looks at the cost of upgrading their processes to manufacturer a product. They price the cost of buying new uber great machinery versus the cost savings and higher defect rate of exporting a process to the third world . Well, at present it still makes sense to export the older method of manufacture and pay a 1.00 a day and eat the defect rate, etc.... However, eventually like everything that equation will not even make sense to pay any real amount to manufacture anything of consequence.
Does that make sense. The chinese and other lower paid markets aren't stealing your jobs, they are holding off advanced manufacturing methods. If those factories stayed in the US, more than likely they would modernize instead of exporting the menial jobs, thus, it's not 10 jobs in china would equal 10 jobs in the US, it's more like 10 jobs in China would be 1 job in the US, or the company folding.
< Message edited by NeedToUseYou -- 10/31/2009 10:08:58 PM >
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