Factory Guy
I still remember the first time I walked into a working factory. It was an old-school process manufacturing facility in the Midwest. In the foreground, innumerable machines whirred and clacked away in precise, interlocking dances. A massive vat shaped like a 50 foot tall Campbell’s soup can loomed in the background. It was encased in heat-trapping refractory bricks that glowed red-hot. A crane arm dumped heavy sand continuously into the top at (literally) industrial volumes, and steaming, liquid glass gushed out of the business end at the bottom in a matching stream. I couldn’t see the heating element, but it was in there somewhere, and it was working.
It’s embarrassing to admit this, but at that moment I felt the way I was always told I was supposed to feel when I saw a beautiful mountain range or something. I laughed involuntarily, and then had a thought that I never could have had about a mountain: men made this. I was looking at concretized human ingenuity.
In the auto industry, a “car guy” is a slang term for an executive who doesn’t just view the business of a car company as making money, but loves the cars themselves. I’m a factory guy. I spent the first few years of my career in the late 1980s as one small part of a self-conscious movement to rescue American manufacturing. I’ve worked in glass plants, assembly plants, oil refineries, textile plants and others from Florida to Canada, and many points in between. I’ve had a union card, and walked a picket line. I loved being in the plant, and using the old-fashioned accounting term for head office costs: “burden”. I enjoyed making fun of the guys working in finance in New York.
Reform of manufacturing was focused on changing business practices. There was no one huge insight; it was painstaking effort conducted one factory, quality improvement session and production planning algorithm at a time. Resistance was intense, and eventually I came to see that the pressure created by capital allocation from the financial sector was required to force painful but necessary change. It turned out that those finance guys in New York were doing something important to prevent the decline of American manufacturing into mediocrity and irrelevance.
Constant work has paid off – the U.S. has a very competitive manufacturing sector. The problem is that, like agriculture before it, manufacturing can support fewer and fewer employees. As this sector continues to mature, it becomes more asset-intensive and less people-intensive. Further, the jobs that it provides tend increasingly to be either low-skill / low-wage or high-skill / high-wage. The world of “get out of high school, work in a factory and have a middle class life” is pretty much gone, because the economic world of 1955 is gone. Our international position no longer allows this, and in fact, other than for those like auto workers who are protected by legacy institutional arrangements, it’s been over for many years. I take no joy in the need for restructuring the auto industry. I wish that world still existed, but it does not.
This change (including, but not limited to, manufacturing) is what “globalization” really means for America, and it is not pretty. It is the root of growing income inequality and middle-class wage stagnation. There are practical things that we can do to address these problems, but sticking our head in the sand is not one of them.
Thanks for this. A good post.
— Klug · Nov 18, 05:32 PM · #
The world of “get out of high school, work in a factory and have a middle class life” is pretty much gone, because the economic world of 1955 is gone.
This is true. What I want conservatives to recognize is that this has a pretty large part to do with many of the social ills that they decry. I further want people who are opposed to the expansion of college education to acknowledge that it’s a pretty cruel thing, in the context of a country where the ability to live a middle class existence— a car, a home, a child in college— is now almost entirely a function of going to college.
Further, I think enthusiastic supporters of globalization and free markets would do well to confront the possibility that, perhaps, innovation and the move from people-intensive to asset-intensive simply will mean less jobs and more headaches for people looking for work. There’s a lot of utopianism, I find, when discussing the impact of increased robotics and automation and the attendant job loss. People tend to say things like “well, we’ll need people to service the robots” or “there will be an increase in X need as a consequence of this increased automation, so they jobs lost will replace themselves.” The idea that there is almost always no net loss in the number of jobs available seems to me to be a matter of faith, and while pleasant, I don’t think it is always destined to be true. The move from people-intensive to asset-intensive industry might really produce what people have feared since the Industrial Revolution, just less availabe jobs. And I think we need to confront that possibility, as our society simply doesn’t have the ability to survive protracted periods of significantly higher joblessness than our historical average.
— Freddie · Nov 18, 06:13 PM · #
Freddie:
Me too, which is why I said:
I wrote an article in National Review called “A More Equal Capitalism” about this very subject in February, in order to make this point to conservatives.
— Jim Manzi · Nov 18, 06:17 PM · #
“I further want people who are opposed to the expansion of college education to acknowledge that it’s a pretty cruel thing…”
Freddie, I’d like you to acknowledge that many people who don’t think college is the magic answer think that 1) high school needs to be beefed up so that a high school degree means more than the POS it currently is and 2) we’d be pretty happy if the attendant increase in college enrollment happened in the technical fields, we just don’t want more art history or general education majors who are just as unemployable as they were before, but now with minors in drinking and student loans.
— Klug · Nov 18, 06:45 PM · #
Jim, I know you write about education here and there as well – if you take requests, I’d like to get your opinion on a movement to re-emphasize technical and vocational post-secondary education as an alternative to college education. I’ve seen it from Charles Murray recently, and I’ve also seen it from many left-leaning people I know who want to import a European model of it. I’m a complete agnostic on it, though I have my doubts.
Klug – I don’t know if I agree about increasing technical enrollment. Are salaries increasing that much, signaling demand? If I understand the data correctly, starting salaries of social sciences degrees increased more quickly from 80-00 than technical/engineering degrees. And that’s with an engineering degree functioning as a signal that you can handle high-end consulting and financial work – to work actual engineering involves a lot more income volatility and insecurity with less than modest increases in salary from a generation ago. (I hear this all the time from friends in my cohort.)
Underemployed art majors are more fun, and less bitter, than underemployed engineers, let me tell you.
— rortybomb · Nov 18, 08:35 PM · #
It seems to me that once the robots and Chinese are making everything we need, people can go back to doing what God designed us to do. Exploring Mars.
— Zak · Nov 18, 08:37 PM · #
It’s also worth pointing out that the combination of low-skill/high-wages is not a natural or stable one. The USA in 1955 had that combination because every other industrial base in the world had been crippled ten years before (what we call the Second World War) and the USA was financing, and profiting from, the rebuilding. If the rest of the world is so obliging as to wreck their industrial bases again, we can get the economic world of 1955 back; but not otherwise.
— Michael Brazier · Nov 18, 08:43 PM · #
I’m fine with replacing widespread college with other kinds of vocational training or similar paths to employment. I’m just not sure that this doesn’t merely move around the problems that the people who feel we need to rein in college attendance are articulating. But you’d have to ask them.
— Freddie · Nov 18, 09:30 PM · #
@rorty: Dunno — you could be right. But I think a lot of people would rather see more S&T degrees than less. (And yes, I’m aware of the attempted debunking of the China/India stats.)
— Klug · Nov 18, 09:39 PM · #
Michael Brazier:
I couldn’t agree more. Here’s quote from the article that I Pointed Freddie to:
— Jim Manzi · Nov 18, 10:07 PM · #
Jim- Great comments.
I’d like to associate myself with Michael Brazier’s statement above, regarding the historically unique set of circumstances that allowed us to create the postwar economy. There are otherwise serious people who think we might still have the Fordist economic order, were it not for that mean, union-busting Ronald Reagan.
— Matt Frost · Nov 18, 10:18 PM · #
So whither the American dream, guys? What’s next? Look you could be right that the vision of widespread American abundance is over. But what’s the next step? Where to? Again, if we want less people to go to college, and also think you can’t/shouldn’t get paid a decent wage without going to college, what precisely should motivate them not to, I don’t know, rob banks or sell crack? You aren’t leaving people with a lot of alternatives here.
— Freddie · Nov 18, 11:00 PM · #
Which American dream though, Freddie? If you read the 20th century as a conflict between two American dreams – a dream of success through higher education and professionalized work, versus a dream of success through non-professional hard labor granting independence and respectability – think Obama’s degrees versus Palin’s oil union, to bring all that up again – it’s pretty clear on the data that the former has wiped the floor with the latter. And I see no reason, global recession included, why elite professionals won’t have a great 21st century.
Iris Young: “Today equal opportunity has come to mean only that no one is barred from entering competition for a relatively few privileged positions.”
— rortybomb · Nov 18, 11:42 PM · #
Well, Freddie, when you frame it that way, I think I’ll just put on my black hat, twirl my mustache and cackle. This (“and also think you can’t/shouldn’t get paid a decent wage without going to college”) is just pure bad faith. What the hell kind of response do you expect?
Conservatives don’t think that; we think that paying labor unsustainably high hourly wages and benefits with very strict work rules have contributed to Detroit’s woes. What do I think? There are plenty of places where high-school grads can earn pretty decent money. Unsurprisingly, a lot of these jobs are union. I don’t really see any conservatives (especially around here) dogging the United Mine Workers or the IBEW. Stunningly, they seem to target the UAW and the NEA, where there are obvious signs of failure and culpability on their parts.
What more to do? More and better secondary and vocational education. Much stricter controls on unskilled immigration. Fewer licensing requirements for many occupational fields.
— Klug · Nov 18, 11:45 PM · #
Freddie:
I think the American Dream is alive and well. Change is always painful, but we need to continually adapt to changing circumstances. As per the article I linked to in my prior comment to you, we are going through an economic and social transformation right now that is as wrenching as the industrialization that occured a century ago.
Obviously this comment is incredibly general, but it would take a lot more space to lay out what an agenda for dealing with would look like. To take your education example / question, I think the whole model of “take in raw material at age 5, add value each year, and produce finished goods at the back end” is clearly an industrial view of the process. I think that more choice, flexibility, discontinutiy and personalization of what we mean by school and higher education will be essential. “Going to college” vs. “high school graduate” should become a much less relevant thing. In short, if “just going to high school” doesn’t lead to a good living in general any more, there is a different solution than saying “well, therefore, either more people go to college, or else, fewer people will make a good living”.
— Jim Manzi · Nov 18, 11:46 PM · #
Freddie: Here is an example of the sort of “pro-college” thinking I am against in an ad for a middle school teacher at a charter school in my area: “Results: With five graduating classes thus far, 99% of our schools’ graduates have gone on to college. Approximately 50% of students are the first in their family to go to college.”
Obviously, you and I can agree that this is a terrible, awful, no-good, yuk-and-poo bit of reasoning. Don’t think it’s much of a point, but here I stand.
— Klug · Nov 19, 01:16 AM · #
It seems to me that once the robots and Chinese are making everything we need, people can go back to doing what God designed us to do. Exploring Mars.
And improving homosapiens sapiens. ;)
BIOTECH FTW!
— matoko_chan · Nov 19, 01:23 AM · #
Klug – sorry to jump back in, but why is that terrible? I’d like to see college completion rates (or some better metric), but that’s a difficult statistic to gather for the school.
Re: 50%, for many disadvantaged areas and families where the parents don’t have college degrees, navigating the college admissions process is a major and scary task – it was for my family, and my high school – and having a staff competent enough to convey that information is essential.
— rortybomb · Nov 19, 01:39 AM · #
I’m not joking.
Sure, we need better trade and vocational schools for the 40percent, and those schools need to have, cachet, elan, w/e….something that raises SES for the students. Can there be an elite trade school?
But…what are the manufacturing opportunities on the event horizon?
Nanomanufacture, and biotech, especially anti-senescence, drugs. People to maintain the robot work force. Tech schools and teachers for tech schools.
Communications.
Transportation.
Do policemen and firemen need college? How about plumbers and electricians?
— matoko_chan · Nov 19, 01:41 AM · #
umm…and here is a question I have thought about some…do elementary school teachers need 4 years of college?
— matoko_chan · Nov 19, 01:45 AM · #
@Rorty: First, I agree about a better metric. Freshman retention rates, I believe, is the technical measurement of success. Considering they’re five years in, college completion rates are also doable. [For the size of the school, looks to me to be above 100 phone calls. For the good PR, might have been worth it.]
Getting your students into college (which colleges?) isn’t a sign of success. If I may make a very mean analogy, it’s like the brokers and homebuyers 3 years ago: “Well, the bank approved the loan and all our friends are doing it, so clearly we’re doing something right!”
— Klug · Nov 19, 01:48 AM · #
@matoko_chan: I haven’t done an iota of research on this, but intuitively, it would seem that you would want your pre-school and K-5 teachers to be the most educated, the most well-paid to attract the best talent, because these are the years in which the students are still malleable. A view that the educators of the young are nannies seems detrimental to the goal of a proper education for the country’s children.
— bcg · Nov 19, 02:01 AM · #
Look believe it or not I don’t delight in being a contrarian liberal scold stereotype. I’m just trying to understand what we should counsel someone to do if we believe that they lack the skills necessary to complete college. If the answer is simply that they can expect a somewhat reduced chance of making X amount of dollars, I’m fine with that— I don’t think society has any responsibility to make someone middle class. I only think society has a responsibility to ensure that a) no one is denied the ability to pursue abundance by accidents of birth and b) a certain bare-minimum threshold of minimum standards for living are met— I’m talking food to eat, the opportunity to have a place to live that’s affordable, some basic health care options, and, hopefully, the opportunity for employment (in order to make these other aspects of the safety net expendable). I don’t think society has a duty to make everyone middle class, nor do I think we should maintain the perhaps unsustainable expectations of what exactly middle class identity means.
I do think, though, that if we’re going to scale back in this way, we need to change as a culture, particularly in our vision of what constitutes an elementary level of material success. And I think we should try to remain compassionate (or if you prefer, respectful) of people who are going to be in for a very rough transition indeed. Including me!
http://lhote.blogspot.com/2008/11/economic-conservatism-and-american.html
— Freddie · Nov 19, 02:10 AM · #
Retention Rates would be great, but you can imagine your HS secretary calling you at 20 and politely dropping “So, drop out of college?” False negatives or no comments would be such an issue that the data collected would be useless, imho. But that’s secondary.
Juking the stats is easy, however students into college is harder. I see your points, especially on the quality of college – however, and I would love to see data one way or the other, my suspicion is that high schools are slowly splitting into those that send 90+% to college and those that send < 50%. If you want your kid to go to college, sending him to a HS that is serious, from the faculty, other parents and students, about securing the resources and signals (Letters, AP, application tutoring, etc.) to get their kids placed, and not to one that is content with just HS level of education, is the first step.
— rortybomb · Nov 19, 02:15 AM · #
Factory
— Daniel Dare · Nov 19, 02:42 AM · #
Having covered community college issues for several years as a writer/editor for my alma mater’s student newspaper, I would agree that vocational/technical education has been both underfunded and ignored, in favor of an increasing emphasis on four-year college transfer preparation. In the time I was a student there, welding, refrigeration and appliance repair programs were shut down for good.
At the same time, Charles Murray’s thesis must be read with a huge grain of salt, as much of it is based on the long-discredited postulate that standardized fill-in-the-bubble “intelligence” tests are perfectly predictive of a student’s potential and success.
I scored 800 on the verbal section of my SATs. Does this make me a Rhodes scholar destined to graduate summa cum laude from Yale? Hardly. I’ve long been of the opinion that standardized tests measure nothing more than a student’s ability to take a standardized test.
Murray is right that college should not be treated as the only option, but he’s wrong when he says that a fill-in-the-bubble test should permanently determine what “tracks” a given student has access to.
— Travis Mason-Bushman · Nov 19, 02:49 AM · #
@rorty: now a tertiary point, but presumably, the question would be “what are you up to, these days?”
Do you recognize, though, the factory mentality of the school? We pushed them out the door! No hint of ‘above median’ test scores or other measurements of quality (although that may well be the case.) That being said, of course, you ultimately want your kids going somewhere where 1) going to college is the norm and 2) those colleges are presumably more selective than average.
— Klug · Nov 19, 04:03 AM · #
@Klug: “Much stricter controls on unskilled immigration.”
The problem is, Klug, are Americans willing to pay the increased costs on everything from produce to building leases which will result from that decision?
Yes, the economy’s kind of tanking right now. But I still don’t see people lining up around the block to pick tomatoes for $8 an hour in the Central Valley.
— Travis Mason-Bushman · Nov 19, 06:09 AM · #
@Travis: Dunno. I am.
— Klug · Nov 19, 06:56 AM · #
You mean you’re willing to pay the increased costs, not that you’re lining up around the block to pick tomatoes for minimum wage, right?
Are you telling me that Americans, as a whole, are gonna look at two identical oranges in the SuperWalSafeCo and willingly pay substantially more for the one that has a label which says “Grown in the USA?” I don’t think there’s any evidence that they will.
— Travis Mason-Bushman · Nov 19, 10:35 AM · #
There is one obvious solution, though I think there should be a rebuttable presumption against it.
If laboring to produce private goods is no longer a viable life-option for the majority of American workers — whether because of immigration or Asian manufacturing or whatever — and if the services and professional sectors can not sustain them, then why not have these bypassed laborers labor to produce public goods?
This is a simplistic notion, sure, but highly variable and deep. Who’s to say that tuning it properly isn’t the answer we need?
— JA · Nov 19, 02:38 PM · #
Jim, the point to be made here is that the auto industry is already well into the process of restructuring. The UAW gave major, major concessions, GM has already shrunk considerably and also invested in new technologies. A lot of productivity metrics have gone way, way up since the 90s and overall Detroit Three efficiency is now quite close to the Japanese. The question is the best way to continue the restructuring in the short term, especially in a time when we have a macro recession. Do we let GM go down under the pressure of the credit crisis? A lot of people think bankruptcy court is not a good way to restructure, especially now.
This post was very well written, but the level of generality struck me as sort of stuck in the 90s and not that responsive to the current state of American manufacturing. I mean, as global capital flows readjust and we presumably won’t want to run the world’s biggest trade deficit any more, don’t you think we’ll need an export sector?
— MQ · Nov 19, 03:41 PM · #
@Travis: No, I’m not interested in becoming a tomato picker, YET. But if it paid well enough or if I couldn’t find working doing what I loved, yes, I’d be more than happy to be a manual laborer.
Americans have shown enough label sensitivity when prodded; would you from drink a bottle of milk that said “Made in China”? Typically, though, they don’t go to the SuperSafeWalCo, they go to the farmer’s market.
I’m willing to concede that it’s a tough sell. However, if coupled with a sense that you’re putting your neighbors to work, yeah, it might work. It’s why I’m willing to buy 28 dollar toy blocks for my daughter from Michigan rather than 12 dollar blocks from Fisher-Price. Safety, quality and a sense of belonging. I’d like to think that a President Obama or even a President McCain (unlikely) would be able to sell such a message.
— Klug · Nov 19, 03:46 PM · #
Jim, your post is very much in keeping with the ideas in a (to my eyes) very insightful recent two-part post by James Livingston.*
http://72.36.139.202/politicsandletters//showDiary.do?diaryId=159
(Condensed summary—cast in my words—on my site: “All Cashed Up with Nowhere to Go.”) He argues that the runup to the Depression had the same characteristics as the runup to the current…whatever this is.
Here’s the basic idea:
The productivity/efficiency that arose from industrialization and corporate capitalism—and now, information technology—results in the following related issues (all my words, which I think Livingston would credit):
1. Because automation is so effective, there is not enough well-paid work to produce enough wages to fuel the consumer consumption that is necessary for economic growth. Production easily outstrips demand.
2. Additional capital inputs into production (plants, equipment, labor, and training) do not produce enough returns, because 1) the leverage is all in technology and systems, not capital inputs, and 2) there’s not enough demand to reward the investment. (Growth in recent decades has not been hindered by any kind of cash shortage, that’s for sure.) So investors turn to investment vehicles that are tied only loosely to production or productivity, if at all.
3. These two facts, combined, shift an ever-greater share of GDP from wages to profits, further exacerbating both 1 and 2.
In this situation, growth can only be fueled by juicing consumer spending via 1) consumer credit or 2) government spending.
Assume for a moment that this accurately describes our country/world. And remove all moral issues about who deserves what share of what for what reasons.
How do we get the most long-term prosperity out of this situation?
My answer is to increase taxes (because marginal money isn’t being invested productively) and spend the money on things that are productivity-enhancing, that are proven to create long-term prosperity. First thoughts: education and infrastructure.
Also, expand the Earned Income Tax Credit so millions more people have more incentive to work, have money to spend and fuel economic growth, and have a stable platform or springboard from which they can move upward via enterprise and entrepreneurship. Yeah, some people will game the system and live off the dole. But that’s obviously true if the money moves up the chain, as well.
I’m thinking this may be an inherent systemic necessity given the situation described above—that at 28-32% of GDP, our current government size is hovering at the bottom edge of the region where a modern, developed, technological society can thrive, and maintain a reasonably steady state.
* It’s based on his 1997 Pramatism and the Political Economy of Cutlural Revolution, 1850-1940 (especially Part 1 of that book, especially Chapter 4), which itself draws on a large body of previous research and theory. The book’s as heavily imbued with acadamese as the title—requires some serious hip boots—but the fundamental reasoning seems profound to me.
— Steve Roth · Nov 19, 11:37 PM · #