8mo ago

U.S. Secretary of Commerce says the ‘new model’ is factory jobs for life—for you, your kids, and your grandkids

fortune.com U.S. Secretary of Commerce says the ‘new model’ is factory jobs for life—for you, your kids, and your grandkids

“This is the new model, where you work in these plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here,” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick says.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29037456

I feel like this is relevant to the sub. If not, feel free to remove.

61 comments

And "rest of your life" means you dying from work related health issues at fifty, of course.
- If you make it there; you won't have a union and labor protections will be struck down in kangaroo courts, OSHA safety requirements being insufficient or insufficiently enforced were already a main driver of people not wanting to work these kobs--and that was before the current and future dismantling of OSHA related rules.
  Also, how are you going to get 90k when federal minimum wage is what is was in 2009? Many of the southern states have even passed "counter-wage" laws forbidding the state from passing it's own improved min wage law--truly hateful of the average person.
  
  Is OSHA really enforced? My only dealing with them was 20-years ago somewhere in Chicagoland. We were new there and I went to the office to ask what job safety requirements looked like for us cable guys. They stared at me like I was an alien. (And BTW, encounters like that are why conservatives are all, "hell yeah! slash them jobs! fuck the gubermint!" The older you get, the most BS stories ya got. I have some positive ones from my local redneck city!)
  The main safety driver, from my experience and current POV, is worker's comp insurance. Employers do not fuck around with rising insurance rates, or getting sued. A worker's comp investigation can be expensive, then come the higher rates. Employers want to show every way they've trained you, given you safety gear and trained you some more.
  If you blatantly ignore the training and procedures, and get hurt, no comp for you. Perfect example is Lowe's "safety knife". Nope, can't possibly hurt yourself with it, but you can barely do your job. They turn a blind eye to those of use who bring our own box cutters, but insurance ain't paying if I split my finger open. (Well, they might, but if it came to litigation, they wouldn't have to. And shouldn't have to.)
  tl:dr; Worked in the payroll industry. Worker's comp insurance is a way bigger deal than most know.

And the economy is planned for 5 years at a time to keep those jobs this stable, yes?
Each time this guy opens his trap, he proves that when you hire clowns, you get a circus.
- He is the proof, that time travel is real. They got a feudal lord from the middle ages to cosplay as that guy.

You keep hearing some members of this administration talk about automation and robots for factory jobs, and also AI for office jobs. If the press were at all smart they would continually ask these morons to keep explaining this contradiction. But I would love hear what they think will happen if everyone in the country loses their job. It's not going to be good for the %.01 either.
Oh yeah, only right wing brown-nosers have White House press credentials anymore.
- That would require the media to not be owned by the same kind of people that own the factories.
  
  Or afraid of losing access. They keep throwing soft balls because they’re worried about being banned from press conferences and interviews.

To be fair, this is what this government promised. The issue is that the voters just took it in
- That poll showing 80% of voters want manufacturing jobs to come back to America but 20% of voters would willingly choose to work a factory job says everything.
  
  Yeah, it says why are we schlepping parts all over the world to be assembled by poors in SEA, when we got our own poors stuck in the middle of the country with nothing to do but meth and fentanyl.
  /s
  On a more serious note, moving manufacturing back to the states will take some stupid number of years even if they start now, just to build the factories and the associated infrastructure. If only voters hadn't let the capitalist class gut domestic manufacturing in the first place...
  
  Yes, the 2024 election was truly a vote for misinformation over any policy.
  Fox and the right have spent decades pushing various "this is what America needs" narratives but they're a contradictory mess that neither matches reality nor is coherent. This about the manufacturing jobs is one. See also: states' rights (except when the right controls the federal government and blue states don't follow), cutting spending (except when we want to give tax cuts to billionaires), back-the-blue and law-and-order (except when we are staging an insurrection and deporting citizens), etc.
  The reason this happens is because those narratives were always propaganda purely to win elections and create hate for the other side, and that is because they were always about gaining power for its own sake, not about a worldview or concrete goals.
  2024 showed that delusion wins over facts. So now the right is living in a pure fantasy, made of construction paper and rotting cardboard facade that they demand we acknowledge as a sparkling utopia, and we're all stuck in it.
  
  People would work factory jobs, if they were good paying jobs.
  If you could own a home, afford groceries, raise a family, save for retirement, and take a modest family vacation, there would be lines out door applying for these jobs.
  But these aren't the factory jobs of the 1950s, those kind of wages aren't coming back.
  
  I want manufacturing jobs to come back. We are transitioning to new technologies where there are not yet entrenched manufacturing dominance: it would be much easier to create jobs related to this, supplies chains related to this, market domination is still possible. We were late to the game after throwing away the early lead but we had our chance. We had investments. We had the economy finally turning. Yep, threw that away too.
  We were finally turning toward indefinite energy independence. Still trying to throw that away.
  All to fight the industrial battles of half a century ago, try to compete where there are no longer jobs, fight to wrest control of supply chains from entrenched leaders, compete on race to the bottom salaries

I see these MAGA morons getting excited about the return of high-paying manufacturing jobs, because they have absolutely no Critical Thinking Skills, and they haven't asked themselves the most basic question - if corporations have the opportunity to rebuild the manufacturing base in America, why would they recreate the model that sent manufacturing overseas in the first place? Wouldn't they use this unique opportunity to create an entirely new model? And would that model benefit the workers, or the corporation?
The simple facts are, there will be two models in the new American manufacturing environment. The first will be factories that will rely heavily on automation/ robotics, and need very few humans. The second will be modeled after Asian sweatshops, with low pay, no benefits, forced overtime with no OT pay, child/teen labor, no health/safety/environmental regulations, etc.
The MAGA Nazis know this, but they are still selling the fantasy of high-paying factory jobs that even a stupid MAGA can do. I get that, they are disengenuous to the core, but why aren't Dems or the media screaming about this, and asking MAGA Nazis in every interview?
- Nothing you tell a MAGA, that doesn't sound like you worship their dear leader, will sink into their thick skulls.
  They could literally be chained to a sewing machine working the 95th hour that week, paid $1 per hour and they would still claim they were winning (or at least owning the libs).

Think I'll pass, bud. I've read The Jungle, I know how this ends.
- This take has got me hate before, but The Jungle is where I got my work ethic. I was 19, college American History. I was fucking appalled, but my take-away was, "Holy SHIT! He persevered though all that and kept going and going! BEASTLY!" (OK, it was the 90s: "GNARLY!")
  I know that wasn't the intended lesson, but I was a changed man after reading that. No job, no matter how shitty, was tough enough to compare. Employment experience has always been, since then, working my ass off and quickly moving up to what I want to do.
  Even my shit job at Lowe's, been there 3-months, moved up to what I wanted, full-time position opening the garden center. I have the best job out of all those fuckers, that fast. No ass kissing or nepotism, no buddies on site, just grit.
  I've done this in many jobs. "Fuck I'm taking customer service calls forever, I want to train classes instead." Moved into that in 3-6 months, two different jobs. Slow as hell as an internet cable guy, but did perfect work. Moved into a QA/supervisory position in 4-months.
  Anyway, yes, The Jungle is what these fuckers want us back to doing. And for anyone that hasn't read it, please do so now.

Children make good factory slaves. Now I understand why they got rid of the department of education.
- The traditional education system was actually designed specifically to prepare children for factory work. Enforce strict schedules, you arrive when we tell you, you eat when we tell you, you pee when we tell you, you leave when we tell you. The bell is king, and determines your whole day. Deviation from the bell’s schedule is to be punished and ridiculed.
  It sounds like hyperbole, but modern education is literally based on the schools that factory owners set up for their workers’ kids, to groom the kids to work in the factory when they were old enough.
  
  The factory owners just copied that from the Prussian model that was meant to train children to be good soldiers. Not that that was any better...

From age six until you drop dead. No schools required, whatever you need to do this job you will learn on the job.

They're still so certain we're having grandkids... Who's gonna tell them?
- It might not be you, but it will be children having children with abortion bans and lack of sex education.

The worst job I ever had had was right after I got out of the military and went home. I needed a job and a buddy of mine worked in a place that made custom logo hats and jackets for various businesses. His job was to ship the finished products out. The job I got was on the floor sewing the little cardboard backing that the hat bill is sewn onto. I did this for a summer in an unair-conditioned room full of mostly older Asian women that were quite demanding about quality control. The repetitiveness of it was truly maddening.

The reason Trumps idea appeals to people for those unaware is that free trade destroyed a lot of union jobs, which were outsourced to emerging markets. After the industrial revolution unions fought for worker rights and salaries, and they were then shipped away to places that didnt have those rights, and they want to see a reversal of this.
Not sure if its right or wrong, but you cant fault them for holding out hope, its actually a left wing ideal I would say, large government protectionism interfering in the free market. Saying that all factory jobs are bad is a silly retort, there are many factory jobs in the US already that people are happy to have; even ASML making advanced semiconductor fabs is a "factory job".
- Saying that all factory jobs are bad is a silly retort,
  Who's saying that?

these idiots have been so spoonfed that they've mentally swapped factory jobs and union jobs, and think it's the factory bringing good conditions and satisfying work
- Precisely.

So they're saying they want us to die on the job. That might be okay for some but I still want to at least pretend to retire before I croak
- Otto von Bismarck moment.
  (Context: dude instated pretty much the first pensions system in the world to try and stop the Marxists gaining influence, and allegedly asked the guy in charge of making the program to set the retirement age at a value where most of the population would die before reaching it. Iirc they settled on 70 years old, which is definitely too old for the average 19th century factory peon)

For life? Someone is delusional.
Maybe for 5 years, at most. Humans need food. Humans need breaks. Automated assembly machines? 24/7 production, no annual leave, no insurance plans, and no unionizing.
The up-front cost is much higher, but it's cheaper in the long run. Good luck keeping that factory job long enough to have kids, let alone pass it down to them.
- We'll, the article was about the jobs maintaining the robots, not humans building stuff in factories.
  
  Well, that's on me for only reading the summary posted here.

I actually don't want to work at a factory. I want robots to do that for me and I want the products to be cheap so I can buy cool stuff to do more interesting things.
Like I don't want to weld parts and stuff, I want to make lasers from those parts.
I don't want to melt glass. I want to use lenses to make images.
I don't want to dig for shit. I want to use that stuff to make rocket fuel.
We don't want factory jobs. We want technology jobs.
- But someone, somewhere is doing the grunt work. We're nowhere near replacing manual labor. Hell, a robot with 10x our current capabilities couldn't do my dumbass job at Lowe's, and it certainly couldn't talk to customers with decades of DIY and plant experience.
  And BTW, I'm with you on all the above. Bet we'd be tight.
- If you are clever enough for that creative work, why don't you use that creativity to make those jobs?
  The uncomfortable problem is that manufacturing jobs dind't move to China for the cheap workers but for the cheap engineers and managers who run the factories.
  Production won't come back because there are not enough clever people in the USA.

And you, your kids and your grandkids will all work in the factory for minimum wage at the same time! A real family affair, whether you're an 80 year old or a 12 year old, there's factory work there for you!
I guess, since they're ~~careers~~ jobs for life, they're also saying that recessions like the one they're triggering right now will never happen again, because layoffs aren't going to be a thing. So that's.... um.... an interesting empty promise, anyways.

Wow the AI meme from earlier this week, with the humans inside and the robots painting and doing creative work, it became too real

Hey, knowing the means of production in and out will be pretty valuable once the working class also own it.

He doesn't mean after they graduate high school, he means as soon as they can walk.

Lol the factories have been neglected for so long they aren't gonna be there.

America was isolated from WW2 and joined at the end on their terms and for their benefit thanks to their location/geography. America will easily self-isolate and go full V for Vendetta (white [Germanic? Anglo Saxon? I feel like Germanic covers both] ethnonationalism, as usual) until it eventually balkanizes.
But Americans are honestly the dumbest people I've ever met, seeming almost challenged in their happy ignorance, so what can Americans by themselves do against their owners and through hardship? Israelis bomb Palestine through Ramadan and the communities still break their fast together in the rubble of their homes; Americans can't afford something they've been advertised but definitely don't need and will start selling drugs, their bodies (OF has made it easier than ever too!) and, finally, their souls. I can't see them doing anything besides murdering when they have the upper hand and assenting in fear when they don't, and I definitely don't see them getting together productively.
- America was isolated from WW2 and joined at the end on their terms and for their benefit thanks to their location/geography.
  That was WWI, they were in WWII from the start.
  
  The US was most certainly NOT part of WW2 from the start.
  We provided aid early in the war through our lend-lease programs, but the US made it a point to stay out of the war. That changed after Pearl Harbor.

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