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[MANUFACTURING] - Yesterday's middle class economic engine(?)/Today's middle class...
Malkor
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
There are many things that inspired me to make this thread. We had the recent failure of Hostess, and the near constant lamentation of lost manufacturing jobs since the 1980s. In those last two older articles the loss of making stuff seems to be tolerable since people transitioned to doing stuff. The service sector exploded, and has consistent growth now. So why are we worried about not making shit? Can we go back to the days when you could support your family working in a factory of some sort?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=7um_UjjPtZU#t=127s
Our widgets and gadgets and clothes and hats (more on this later) are now all made in far off places, and shipped to Wal-Mart or Target and other stores or product creators demand the lowest cost to manufacture these things and ostensibly pass along the savings to buyers. I don't want to completely get mired in the other things certain retailers do to keep their costs down, although I guess the argument could be made that some of the jobs lost from manufacturing have been replaced by them. The consumers want low-low prices and to do this goods are created in large quantities and supply chains ensure that these goods are moved as efficiently as possible.
One of the problems might be that 'manufacturing' is such a general term when used to describe economic activity. You manufacture airplanes, you manufacture cars, but you also manufacture crayons and porcelain dolls. And if you look in reports, even mining is considered a type of manufacturing. The work is anywhere from mind-numbingly routine to painstakingly precise and employs workers who are masters at their trade or who've just been given a run-down about what they're doing. But when you hear about how manufacturing needs to make a comeback it's almost always presented as a panacea for the economy.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/11/29/the-problem-with-the-return-of-manufacturing/
There's a quote in this reuters article (which is a quote from a Salon article..) about one of the realities of the Hostess bakery;
One of the points brought up is that cupcakes and Twinkies just might not be worth supporting a $48k job, the market more commonly referred to as the producer and consumer has an asterisk somewhere that also includes the employee, and the employee is taking their output elsewhere. Making iPhones in Asia is just cheaper because the employees there are willing to potentially accept less. Damn unions.
Speaking of hats, the area of Connecticut I live in used to be pretty big into manufacturing. Brass, hats, guns, and other things were all made in large quantities in the interior of the state and floated down the Housatonic river. There are many empty, rotting, shells of factories gathering dust, being useless, and providing kindling for random "unexplained" fires. During the 1900s there was a hat factory that went on strike and eventually the individual members of that union were forced to pay damages. This isn't the only time a union was punished for stopping work, but it wasn't violent and troops weren't called, so that was great. Think about how quickly the Hostess workers were villified. Over fucking cupcakes, one hundred years ago they used to blow up trains!
This is what's left of one of the manufacturers in CT (Remmington Arms Manufacturing) and I wouldn't be surprised if many lived near similar ugly reminders. So thread!! Do we really think that manufacturing will be a big part of our future economic growth? Will it ever be like the video, or does it need to be in some other form?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=7um_UjjPtZU#t=127s
Our widgets and gadgets and clothes and hats (more on this later) are now all made in far off places, and shipped to Wal-Mart or Target and other stores or product creators demand the lowest cost to manufacture these things and ostensibly pass along the savings to buyers. I don't want to completely get mired in the other things certain retailers do to keep their costs down, although I guess the argument could be made that some of the jobs lost from manufacturing have been replaced by them. The consumers want low-low prices and to do this goods are created in large quantities and supply chains ensure that these goods are moved as efficiently as possible.
One of the problems might be that 'manufacturing' is such a general term when used to describe economic activity. You manufacture airplanes, you manufacture cars, but you also manufacture crayons and porcelain dolls. And if you look in reports, even mining is considered a type of manufacturing. The work is anywhere from mind-numbingly routine to painstakingly precise and employs workers who are masters at their trade or who've just been given a run-down about what they're doing. But when you hear about how manufacturing needs to make a comeback it's almost always presented as a panacea for the economy.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/11/29/the-problem-with-the-return-of-manufacturing/
There's a quote in this reuters article (which is a quote from a Salon article..) about one of the realities of the Hostess bakery;
“In 2005, before concessions I made $48,000, last year I made $34,000…. I would make $25,000 in five years if I took their offer. It will be hard to replace the job I had, but it will be easy to replace the job they were trying to give me.”
One of the points brought up is that cupcakes and Twinkies just might not be worth supporting a $48k job, the market more commonly referred to as the producer and consumer has an asterisk somewhere that also includes the employee, and the employee is taking their output elsewhere. Making iPhones in Asia is just cheaper because the employees there are willing to potentially accept less. Damn unions.
Speaking of hats, the area of Connecticut I live in used to be pretty big into manufacturing. Brass, hats, guns, and other things were all made in large quantities in the interior of the state and floated down the Housatonic river. There are many empty, rotting, shells of factories gathering dust, being useless, and providing kindling for random "unexplained" fires. During the 1900s there was a hat factory that went on strike and eventually the individual members of that union were forced to pay damages. This isn't the only time a union was punished for stopping work, but it wasn't violent and troops weren't called, so that was great. Think about how quickly the Hostess workers were villified. Over fucking cupcakes, one hundred years ago they used to blow up trains!
This is what's left of one of the manufacturers in CT (Remmington Arms Manufacturing) and I wouldn't be surprised if many lived near similar ugly reminders. So thread!! Do we really think that manufacturing will be a big part of our future economic growth? Will it ever be like the video, or does it need to be in some other form?
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I come from Argentina, where most of our PBI (brute internal production? ) comes from exporting some quality meat to you gringos and europe, but mostly exporting soy to asian markets, where THEY manufacture goods, to sell in YOUR walmart.
We once used to produce planes and engines (after wwII when a lot of german engineers and technicians fled europe and found a safe place here, I also have to say that while we bloomed for a while, it was never compared to the ammount of edibles we export worlwide)
Still after scratching the surface of becoming a nation that produces "stuff" and not just "materials for stuff", we did went down in flames and got back to being a huge farm. (because we were bankrupted by a military dictatorship, and war.)
So it is POSSIBLE that USA re-starts producing end-products again, but for that to be profitable/possible you guys would have to be in a seriously bad economical position, the whole culture of consuption would be invalid in such context. We are talking about wages that can compete with sweat-factories in asia that keep workers in near-slavery conditions. (I said asia, but they do exist in south america as well)
The irony is that while a lot of these plants are closing down, there are quite a few new plants opening up in the area. Since manufacturing is done so differently now than it was fifty to a hundred years ago when those plants were built, it's usually far cheaper and easier to throw up a new plant at a new site instead of renovating the old factories. Plus you don't need to worry about all the hazardous materials and can leave the old plant to rot into the ground until someone (the EPA?) decides to get around to cleaning it up.
Anyway...I don't see a big return to the 'unskilled' manufacturing of yesteryear. I definitely feel people underestimate the difficulty of the 'unskilled' jobs and don't realize that even when the task is easy (it's not always) doing it all day every day can incredibly hard. A lot of those jobs can and should be done by robots, but it's rough for the people who lack skills and still need work.
As for manufacturing itself, I do see it coming back to America. Not all of it, globalization isn't going away, but some of it. As energy costs rise, it's going to eat into the margins of shipping shit from Pakistan to a hypermart in Omaha. Eventually the supply of stable 3rd world nations that can provide a $2.00 / day workforce will run out. If America gets a handle on healthcare spending, which the ACA has the potential to do, the cost of providing worker benefits will plummet. All of those things will make manufacturing in America more attractive.
There are a lot of benefits to having production the same place as your market, and America is a massive market. Some manufacturing will probably return, but it'll never be like the 50's and 60's. Remember though, that the only reason the 50's and 60's were so great for America is because the rest of the world was flattened (or waiting on the Industrial Revolution) and we made everything. Some is gone for good.
....Are you me? +1 for skilled tradesmen, finally found someone else who uses/understands that term. My dad was a press repair skilled tradesman for Chrysler; took the buyout after 33 years.
This is absolutely true, local markets cannot compete with their infrastructure. I said "Your" Walmart, in a very, very loose way, I have no idea where Walmart is actually from, what I ment but "your" was actually a "not mine", in the sense that the gross profit from the infrastructure doesnt translate to investment of such funds in Argentina. It all goes somewhere else. I recon you guys in the US probably have a similar issue with this, since I at least know that the money they make doesnt translate to good wages for their employees at least.
Edit: sorry if Im derailing here, I didnt want to bring up walmart, I think its sort of a topic on its own this days ?
That said, the defining trait of a production line is that it produces many copies of the same item. Robots are better at that than humans, and potentially cheaper (if you can get the maintenance costs down, and handle the initial investment). I suspect that over the next decade or so that we will see even cheap labor overseas get pushed out by automated processes.
I highly doubt that energy costs are going to bring back manufacturing. Putting things on boats and shipping them across oceans is dirt cheap per item because big boats are fairly efficient, and even a large increase (say, doubling) is only going to add a tiny amount to the total cost. Put that up against the difference in wages that people demand in the US and its a trivial choice.
If you want to bring production back to the US, I would expect it to be more along the lines of skilled work or creative work, where it is much harder to get equivalent results with a machine. If you really want that to go well, you need to give everyone a fairly decent basic education so that they have some basic abilities in that realm. I suspect that you're going to find that you leave a big chunk of the population out in the cold unless you come up with some way to rapidly bring them up to par, and I don't know of a good way to do that.
Well programming/maintaining the robots is a semi-skilled task. It's not engineering but there is too much damage/injury concerns to let just anybody do it. Though the safety is one area where non-american places tend to have it easier.
Cost isn't going to be the driver. Quality and delivery time might. Putting something on a boat in China means you won't see or hear anything from it for around a month. To get a good rate it either must be very heavy or large enough to fill a cargo container. A month long lead time plays merry hell with your responsiveness. If you do have a QC problem you can easy have a month or two worth of product be defective.
Eh. I don't think it's the basic education that is stopping us. It's the technical trades where we have no infrastructure and are soon going to have a rapidly diminished workforce.
Human factories also have the advantage that they can change the product they are making in an incredibly fast time, much faster than reprogramming robots. Remember that factory robots are not the robots of sci-fi, and have to have every tiny movement reprogrammed - it's a full software development project, including the debugging and the test time. Human factory workers can change the widget they are making with less than a day of retraining.
We are not running out of poor and desperate humans any time soon. We still have the whole of Africa to go. Chinese companies appear very interested in commercial investment in Africa, and if they can manage to get past the corruption and chaos, there could be millions of new workers available who are grateful for any job at all. And who knows? It might even be better. Better a factory drone than raped, mutilated and murdered in some pointless war.
Robots can be faster than humans so in conjunction with a machines with high capital costs they can greatly out perform humans even if the humans were free. This isn't true in things like clothing and apparel but for stuff like plastic parts or metals can be very true.
It also sounds like you're grossly overestimating the time to program the robot. It may be a matter of days, but weeks is fairly out there unless you're talking about totally retooling an assembly line. At that point, humans or robots, your going to run into massive delays beyond that for fixturing.
That said, I also don't see why we should necessarily couple the work you do to your ability to live a decent life. Better in my mind to push for tools of efficiency like automation and outsourcing to low cost areas, and to use the larger pie we create to provide for the people who would have worked. This is another way of saying that we don't tax capital holders sufficiently, and that we should increase taxes so that the efficiency gains accrue to society, not only to the elite (not to say they shouldn't keep most of the profit, but right now things are broken in my estimation).
Why do you frame it this way when we can't even reach a fiscal slope/cliff/hill/whatever deal because the GOP doesn't want taxes on the rich a few percentage points.
What world are you living in in which we can provide a decent standard of living for everyone when we can't even tax people who A.) quite obviously can afford to be taxed at a much higher rate than we even are talking about and B.) used to be taxed at a much higher rate anyway.
Of course your idea is preferable if we lived in a world of selfless people, but that's not the case.
There is no way your idea can be implemented in the remote future.
Also, people your industry are the biggest fans of automation and outsourcing, of course you want people to be cool with it.
So, jobs that don't require high levels of skill didn't basically create a stepping stone for the children of manual laborers to use to get an education and go to college and then get jobs which require a higher level of education? University enrollment didn't start booming because a whole mess of people actually entered the middle class because they could get higher paying unskilled jobs and then send their kids to college? I'm not a product of that exact scenario? You are so full of it.
Social mobility is often generational. Many of the children of yesterday's factory workers are today's computer scientists and engineers and doctors and so on, and I'd argue they wouldn't be in those careers had their parents had "unskilled" laborer jobs.
While this sounds very nice and all, it's not really remotely true. Relevantly, wages for garment workers in Bangladesh could double and they'd come in below $2 per day [edit: I went to double-check this and can't seem to find numbers anymore, so take that number with a grain of salt for now], and they'd still be working in ludicrously-dangerous environments. Between Bangladesh, China, India, and Nigeria you've got at least a billion people willing to work for far, far less than $2/day because it's more than they make off subsistence farming that carries with the it the risk of death by famine/disease/political strife. I don't think you could build, maintain, and operate robots in America at under that cost, at least not substantively.
And it's so efficient to deliver goods by cargo ship that fossil fuel prices could double (or more) and it still wouldn't add substantially to the price of most products made on the other side of the world. You'd be worried about the price of food produced here in a petroleum-based agriculture (and how to get it from California to Chicago) long before shipping containers started to get too pricey.
Sure maybe in the long run, outsourcing low-skilled labor may no longer be a viable option. But in the long run we're all dead. How do you revive a sector that, even if it's not glamorous, could still be an important contributor to American employment in the coming decades?
Germany is a good example of how to be a first-world manufacturing country: produce high-quality products that require technical skill to design and build, rely on dirt-cheap materials from overseas to keep costs down, and artificially keep labor and capital costs in your own country low by racking up a massive trade surplus at the expense of all the poorer countries in your free trade area.
(I think I got that last one right, but see Krugman for Germany's role re: Euro problems)
In the end, tedious manual labor is not the kind of activity that advanced economies can sustain themselves on indefinitely. It's a great way to pull yourself out of a hardscrabble low-tech agrarian economy, but it won't turn a hundred million peasants into a property-owning educated middle class unless you can find a quarter-billion even worse-off peasants halfway around the world to do your dirty work.
China learned this lesson from the US by being the suckers in that game the first go-round, and they'll likely implement the lessons of how not to let your economy stall in the transition from blue-collar to service-industry in a couple of decades. Mostly, probably, through political unification preventing serious class stratification and consolidation of power, but it's also entirely likely that their political elite will become their financial elite and achieve the same sort of gilded age that America seems to be now entering. It is a lot easier to implement politically-difficult reforms and policies when there is no political discussion to speak of, however.
There are compromises which contain this proposal and which are palatable to the right. In fact, I discussed this exact credit proposal with McCain's head of tax policy from his campaign, and he is fully behind such a credit, as long as certain other changes are made to the code. Suffice to say, a totally revamped tax code could likely include something like a proposal that gives everyone a $40k credit, regardless of income.
The skill set problem is soluble, and at least for folks that haven't graduated high school yet we could nearly trivially give them the options they need to start building those skills. The only catch is that it will cost a substantial amount of money, and the money seems unlikely to show up. The same would apply to adults that want to pick up a new trade, but the issue of what you do with their food/housing while they spend 40-60 hours a week switching careers is a little less clear cut.
Manufacturing required more skill at the time than other professions. Now, it requires FAR less. QED salaries.
Also, keep your anectdotes out of this. Both of my parents are highly educated and I didn't even graduate high school. What does this prove?
I was going to type up almost exactly the same post, including the "fetishization of manufacturing" line, but I decided that phrasing was unnecessarily provocative.
/Moderate Mike
I'm skeptical of those kinds of claims about shipping costs. Boats are just ridiculously inexpensive in terms of fuel costs. The bulk of transportation costs, if I recall correctly, is in the trucking and flying parts, and the latter is only occasionally necessary. The bulk of things that journey from Pakistan to California have negligible costs that could go up by quite a bit and people would hardly notice.
Thanks in part to the Internet, around 2000 (and really a bit before then) small and combined-batch PCB [printed circuit board] manufacturing began to creep onto the scene. A service which would allow for limited runs of new PCB designs or combined batches of many small sets of PCBs took the cost of electronic hardware development through the floor. It's so cheap that effectively anyone who wants to develop some kind of electronics project can fund it out-of-pocket. Small batch manufacturing is also starting to become more popular with machined items, though for obvious reasons it's not nearly as cheap. I could go more into additive manufacturing/3D printing, but really the first economic implications there compared to conventional machining are more price drops for small-batch work. If anyone wants me to go into more detail, say so; there have been a lot of huge milestones made recently.
The ability for an individual to produce a serious prototype with no external financial backing is huge. In some ways it accelerates the development of some technologies to nearly the same rate as that of software. The growth of small-batch manufacturing could indicate a possible future direction more companies will follow: nimble design houses served by a set of nearly indistinguishable large manufacturing firms. In essence, this is already the case in integrated circuit manufacture and is fairly prevalent in the cell phone industry. I believe that in a few more decades, this model will likely expand to cover most industries that are capable of using it.
If manufacturing is to have a resurgence in the US, it may be because a company figures out how to handle a huge volume of small-batch manufacturing as well as large-scale manufacturing for either unbeatable prices or unbeatable quality. Note that this company would internally look quite a bit different from most manufacturing companies today: much of it would be extremely automated, with workers to handle machine setup [which occurs at least once for each unique design that comes through] and maintenance. Depending on the nature of the service, assembly may also be included (note that even with automated assembly, a technician will likely need to produce an assembly setup for each item being assembled as well). This layout - if it can be made to work - would be able to serve anything from a startup project to that year's must-have Christmas item. The biggest change for manufacturing jobs in such an environment would be a switch to focus on CAD/CAM work from manual labor, as well as a reduced total need for workers. Pay would tick higher again, but there would be a need for companies to either have CAD/CAM training programs or for workers to attend technical schools with said programs.
This is how manufacturing dies. Not with a bang, but with a (3d) printer.
This is aside to the fact that 3D printing leaves different structural characteristics behind. The blended method of 3D printing a pattern to investment mold gets around this but is still basically just investment molding.
This is very true: 3D printing is really only suited for making very small quantities of things. I was more thinking of CNC machines (and what may result in automated assembly) for the foreseeable future in large-scale manufacturing. The only scenario where 3D printing completely eats manufacturing is if printer costs become less than maintaining an active inventory. In other words, if they were just as good as the old manufacturing techniques but so cheap they naturally resulted in digital distribution for physical products. This is a long ways off.
We do not really need manufacturing jobs as long as cost of goods keeps going down and we still have useful labor to sell to the world in general.
These skills dying wouldn't be a problem if they were skills that would never be useful again, like making buggy whips.
If we completely extinct the infrastructural and skilled labor though for industries that could make a comeback though, this will create additional burdens to what should be natural flows of capital and industry across national borders.
The US in particular can compete globally in manufacturing but it needs to pick it's target markets carefully and to be willing to support industries as they go through the inevitable, rocky changes to new economic models. I doubt the US will every be a major manufacturing power again; however, that doesn't mean it has to lose all it's industrial capacity.
One aspect of 3D printing is that while it can only make small batches, personal consumers really only needs small batches. If more complex products are redesigned so they can be made in (next generation) printers for pennies on the dollar you might see consumers willing to put up with slow production and lack of a shopping experience in exchange for the much lower cost.
Building industries or economic models around technology that does not really exist in a proven form yet though is foolish, since the way the future actually looks is often starkly different then what is predicted even when the technologies do come about.
What is certain is that what the US needs right now is a more flexible labor force that can rapidly retrain for the changing economy. We can no longer rely on the next generation bringing new skills because the changes are happening faster then the K-4 year college system can cope with.
I can't go into too much detail about this because lol propriety business concerns, but one of the companies I work for does this already. They don't maintain any inventory, and produce on demand. Its not 3D printing, but very similar technology.
I recall reading that there are several critical specializations where there are literally a handful of people left in the country who know how to do the job at all, and those guys are aging boomers or older. There isn't enough demand to train a new generation of apprentices, so the few guys who are left consult / contract out and run around the country doing whatever specialized calibration / setup / etc is necessary to keep vital equipment working.
You see similar things in ship building and the space program, where the government is desperate to keep infrastructure dating back to WW2 from crumbling because even though we don't really NEED it now, it would be decades and $TEXAS to rebuild / replace it. Anyone working in IT long enough has probably ran into this, where you've got a legacy product that's 20-30-40+ years old, works, and is either irreplaceable or the people who use it do not want to upgrade...so there is one or two guys who know how to do everything in it, and for everyone else it's black magic. Nobody knows what's going to happen when those guys retire, but it won't be pretty.
I'm not going to downplay the importance of technical trained semi-skilled workers, STEM college graduates, and more engineers. But what we're really losing are the skilled trades guys to fill the gap in between. A SCARY amount of skilled tradesmen are 60+ boomers, and they aren't going to last forever. The remaining guys aren't busy training replacements, and the employers are fine with it because skilled trades are bread and butter of the manufacturing unions...and who cares beyond next quarter, right? Besides, it's expensive to run programs to train up tradesmen...and you can't make them leave the skills behind when they go find better work.
And we will be in a dreadful pickle when the horseless carriage fad fades and we find we have noone to manufacture our buggy whips. We can't possibly undertake to keep people trained in all arcane skills on the off chance they are needed. Where would you draw the line?
It could be clamping fixtures to hold work that is being routed, it could be racks to hold parts in an electrochemical bath so they can be plated, it could be the mold that creates the plastic parts I'm typing on right now. Some parts of toolmaking have been radically changed in our lifetimes but other parts still involve processes that haven't changed in just as long.
Wait, what? You realize that, right now, the United States is the leading manufacturer of the world? Wiki says:
And seriously, this is another aspect of this manufacturing fetish that annoys me: the imagined lost glory.
We aren't talking about obsolete technology though...we're talking, in a lot of cases, about fundamental and vital skills that are still needed but aren't being taught. Machinists, toolmakers, sheet metal / millwrights, pipe fitters, welders, etc. There are even shortages of plumbers and electricians, and you can't tell me that plumbing and electricity are going the way of buggy whips. We need more, better programs to keep workers going into those trades.
We aren't ever going back to horses and carriages, but some things aren't obsolete - just cyclical. Sure, right now our military is bloated and over-equipped. For the next decade or so, our military is probably going to be downsizing and cutting budgets. But at some point, we're going to need to start building ships and tanks again.
If you don't have the infrastructure and institutional knowledge, it is far more expensive and difficult to tool up and begin production. There are more bugs, there are more problems, and you end up reinventing the wheel. All kinds of supporting industries are gone, and you need to either tool those industries up or find alternatives. You end up with all kinds of weird issues - like how we forgot how to make 'FOGBANK' for nuclear weapons.
I do wonder how much of our problem of 60 year old workers is based on union "last in, first out" rules though. . .
In some industries or specialties, yes. There are things that literally two or three guys do anywhere. These guys are in their 60's or older, and if they die without passing on their knowledge nobody anywhere knows how to setup / calibrate / fix issues / etc.
Quite a few industries use equipment that hasn't been produced for literally half a century...it was overbuilt (both in durability and quantity) in the 40's, 50's, and 60's that it's just what you use. If you need one, you find one that's being resold. In some cases the control systems have been upgraded, but a lot of times the machine operator is doing the exact same job their grandfather did. Presses, tooling / machining , winding , racks / handling equipment, etc.
This equipment is ubiquitous, but even now when one line goes down it can take weeks or months (and big $$$) to get one of the few people who know what they are doing out to fix it. Nobody is building replacement equipment, because...why? Little market, and everyone wants the standard.
Most of the problems with lack of workers aren't so much 'last in - first out' rules as the big manufacturing companies stopped taking on new apprentices ~late 1970's and never started the programs back up. It was part union breaking, and part changing business needs. It wasn't a big deal in the 80's and even the 90's because there was a glut of trained boomers from the old manufacturers that had gone out of business, downsized, or offshored jobs. Wages were depressed, no training was really available, and labor was readily available. Why spend money training new people?
Now, anyone who was apprenticing in the 70's is approaching 60, and we're still struggling to get a halfway decent technical education setup in this country.
Since I'm an engineering undergrad, I can actually say from experience that there is already a shift back toward knowing not just about the physics behind designing systems but more about the manufacturing processes that underlie making said systems. There was a point a few years ago at my college where the decision made back in the '70s-'80s to have minimal involvement in such areas for engineering students was determined to have been a horrible idea. For example, you'd end up with engineers who would try to hand off "impossible" parts to manufacture to machinists; sure, the geometry is fine and the math all checks out, but there's no machine in existence that could make the part or technician talented enough to cram a 1/4" bolt through an 1/8" gap. Now every single engineering student graduates with hands-on experience designing AND fabricating a large-scale - and often multidisciplinary - project.
I'm not sure of the current state of trade schools where machinists are trained, but virtually all I've encountered (both young and old) can all operate CNC machines. The real change will probably be if someone decides that we should be encouraging more high school students to go to trade school as opposed to a traditional liberal arts college.
They set the part up, get the tooling on, and the machine zeroed out, and then let it run. Maybe stop it every few hours, to change/resharpen tooling or check some measurements to make sure the zeros are holding. Hit GO again.
The superskilled craftsman aspect of it, where they are hand cranking the machine, cutting a few passes, taking measurements, and then hand cranking another few passes are pretty much gone in the production environment.
True. I worked for one of the biggest toolmakers, and talking with the heads of the various engineering departments all came around to this point. The young guys coming in fresh from college didn't know shit about tools and they were having to train them in common sense. They even set up a school that's mandatory for new hires just to teach the basic ins and outs.
On the broader subject, it's great to advocate for more STEM programs. Realistically though, everyone cannot be an engineer. So are we really, as a society, comfortable with depressing wages across the board?
That's going to weaken the economy significantly and hurt everyone.
Plus apprenticeships don't fix the core problem. It's a failure of management that tribal knowledge is still so prevalent in many factories. More than ever, documentation needs to be stressed even though people hate doing it.