Trump and the reality of manufacturing jobs... THEY SUCK!

[Weird Tolkienish Figure]

My rant posted on another forum:

I will say it again and again, this is the reality of the coveted "Manufacturing jobs" that both Trump and other politicians seem to covet so much. THEY SUCK, mostly.


They suck balls. Sweaty, fat man in August balls.


I had a summer job, electroplater's assistant, during college, through a temp agency. The people at the plant said I was the only person who lasted longer than a week. WHOOPTY DO! I got the job politicians and morons love to complain America is shedding.


The job was terrible. It involved sweating, dipping baskets of lead telephone parts into boiling hot, electrified, tin solutions. My supervisor reminded me of a serial killer (literally, he looked like Jeffrey dahmer yet somehow even creepier), the other people at the plant were miserable meth head types, angry blue collar workers, tweakers. Plus a Toga-ton of foreigners.


Just a group of miserable people. (There were some cool people there too, but a lot of unhappy people).


The plant was smelly, probably carcinogenic, and I dealt with lead all day long.


Next summer: another factory job. I made "atomizers" aka perfume bottles. All day long. We did the michael jordan cologne bottles, this was in the mid-90's. Same deal.


Next summer: I did one day at a job bottling ethyl alcohol. All goddamned day long. Most depressing terrible job ever.


Now I have a service job. I should be a miserable sunova Toga, after all, I'm service worker. I WOULD NEVER TRADE MY CURRENT JOB FOR A MANUFACTURING JOB. NEVER.


Now, not all jobs are like this I understand. A lot of my inlaws have decent well paying jobs in factories but man, I wouldn't trade my job for their's.

But it didn't used to be like this did it? Our ancestors were willing to sit on an assembly line and turn the same screw all day long?

But the unskilled workers, many of them foreign born, didn't enjoy their work, earning a mediocre $2.38 for a nine-hour day. Indeed, the simplification of the jobs created a treacherous backlash: high turnover. Over the course of 1913, the company had to hire 963 workers for every 100 it needed to maintain on the payroll. To keep a workforce of 13,600 employees in the factory, Ford continually spent money on short-term training. Even though the company introduced a program of bonuses and generous benefits, including a medical clinic, athletic fields, and playgrounds for the families of workers, the problem persisted. The rest of the industry reluctantly accepted high turnover as part of the assembly-line system and passed the increasing labor costs into the prices of their cars. Henry Ford, however, did not want anything in the price of a Model T except good value. His solution was a bold stroke that reverberated through the entire nation.

http://www.wiley.com/legacy/products/subject/business/forbes/ford.html


That is the reality of manufacturing jobs. They have always sucked. They always will suck. I'm not talking about those of you who are mechanics, or industrial technicians or PLC programmers or the skilled industrial jobs. I'm not putting anyone down.


I'm talking about the kind of jobs that politicians love to talk about, where a guy could get a job in a factory off of the street. A lot of the beloved "made in america" tool brands like Snap-On probably have a lot of this type of mind-numbing assembly line type work. I will bet anything that is true. And these jobs are jobs that pretty much anybody will get tired of in even a few hours.

[skeeter]

As you said it depends upon the industry. I used to work as a mechanical engineer manufacturing mainframe computers, back when we used to make such things here. The job was far more fulfilling than contract procurement and management positions I held later.

I always assumed the mfg jobs being vaunted by politicians included these kinds as well.

[dfwgator]

They only suck, because welfare made it suck.

Without welfare, those jobs sure would beat the alternative, wouldn't it?

[jmyrlefuller]

It's not so much the jobs themselves. A lot of the problem with factory work is poor management and worker mistreatment.

Why manufacturing is so attractive is the pay and mostly steady work. You're actually producing something as a manufacturer, something that can be sold, something that is worth a tangible value. Selling services doesn't produce that (except perhaps in the repair industry, where you take something broken and worthless and restore value to it). You also get steady shift work—production is not a time-sensitive industry; whether a product is made at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday or 7 p.m. on a Saturday doesn't change its value the way a service industry job's value does.

Our current service industry destroys families with low wages and emphasis on night and weekend work that deprives people of a social life.