Hold on, why are Americans making cars anyways?

aircooled said: Are you implying that manufacturing positions are high paying? I think if you look at any numbers (which I do not have) you will see the higher paying jobs in the US are not manufacturing. Not saying there is anything wrong with manufacturing of course, but I think it might be a bit off implying that with fewer manufacturing, the economy will move to service jobs (and I really don't see where all these new "service" jobs will be).

I've spent my working life in the factory so far, and I have to say the man has a point. Thanks to Manpower and other temp services, average manufacturing wage is roughly 9.50 an hour. If you're lucky or connected or just a go getter, you might get $14 an hour someplace. 14 is uncommonly good manufacturing pay. You won't go much higher than that unless it's union work. I don't count Maintenance personnel. Maintenance is skilled labor, service, in fact, like a mechanic, or an attorney for that matter.

At 14 bucks an hour, with bennies, you're bringing in around 30K a year, that's INCLUDING your bennies as compensation, not just cash pay. You can work there for another 20 years once you hit the pay cap, and never see another pay raise aside from a yearly 25 cents an hour or so. And they only give you that lil bitty raise to compensate for inflation.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't 30k a year basic noobie pay for most degree (service) jobs? A service job isn't just McDonalds.

"Service" is a very broad word. Banker is a service job. Lawyer too. IT manager is a service job. COBOL programmer is a service job. ASE Certified Master Mechanic is a service job. Engineer is a service job. Rennie Bryant, Keith Tanner, JG Pasterjak, Per, Tim, Margie, and probably most of the people who post on this board have service jobs. Your local master machinist has a service job. Master welders, too. The guy who did your rollcage? Service job. Hell, Mike Guido has a service job. I could go on and on and on.

I agree completely with everyone who doesn't want to see manufacturing capability offshored. We must be capable of what we did in WWII if push comes to shove. BUT. Service people-engineers, designers, welders, electricians, technicians, even bankers-BUILT the factories in the first place. Billy Joe Bob factory worker can't build a factory from scratch, neither can his Chinese counterpart. Even if we lose a lot of factories, we don't actually lose the abiltiy to manufacture. That stays with us.

Make no mistake, manufacturing jobs SUCK, from the individual's perspective to the community's. Manufacturing jobs in general are carefully, deliberately designed so that just about any monkey can be plugged into the system. By the end of his first day, said monkey will be decent at his completely mindless task. After two weeks at his very simple, repetitive, and idiot-proofed task, he'll be about as good as another coworker monkey who has been around the place for years. And once that monkey is fired, or quits, or is laid off, he is out on the street with NO new skills to speak of. NONE. What little he learned will rarely be portable to his next manufacturing job, or applicable to his immediate community in any real way. Imagine spending a year of your working life being the guy who wraps a wiring harness with tape. Outside of that one, specific situation at that specific factory, that skill is USELESS. Jobs like that make up the majority of manufacturing jobs. I'll go out on a limb and say that in an ideal world, the only factory workers would be young, unskilled people stacking up dollars to go to college with. In the real world it's a trap for young families. They stay Just Over Broke at factory pay, and rarely develop skills.

Service jobs account for most, if not all, of the actual skills in an economy. McD's is actually a terrible example of a service job, since they use a lot of the same dirty Taylorism (Google it sometime) that the factories use. McD's is actually a little food factory, not a restaurant job.

Contrast a burger flipping job with what a friend of mine does. He's a cook, currently at Applebee's. Still fairly lowly, pay-wise, but unlike a McDonald's employee, he has an actual, portable skill-set that he developed on the job that he can take with him anywhere. If he moves to another place, he brings a real skill into that community that said community can put immediately to use. The same goes for every other true service worker, from the lowly cook to the guy who can reprogram the PCM in your Mustang. A factory worker moving into your community has NO skills. He/she just has a mouth or four that needs feeding, and he/she enters your community looking for a job that a chimp could almost literally do, since he/she has developed no actual skills during employment. I'm not dogging factory workers, I'm speaking from direct personal experience.

This went long, and I hope no-one thought it was an angry rant. It isn't.

It's dawned on me that most all those on this board either have college degrees or a valuable skill-set that they've spent years developing. Or both. I don't think there's a lot of factory workers here, except me and probably a few others, and I don't think you guys are quite aware of what a manufacturing job really is, or what it's really worth to the country, so I just thought I'd get it out there as food for thought.

Right now, I guess, we do need to preserve those manufacturing jobs, because otherwise the upper Midwest will be flooded overnight with unskilled factory labor looking for jobs that aren't there. If that should happen, some of them will buck up and go get a skill to build wealth with, the rest will turn to God knows what. Probably robbing houses and selling drugs, because I don't know what else they'll do to feed thier kids if thousands of them were to be laid off at once.

Me, I just want the US car industry to continue because without it, the country loses a big chunk of its soul. The cars a country makes are a distinctive part of its culture, just like its art, or food. Without a serious US car industry, we lose that, and have to make do with scraps from other cultures.

I like imports. They often suit my needs. But I'm still glad that the new Camaro exists. Nobody else would make a car quite like that. Nobody else would have made the tailfin Cadillacs but US. Even the new Caddys are distinctly American compared to zee Germans they compete with.

I'd like to see a US car industry shrunk small enough that the only unskilled factory labor it employs are US citizens who consider assembling distinctly American cars to be a holy mission from God worth spending thier lives on. Those workers, who want to be where they are, doing what they do, will make excellent cars. Those cars will find buyers all over the world, and ensure that we always have an excellent manufacturing base to expand upon if need be.

Everybody else in this country ought to be getting into the service economy where the REAL skills are.

Wow, that's a big fat monolith of text. Sorry about that folks. Fingers got carried away.

Adrian_Thompson wrote: Yes I know that this is overly simple, but at the end of the day I don't believe we can survive as a service economy, we need to build things, anything if your going to have people earning money to continue buying things and driving the economy. This is partly why were in the situation we are.

Too bad our elected leaders (from both parties)think we can borrow and consume our way to prosperity.

FindlaySpeedMan wrote: Me, I just want the US car industry to continue because without it, the country loses a big chunk of its soul. The cars a country makes are a distinctive part of its culture, just like its art, or food. Without a serious US car industry, we lose that, and have to make do with scraps from other cultures.

+1,000,000 on this.

Amen.

Excellent post.

As a Dave Ramsey listener, one of the things I've picked up from listening to his show is that you need to become an expert on something to make more money, because people will pay you for that expertise. Either practical experience in fixing widgets or knowledge through reading or getting a degree, but you need to know more than the 300 other applicants for whatever dream job you may be after. You won't get that working on a factory line.

That being said, it is simplistic and easy only if you know what you want to be an expert of. I still haven't figured that out. Luckily, I have a broad spectrum of knowing just enough about a number of things to be smarter than the average mouth-breather, so can survive in a few different careers should it be necessary. If only that position in Obscure Automotive Trivia would open up...

FindlaySpeedMan wrote: Big fat monolith of articulate, insightful, grammatically correct text.

Post of the day. +1.

hey Findlay...you misspelled "their" as "thier"...your post is totally sullied in my eyes and not worth consideration at all. total hullabaloo.

just kidding

As a member of the US work force for more than a decade now, and having skilled manufacturing, skilled service, and the "unskilled monkey" type job experience on my resume, I can faithfully and in good conscience say that was a profoundly accurate portrayal of one of this biggest misconceptions in American employment policies today. Thanks for your post, and I really mean that.

TJ wrote: Too bad our elected leaders (from both parties)think we can borrow and consume our way to prosperity.

Certainly true, and correct me if I am wrong, but isn't that basically how our economy is setup?!

In order for fiat money to work it has to be that way! I certainly think it is silly, but it appears that that's the way it works. Of course I don't think it's really supposed to be borrow and "consume" but more along the lines of borrow and "build", but consume is definitely part of it.

4cylndrfury said: hey Findlay...you misspelled "their" as "thier"...your post is totally sullied in my eyes and not worth consideration at all. total hullabaloo.

Heh. Obviously I have a solid command of my birth language, and yet I have this wierd blind spot when it comes to i before e. What really makes me shake my head is that I proofed and edited that post about three times, and I remember actually proofing and changing that word. And I changed it wrong.

Yaknow that sound that Charlie Brown makes when he misses the football? Yeah, insert that here.

i before e<----- CURSE YOU NEMESIS!!!

I'm glad the post was well recieved. The truth is that schmoes in manufacturing aren't the ones buying nice TVs, or big houses, or new cars. The UAW guys are big fat outliers, paywise. Everybody else is scraping by, all the time. They/we drive the economy to a degree, but I don't know that manufacturing jobs are that much of a make or break for a country to have.

FindlaySpeedMan wrote:

aircooled said: Are you implying that manufacturing positions are high paying? I think if you look at any numbers (which I do not have) you will see the higher paying jobs in the US are not manufacturing. Not saying there is anything wrong with manufacturing of course, but I think it might be a bit off implying that with fewer manufacturing, the economy will move to service jobs (and I really don't see where all these new "service" jobs will be).

I've spent my working life in the factory so far, and I have to say the man has a point. Thanks to Manpower and other temp services, average manufacturing wage is roughly 9.50 an hour. If you're lucky or connected or just a go getter, you might get $14 an hour someplace. 14 is uncommonly good manufacturing pay. You won't go much higher than that unless it's union work. I don't count Maintenance personnel. Maintenance is skilled labor, service, in fact, like a mechanic, or an attorney for that matter. At 14 bucks an hour, with bennies, you're bringing in around 30K a year, that's INCLUDING your bennies as compensation, not just cash pay. You can work there for another 20 years once you hit the pay cap, and never see another pay raise aside from a yearly 25 cents an hour or so. And they only give you that lil bitty raise to compensate for inflation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't 30k a year basic noobie pay for most degree (service) jobs? A service job isn't just McDonalds. "Service" is a very broad word. Banker is a service job. Lawyer too. IT manager is a service job. COBOL programmer is a service job. ASE Certified Master Mechanic is a service job. Engineer is a service job. Rennie Bryant, Keith Tanner, JG Pasterjak, Per, Tim, Margie, and probably most of the people who post on this board have service jobs. Your local master machinist has a service job. Master welders, too. The guy who did your rollcage? Service job. Hell, Mike Guido has a service job. I could go on and on and on. I agree completely with everyone who doesn't want to see manufacturing capability offshored. We must be capable of what we did in WWII if push comes to shove. BUT. Service people-engineers, designers, welders, electricians, technicians, even bankers-BUILT the factories in the first place. Billy Joe Bob factory worker can't build a factory from scratch, neither can his Chinese counterpart. Even if we lose a lot of factories, we don't actually lose the abiltiy to manufacture. That stays with us. Make no mistake, manufacturing jobs SUCK, from the individual's perspective to the community's. Manufacturing jobs in general are carefully, deliberately designed so that just about any monkey can be plugged into the system. By the end of his first day, said monkey will be decent at his completely mindless task. After two weeks at his very simple, repetitive, and idiot-proofed task, he'll be about as good as another coworker monkey who has been around the place for years. And once that monkey is fired, or quits, or is laid off, he is out on the street with NO new skills to speak of. NONE. What little he learned will rarely be portable to his next manufacturing job, or applicable to his immediate community in any real way. Imagine spending a year of your working life being the guy who wraps a wiring harness with tape. Outside of that one, specific situation at that specific factory, that skill is USELESS. Jobs like that make up the majority of manufacturing jobs. I'll go out on a limb and say that in an ideal world, the only factory workers would be young, unskilled people stacking up dollars to go to college with. In the real world it's a trap for young families. They stay Just Over Broke at factory pay, and rarely develop skills. Service jobs account for most, if not all, of the actual skills in an economy. McD's is actually a terrible example of a service job, since they use a lot of the same dirty Taylorism (Google it sometime) that the factories use. McD's is actually a little food factory, not a restaurant job. Contrast a burger flipping job with what a friend of mine does. He's a cook, currently at Applebee's. Still fairly lowly, pay-wise, but unlike a McDonald's employee, he has an actual, portable skill-set that he developed on the job that he can take with him anywhere. If he moves to another place, he brings a real skill into that community that said community can put immediately to use. The same goes for every other true service worker, from the lowly cook to the guy who can reprogram the PCM in your Mustang. A factory worker moving into your community has NO skills. He/she just has a mouth or four that needs feeding, and he/she enters your community looking for a job that a chimp could almost literally do, since he/she has developed no actual skills during employment. I'm not dogging factory workers, I'm speaking from direct personal experience. This went long, and I hope no-one thought it was an angry rant. It isn't. It's dawned on me that most all those on this board either have college degrees or a valuable skill-set that they've spent years developing. Or both. I don't think there's a lot of factory workers here, except me and probably a few others, and I don't think you guys are quite aware of what a manufacturing job really is, or what it's really worth to the country, so I just thought I'd get it out there as food for thought. Right now, I guess, we do need to preserve those manufacturing jobs, because otherwise the upper Midwest will be flooded overnight with unskilled factory labor looking for jobs that aren't there. If that should happen, some of them will buck up and go get a skill to build wealth with, the rest will turn to God knows what. Probably robbing houses and selling drugs, because I don't know what else they'll do to feed thier kids if thousands of them were to be laid off at once. Me, I just want the US car industry to continue because without it, the country loses a big chunk of its soul. The cars a country makes are a distinctive part of its culture, just like its art, or food. Without a serious US car industry, we lose that, and have to make do with scraps from other cultures. I like imports. They often suit my needs. But I'm still glad that the new Camaro exists. Nobody else would make a car quite like that. Nobody else would have made the tailfin Cadillacs but US. Even the new Caddys are distinctly American compared to zee Germans they compete with. I'd like to see a US car industry shrunk small enough that the only unskilled factory labor it employs are US citizens who consider assembling distinctly American cars to be a holy mission from God worth spending thier lives on. Those workers, who want to be where they are, doing what they do, will make excellent cars. Those cars will find buyers all over the world, and ensure that we always have an excellent manufacturing base to expand upon if need be. Everybody else in this country ought to be getting into the service economy where the REAL skills are.

Both great posts. I meant no disrespect to anyone when I made the 'outsource manufacturing jobs' leads to lower paying 'service sector jobs'.

The problem is that 'manufacturing' and 'service sector' are both broadly encompassing statements. If we take 'Manufacturing' that could mean anyone from the guy unloading a truck at the factory on night shift earning minimum wage to the CEO of the same company earning hundreds of millions. Likewise 'Service' can mean anything from a contract office cleaner, again on minimum wage up to Bill Gates.

I should have been clearer, sorry.

What I was referring too was the loss of traditional old school manufacturing jobs that created the middle class in this country and the rise of low paid, unskilled, entry level service industry jobs.

There were a number of studies discussed prior to the last election on average wages. The last administration claimed that average wages had risen over the prior 8 years, while many studies sited that when adjusted for inflation and cost of living they had in fact fallen. When discounting the top earners who's wages had risen dramatically, the drop for the middle and lower incomes was even greater. In those studies one of the factors mentioned was that our manufacturing had declined and that many of the new jobs were lower paying service industry jobs.

FindlaySpeedMan wrote: A factory worker moving into your community has NO skills. He/she just has a mouth or four that needs feeding, and he/she enters your community looking for a job that a chimp could almost literally do, since he/she has developed no actual skills during employment. I'm not dogging factory workers, I'm speaking from direct personal experience.

I must work in a WAY different factory environment then you do, and I can see why we're successful where others are not.

aircooled wrote:

TJ wrote: Too bad our elected leaders (from both parties)think we can borrow and consume our way to prosperity.

Certainly true, and correct me if I am wrong, but isn't that basically how our economy is setup?! In order for fiat money to work it has to be that way! I certainly think it is silly, but it appears that that's the way it works. Of course I don't think it's really supposed to be borrow and "consume" but more along the lines of borrow and "build", but consume is definitely part of it.

Yes you are correct - our fiat currency and debt-based monetary system require ever increasing debt to function. It won't last forever and it won't be pretty when all these crazy attempts to prop up an unsustainable system fail.