To reduce dependence on China, more of us need to work in factories

I make decent money working freelance from home.

I might consider working in a factory if they payed me like 150,000 a year and offered on the job training and promotions and pay raises yearly that beat inflation.

I don’t make anywhere close to 150,000, but I’m not willing to drive to a factory, work in a place that may be bad for my health, and give up the experience I’m gaining each day in my current field of work.

Honestly, the jobs would probably fill at 75-100k/y
- Not worth it, it’s more than I’m earning now, but then you have to figure in the commute and the hour lunch break that I have to be there for but not get paid for.
  It’s a tough sell.

So after 8 decades of psychological warfare to get manufacturing and fabrication moved to nations that used to have lucrative slavery, we've decided (because of a dry, boring "national security" issue) to bring back these factories...

so... $2 an hour? Honestly, we'd rather make it $2 a day, but... yeah... maybe we can make it $2 a day, if payment of rent is included into the salery? We can't trust China, but we sort of want to recreate the conditions.

Then I guess corporations will just have to start paying Americans living wages, huh?

Factory jobs do pay living wages. I worked at a Fortune 500 factory in rural AL and the entry level jobs (running the street sweeper inside the factory) started at $28/hr. Operators that took OT would make over $100k/yr. The operators that worked there 20+ years made more money than I did as an engineer.
I’ve worked in factories in California, Ohio, Alabama, and my peers have worked all over (different companies). Factory jobs pay very decent and often have a hard time finding employees.
- Thanks for the injection of reason. I work as an engineer in a manufacturing plant. We're short-staffed with a high turnover. However that's because of the hours, not the pay. This thread is filled with people who think factory workers are manual-labor oppressed people with no upward mobility. It's borderline classist. Factory jobs aren't inherently bad or unhealthy.
Whoa whoa whoa - let's not get ahead of ourselves; what is America if not the exploitation of the critical working class?

All of this article completely ignores why manufacturing left in the first place. By the 1970s Japan's manufacturing quality revolution put financial pressures on American corporations to become more competitive. As more globalization occurred, the ability to economically compete with foreign economies became more prominent in management philosophy. Pair this with the invention that corporations exist to drive shareholder value, increasing shareholder value became the primary concern driving corporate strategies.

Companies who listen to shareholders and not markets become asset-light with high risk aversion. Few companies want to weather a storm not because the employees don't want to work there, but because any slight can be perceived in the market as a weaken position. There has to be a fundamental disconnect from the companies and the investors. We cannot be a stable manufacturing economy if the primary driver is speculation.

With weak labor protections currently prevalent in the United States, there's little possibility to buy the notion that employees and their product will be placed higher than speculative investors who are completely disinterested in the particulars themselves. So long as boards listen to financial gurus who prognosticate from their Excel tea leaves and market models, and less to middle management who just want the company to do well, there's zero ways manufacturing will attract the numbers required for a complete return to domestic production. If we want the people to work, we must give the people the power to dictate that work. Anything less is sure fire means for a return to whence we came.

Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and adviser at Gallos Technologies.

Nice try

Oh so you mean she doesn't work in a factory?
Good spot!
Yeah. She says "more of us" but she means "more of them".

There’s definitely work to be done so that production of goods becomes once again an esteemed endeavour. It’s problematic that factory work is as undesirable as locally made things are desirable. It’s a cultural thing now and it’s silly.

It's not inherently undesirable, but often enough extremely unattractive.
Low pay, bad working condition, no sense of accomplishment, hardly any upwards mobility. Why would I do that, if I have better options?
Here in Germany, people used to take pride (and sometimes still do) in working for VW or Daimler, they had a sense of belonging, pay was good and there was at least a feeling that your company took care of you. That is pretty much gone.
- I know a lot of people that work in union manufacturing jobs that have a real sense of pride and feeling of accomplishment about it. Gotta say, having time off, extra money, and voice in how the company treats you probably goes a long way, because some of those same people hated their non-unions jobs before.
- Low pay, bad working condition, no sense of accomplishment, hardly any upwards mobility. Why would I do that, if I have better options?
  I kind of agree with the lack of career options for factory workers, but in many factory jobs there are several upsides.
  For example many places allow you to listen to music/podcasts all day, while you are working. The work itself is often not mentally taxing and it doesn't follow you home when you leave. Also there is no reason not to feel pride in being able to complete relatively complex tasks with care and speed.
We need to put more effort on automating factory jobs, but having them be supervised by techs 24 hours. It makes for nice monitoring and maintenance jobs, as long as they are paid according to the value their machine brings.

Manufacturing isn't coming back to the US. No matter how much the US Government frets about wartime capacity, the one percent LOVES the idea of the middle class disappearing and those without an education suffering. They won't allow the middle class to come back.

It'll come back, but with automation.
If it's cheaper to build locally with automation and minimal US based labor then it is to build overseas and ship then they will bring manufacturing back.

How about no and instead we focus on automation?

Why not both?
- Because we could produce European middle-class living standards for everyone with 70% unemployment, and that's with the automation potential of 10-15 years ago. Think nice apartment, washing machine, dishwasher, gaming PC, healthy food, education, healthcare, probably no car but proper public transit, all included in UBI.
  The reason it's not happening is because there's very little investment in it, not because the ROI wouldn't be high but because it's very long-term. In the short to mid-term it's way cheaper to outsource jobs to a low-wage country somewhere.
  And, of course, tech only became better. We now e.g. have the tech to do automatic QC, proper visual inspection no worse than the human kind, allowing a system to say "yep that's chatter marks let's sort that piece out, mill #32, you need new tooling, shut down until maintenance drone #21 fetched you a new endmill from storage". In other words automated factories can now self-diagnose and self-maintain to a significant degree, at least to an "everyday problems" one.
- Assuming both means more jobs at the factory which suggests more labor involvements and automation in the process of manufacturing, I would advocate against the former until we have universal healthcare and stronger safety standards and laws.

Interesting relevant factoid.

I am a truck driver. I make $75,000 per year. Required a license that cost me 2 years of my life or $10,000 (my choice) for school (12 weeks) and roughly $1000 in admin fees to my State to aquire.

My wife is a mental health therapist. She makes roughly $55,000. To do her current job required a Master’s degree($80,000 +6 years), and 2 separate licenses with an unknown (to me) cost but required a total of 5 years on the job to acquire. Before she got that second license, she made more money working at McDonalds. And she still has continued education requirements costing upwards of $800 per course.

She loves her job (usually) and I love that she loves it, but if you’re looking for money, THE TRADES PAY! And usually a heck of a lot earlier and better than jobs that require a college degree.

Edit: Spolling is hard!

It really comes down to the degree. Someone could spend significantly less to get an IT related degree and start out making more than what your wife currently makes with, probably, a much better work life balance. That person could easily double that in a few years.
Honestly, we simply do not value health care and teachers as much as we should.
Just FYI, a "factoid" is by definition not a fact but something that somebody believes to be a fact because it was printed. That definition is clearly changing over time as the English-speaking population as a whole forgets this, but it's not there yet.

Okay but all of the proponents have to go first and stay at the job for at least 3 years.

Last year I quit cooking after nearly 15 years and got a job at a semiconductor factory. I was making more money on day one and the work is soooo much better. Went from having no breaks to 1.8 hours of break time. No vacation to 5 weeks PTO. I never have to stay past my scheduled time out.

I'll never go back.

I think that more shows how crap it is to work in catering. Especially when chefs in popular Michellin star reseraunts make the same, sometimes less to work in such reseraunts.

brings jobs back to America

NOOO not THOSE jobs

I'm down. I have a college degree, but have never had a job that required it. My skills fit the bill. But I still have the college bill to pay! I have often thought about moving to a big city and trying my hand at a factory job but there aren't that many of them. Until soon?