from Hacker News

American Labor’s Real Problem: It Isn’t Productive Enough

by ceohockey60 on 9/23/23, 4:54 AM with 40 comments

  • by Animats on 9/23/23, 5:26 AM

    Boeing moved production from Seattle, where they had people with experience building airplanes, to North Charleston, South Carolina, and cut pay. Of course they now have people who don't know what they are doing.

    There's a more general problem. Who goes to college to learn how to set up a factory? Where do you go to learn that? That's a difficult skill, and it helps to have done it a few times as a junior before you're in charge. What happens if you don't know how is that you have to let the people who sell you the machinery set up your factory. This works for simple stuff, like a bakery, which you can buy turnkey. More complex stuff, not so much. Worse, much of the knowledge doesn't transfer. If you know how to design a production line for metal furniture, that may not translate well to batteries. One of the things that auto manufacturers have painfully discovered is that a battery plant is partly a chemical plant, which is not something automakers know much about.

    Machine design is quite hard, not that many people are good at it, and it pays less than coding webcrap. The US used to have people who were good at this, and most of them were laid off in the 1980s.

  • by pseudo0 on 9/23/23, 5:22 AM

    > For example, American manufacturers use far fewer robots than their competitors, in particular in Taiwan, South Korea and China, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank.

    Just handwaving this aside is ridiculous. Productivity is a function of capital investment in technology. If all the free capital is going into share buybacks, $5 billion in the last year, no wonder productivity is flat.

    https://www.levernews.com/automakers-hand-billions-to-shareh...

  • by Animats on 9/23/23, 5:41 AM

    Whenever you encounter an executive who complains they can't get qualified people, ask how many people they have in training classes right now. Large companies used to have large training programs, to go along with a stable workforce, and a good pension plan. A few still do. Yes, after they finish training you have to pay them more.

  • by jjoonathan on 9/23/23, 5:37 AM

    Our macro policy pumps assets and dumps exports. Our manufacturing workers must be more productive in the colloquial sense to be as productive in the economic sense. The headline weaponizes this nuance to read like "our workers are lazy." This is intentional, and it is ugly.

  • by metabagel on 9/23/23, 5:17 AM

    Why does this argument never apply to executive compensation?

    https://www.businessinsider.com/uaw-strike-automaker-ceo-pay...

  • by dangus on 9/23/23, 5:59 AM

    A Murdoch rag has an anti-worker pro-ownership class article. News at 11.

    If automotive CEOs don’t want their assembly line employees to demand 40% raises, maybe they shouldn’t take 40% raises themselves. Since they have more than enough money to live on in multiple homes and boats they should have no problem making themselves an example of austerity for their employees.

  • by fzeroracer on 9/23/23, 5:42 AM

    Maybe if companies put time and effort into training and retaining employees they wouldn't be fighting brain and productivity drain.

    I've seen this happen enough in software companies to know it's already a problem. They want 10x engineers but aren't willing to pay even 2x rates and sure as fuck aren't willing to give them good raises to keep them around.

    Trying to browbeat labor into being more productive isn't going to work. Unless they really want the return of how unions used to behave a century ago.

  • by throwawaysleep on 9/23/23, 5:50 AM

    The cult of American ignorance doesn’t help as well as the idea of manufacturing as “real” work.

    Americans sympathize with people who complain that a Mexican took their job rather than telling them that if someone with 4 years of education can do what they do with 12 for 1/8th the pay, they are utterly pathetic.

  • by delecti on 9/23/23, 5:13 AM

  • by sharts on 9/23/23, 1:24 PM

    Typical WSJ hit piece. When capitalist lack critical thinking skills and cry that the rate of their wealth isn’t increasing fast enough, one can be sure WSJ writers will provide soothing words. Even if they are false.

  • by 000ooo000 on 9/23/23, 5:22 AM

    >Pay is ultimately tied to productivity

    This must be why CEO pay, relative to worker pay, has increased so much over the last few decades!

    /s