What would you tell your child?
As our manufacturing sector has shed jobs, especially during the past 15 years, there have been few opportunities for young people to start working and train in manufacturing.
Now that manufacturing is picking up just a little, and as the boomer work force hits retirement age, there are reports of a growing shortage of skilled manufacturing workers and allied skills (welders in particular).
So what do tell young people? Get into manufacturing, learn the skills, and you may have a job for an entire career, or maybe for ten years until the offshoring starts again. How do we convince young people, who have seen nothing but deterioration in their lifetimes, that devoting time and energy to manufacturing will have a good payoff?
Or should we tell them the economy is lousy, there may be nothing else, take the job and ride it as long as you can? What would you tell your child?
Interested in your opinions.
Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt
My advice is to hedge. Get the skilled trade training and relevant ticket. If and when the demand ebbs go to colledge and get a degree.
Any evidence of rising wages? If not, there is no shortage. If there is then make a limited investment, one that someone else pays for or one that should pay off withing 10 years. Don’t plan on a career there.
Rusty, fascinating question. Those of us of an age and locales know that “skilled trades” were the pinnacle of manufacturing jobs. Not all could get in and were qualified at that level. So, if the offer was really there, then I certainly would recommend taking it!
Now the “but”. Since it is a very limited quantity of jobs, and availability makes it even more limited, I would recommend getting formal training in any skill. The real pinnacle of blue collar jobs, in my opinion, is the professional electrician and plumber, who can go almost anywhere. Mechanics, auto, truck, jet/aircraft, diesel, etc are also high on my list. Welders, steel workers and to a lesser extent carpenters can also be included, although lower on the list. Any of them can change locations with the jobs.
If we are talking education, then the hard sciences take the tip of the pinnacle, and the professional classes here, Doctors, and engineers, are the most mobile. (Notice no lawyers – my choice)
If you understand my assertion, it is good to be highly trained and even more importantly mobile. Because today’s jobs are certainly not static to a locale. Ohio, Michigan and Texas are good examples.
My advice would be to tell children to discover where their unique abilities lie and to focus on how to use those best to benefit the greater community. Economics and politics have always and will always shift but the person whose vocation is aligned with his or her true nature and who is motivated by something less transitory than the ability to succeed in a particular economic climate will have the best chances of being able to find a place and sense of purpose in the world.
CoRev
hmmm… i agree with you. but i also agree with Laura Lee (below). Unfortunately unless we can solve the political problem, neither approach is going to be very safe. we have no stability because we have embraced a “philosophy” of “creative destruction” which is closely allied to “money is the measure of man.”
i don’t know if it is possible to have a rational economy… with a mixture of stability and room for enterprise… something like what I thought we had in the fifties and sixties… but it seems like until we learn to stop being fooled by the politicians and the “economists” we are going to have … well, what we were warned about worshipping mammon.
Laura
I agree, but there is some danger of raising a generation of “artists” who can’t work.
I would tell them to approach any position as though it might turn into a career or long term job. I don’t see where anyone is harmed by picking up additional skills and being viewed as an asset to a job. I would also encourage them to be realistic about the possibility that the job might not be long term and to keep their eyes open for alternate opportunities that are either better or a better fit to what they want to do.
And this is somehow worse than creating legions of bankers who can’t manage money? MBAs who don’t understand competition? Maybe we need more “artists” who can’t work, at least they can’t muck things up worse.
Next time you are flying knock a couple times on the wall, and it is a good chance it is ‘made’ by a company headquartered in Ohio. The welding is specialized for the company production line. They tried to ‘rehire’ their welders after laying them off for a year and a half plus, and also advertized at 16-20 hour plus some benefits…and got very few takers.
The company is multi national, in that the markets that are profitable are Europe and ‘Asia’ and not the US to date. Production is also done overseas near markets. The company decided to use robots to weld…no health benefits or layoff cost worries seemed attractive given the ‘lack’ of welders that had relevent experience (a common theme…hire those who can step in running). I assume training was ruled out for newbies.
I can guess why the response was not adequate, and so can the company I presume, but my impression was it was not pursued as a research topic so to speak. (I am not implying the company should), so no info there to be had by me.
Several ways to do this:
– Learn a foreign language such as Mandarin to assist you with a global economy if that is your bend.
– Be ready to move to another country as many foreign companies seek out Americans.
– Go to Wall Street as a financial expert, financial engineer, investment analyst, etc. Labor intensive product is dying or will forever be at a much lower level and the physical labor pool at all levels for this type of growth will be abundant for a long time to come and until the population shrinks.
Manufacturing will never return to the levels experienced pre-2001 until it before more profitable to invest in labor intensive industry. Too much money can be made on Wall Street in non-labor vehicles and with banks on 24 and 30% credit cards, etc. than the returns from manufacturing. Why invest in a 3-5% profit making and labor intensive venture when so much more can be made elsewhere and the government sponsors such activity?
– Pass laws that allow states to again regulate usury to negate Marquette National Bank versus First of Omaha Service (SCOTUS 1978)
– Regulate CDS, naked CDS, CDO, rating services beyond today’s joke to bring more transparency to the market and then tax the piss out of them.
Agree, all decisions need to be viewed as short term.
These days.
The CEO of Boeing this past week included in a speech that governments around the world, US included need to encourage young workers to look to the aviation industry.
Not only are there huge demands for new aircraft, there are anticipated demands for hundreds of thousands of highly skilled technicians and pilots, as the boomers retire and air travel grows.
If he is wrong one would have had the chance to work around airplanes, which I did for quite some time.
Idealism is in such low supply today, your’s is quite refreshing.
But maybe not 100% practical.
Welding, especially high tech welding of more complex materials, seems to hit that category.
Welders are as common as dirt. Their lungs get fried with poison gasses and their retinas burn out early. That is one lousy trade.
If kids are not willing get involved in drugs, sex or stolen items then they should seriously consider emigration.
A smart kid who was being warned about the danger of pursuing art as a vocation might be well served to compare the relative staying power of US cultural exports vs industrial ones. Like it or not it’s a lot easier to sell a bad movie, band or book on the world market than a car plane or machine tool.
Of course given his recent hassles with the NLRB you could fairly say he’s just “talking his book”.
“Of course I need an increase in the size of my available work force, it makes them so much easier to exploit!”
Corev somehow inadvertently managed to get something right. Electricians are a respectable bunch, and a shitter fitter can usually find work, but most kids are not smart enough to be a sparky or burly enough to be a plumber.
See also: The emerging “Crisis” in tech and software talent ca. 1998.
Laura’s advice is the most practical available. Even that hand-book of the MBA-and-CEO-wannabe “What Color is Your Parachute” makes the same basic point. The world isn’t going to give you $10M a year to be an investment banker if you vomit on your way to the office every morning. Nobody can act that well.
The most important thing to teach kids is that failure is not synonymous with disaster so much as opportunity. Having the license to fail in non-life threatening situations is perhaps the only reliable contributor to human character that exists. Failing repeatedly only puts you in good company among history’s more celebrated successes.
Many people today recognize Steve Jobs successes with the iPod/Pad/Phone and PIXAR while conveniently forgetting the Lisa, the original slotless Macs, NeXT, the Cube, etc. George W Bush and Donald Trump provide other perhaps less celebrated examples of multiple failures that worked out all right (for them personally anyway).
The second thing is probably a general awareness of how much success largely depends on serendipity, i.e. “The happy accident or unexpected good fortune”. It’s also important to emphasize how often “Luck” requires being prepared to capitalize on life’s opporunities. That awareness ought to undermine an outsized belief in their own contribution to their success. The most insecure and unhappy people I’ve ever met have often been the ones who most loudly and consistently insisted on people’s solitary ability to affect their own fortunes.
And it ought to be a crime to advocate teaching manual skills and craftsmanship to people without providing education on the role of collective action in ensuring those skills and efforts are fairly complensated. e.g.: Teaching people to sew without a lesson in Triangle Shirtwaist, mining without Matewan and Ludlow, machining without River Rouge etc. Learning to work without understanding the sometimes violent history of workers is folly.
cursed
act is most kids aren’t smart enough to be plumbers, as i am learning by doing some plumbing myself.
here is the point: half the people in America have i.q.’s less than 100. Those people need to have jobs… and they should be jobs that leave them a chance to live like human beings.
there is not a goddam thing that any of our Harvard economists are doing about that.
amateur
i couldn’t agree more. but still there is something pathetic about an artist that no one understands.
but they don’t make me as angry as the economists who don’t understand anything.
run
how do you say “yassuh, boss” in Mandarin?
ilsm
the deal is, see, the kid invests thousands of dollars in his education, and the aviation industry hires him at minimum wage because so many other kids are doing the same thing. or it hires him at a premium for a couple of years until it automates, outsources, or finds a way to use jr college graduates at minimum wage.
am soc
true enough, but its a hell of a lot different applying for a job when there are one or two applicants, and applying for a job when there is a line around the block.
be careful of the fallacy that “if i got a job, you should be able to get a job too.”
all sewing these days is done by slave labor in central america or southeast asia. china does it with organ donors.
Coberly:
The pic is from The Peak looking down on Hong Kong and the harbor. I took the pic.
A man operating with a two digit IQ will never make a good plumber.
John Wayne while playing Sgt. Striker in the Sands of Iwo Jima said. “Life is tough, but its tougher is your stupid”. Well stupid people make life tough not only on themselves, but on everyone around them. I got no sympathy for stupid people. Tell stupid people heres a bottle of whiskey and a porsche. Problem solved.
Truth is I always did what I pretty much could stomach and found interesting. I spent 10 years logging and being a potter and 10 years as a grad student. Now I am 4 years in on a tenure track. Work is work and none of it is very secure these days. So tell the youth to get as much education as they can afford in as many practical and abstract fields as they are interested. If they do the applied training first they will be able to pay for the more abstract later.
There are other options to manufacturing. Nobody in my family ever worked in manufacturing. My father’s grandparents were chemists and farmers. My mother’s grandparents were fishermen. My father’s parents were a teacher and a small shop owner. My mother’s parents were a coalminer and a housewife. My father was a chemist and my mother was a housewife.
In short, manufacturing has played absolutely no role in our family’s work history.
cursed
you are right about the intellectual requirements of plumbing. but my point is still that half the people in the country don’t have three digit i.q.’s, We need to come to terms with that. And find them decent work. And, yes, supervise them… though buff thinks that makes me a communist.
unfortunately there are plenty of high i.q. stupid people, some of them working in Washington, and supervising us.
run
i am envious.
i am wearing the remains of a jacket made in Hong Kong by an American company. best jacket i have ever owned and i can’t find another one, so this one is still being worn despite being wort to rags.
And they never used any manufactured products either.
Did they sew their own clothes, build their own cars and boats, make candles for light?
Probably somebody somewhere manufactured those products.
Including the computer you type on.
Mark. I am confused. The question as posed is reasonable even if you are saying it is not the only vision to offer. And the unstated assumptions about our ‘economy’ need addressing. Sometimes macro is way too diffuse for dealing in immediate and daily living or to guide individual choice.
coberly:
It has been a bit since I have been there (5 years); but, I was in Shenzhen and Shanghai last month and am off to Luzon Philippines June/July. Without a doubt, if they did not speak English so well, I would have issues. There is still an understability issue as they understand; but, they do not really understand.
My advice: study medicine — the US will never get health care spending under control; and if you are a good doctor even if the US economy collapses you can migrate to another English speaking country and still have the hope of earning a decent living. Studying anything else is a waste of time.
My first degree is in engineering. An engineering career in the US has a half-life of 7 years, which isn’t enough time (for more than half of the folks who finance their career) to pay off the student loans to get the degree. Like the vast majority of young engineers, I suffered from the libertarian disease and refused to get licensed (it was against my beliefs at that time). There are far more engineers graduating each year than available jobs, and this profession also suffers from boom and bust cycles that make career planning out to be lessons in futility.
My advice to the youngsters is to look for a career that has a high barrier to entry, such as one that requires a license to practice. I’m putting my money where my hypothesis is, by working towards an accounting degree. From what I can tell, CPAs don’t get pushed out the door because they’re too old, they retire when they want to, and many continue to work into their 70s because they feel like it, not because they have to.
And if they don’t want to learn, I can always hold up my kid brother as a shining example of “what not to do.” Someone who couldn’t be bothered to finish anything without quitting (including the military), he has no education, and now a felony conviction, it looks like being homeless is going to be a step up for him.
Not to mention the huge and imminent need for tens of thousands of forensic accountants. The (so far) undetected fraud prosecutions in the banks and pension funds alone would keep an army busy for a decade. Assuming we ever muster the institutional fortitude to hire and employ them.
Hey it might happen.
The best advice to kids today – Learn how to be happy with less of everything. Stay flexible, learn life skills like cooking, fixing your own stuff, home maintenance. Live as cheaply as possible, and even so you will never be able to save enough money for retirement, your kids’ education, a down payment on a home, health care expenses, etc. Until we learn to embrace the common good and pool our resources for these things, they will be out of reach for most of you.
Career advice in these times? Get a dart board.
Knew a guy once who was a money market analyst. He neede to relocate – new wife, I think – and I asked whether that wasn’t a substantial financial burden. Nope. He got calls about once a quarter to go back into high-end cabinetry and it was always a temptation. Leaving a job was not a problem because he had a white collar career and a craft.
New a woman once who was pursuing a PhD in music history. I asked her the usual question – how you gonna make that pay. Answer – she wasn’t. She did taxes for small businesses to make money and studied music history for love. If a teaching job opened up, she’d be happy to try, but she’d always do taxes on the side, because taxes would always be her fall-back job.
We make a big deal about education, but often there appears to be little thought beyond “more”. Getting ever more training in one field just to stay competitive may not be the best choice. Diversifying skills might be the right choice for a good many people.
I just figured out today you’re anti-union and so you are anti-labor.
You’ve got hell to pay for being such a deceiptful dipshit.
Guess what? I was in once a union. I’m about to rip you a new one.
The question is being posed by an anti labor advocate.
I think the advice is the same as it ever was. You have your job, and you have your hustle. You job keeps you fed and housed, and your hustle fills in the gaps. Always have at least two marketable skills. Be flexible. A friend of mine always wanted to be a carpenter, and worked his ass off to get there, and to get to be a foreman. Made a metric butt-load of money. Then he ups and quits, and goes to paramedic school. I thought he was nuts. Six months later, the housing crash happened, and he’s got a job where the rest of his coworkers are screwed. Now he does carpentry work on the side.
As for manufacturing, I’m not sure what the big deal is about manufacturing. Those are dull, mostly dead end jobs. (Dead end in that you have to basically accept that if you want to continue in that field, you have to accept that your standards of living will never change. You’ll make about the same money, after inflation, as you did when you started. If you are smart, lucky and thrifty, you come out the other end with a paid-for house and a pension.)
I think the advice is the same as it ever was. You have your job, and you have your hustle. You job keeps you fed and housed, and your hustle fills in the gaps. Always have at least two marketable skills. Be flexible. A friend of mine always wanted to be a carpenter, and worked his ass off to get there, and to get to be a foreman. Made a metric butt-load of money. Then he ups and quits, and goes to paramedic school. I thought he was nuts. Six months later, the housing crash happened, and he’s got a job where the rest of his coworkers are screwed. Now he does carpentry work on the side.
As for manufacturing, I’m not sure what the big deal is about manufacturing. Those are dull, mostly dead end jobs. (Dead end in that you have to basically accept that if you want to continue in that field, you have to accept that your standards of living will never change. You’ll make about the same money, after inflation, as you did when you started. If you are smart, lucky and thrifty, you come out the other end with a paid-for house and a pension.)
I think the advice is the same as it ever was. You have your job, and you have your hustle. You job keeps you fed and housed, and your hustle fills in the gaps. Always have at least two marketable skills. Be flexible. A friend of mine always wanted to be a carpenter, and worked his ass off to get there, and to get to be a foreman. Made a metric butt-load of money. Then he ups and quits, and goes to paramedic school. I thought he was nuts. Six months later, the housing crash happened, and he’s got a job where the rest of his coworkers are screwed. Now he does carpentry work on the side.
As for manufacturing, I’m not sure what the big deal is about manufacturing. Those are dull, mostly dead end jobs. (Dead end in that you have to basically accept that if you want to continue in that field, you have to accept that your standards of living will never change. You’ll make about the same money, after inflation, as you did when you started. If you are smart, lucky and thrifty, you come out the other end with a paid-for house and a pension.)