Greetings and Salutations...

On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 08:03:42 -0400, "Bruce Hunt"
wrote:

This thread got kind of long, but it was interesting. I teach welding and
machining at a vocational school near Roanoke, VA and train high school kids
for jobs, many of which should be found in manufacturing. True, our
manufacturing base has eroded to the point where I have to educate kids in
what a machine shop is! When I was a kid (10-12 years old) I had never seen
a machine shop, but just by listening to my dad talk while he tinkered I
knew what they did. Today, at least among the kids I work with, there is no
family memory of someone being a machinist or industrial mechanic. They sure
do know what MTV is though, and can play the hell out of a video game! Are
we looking at this thing backwards? Have the jobs followed the labor? I
struggle to get kids interested in this field, particularly the best and
brightest who would make good engineers. The angle I take with most of the
kids now is that they need to learn everything they can, be competent in as
many technologies as they can, have good people skills, and learn to be
professional. That is the best job security. While they won't spend 30 years
working on the same line and retire with a fat pension, they should be able
to live comfortably and not be chronically unemployed. And there will always
be room for the man in this country that can repair anything, as well as be
a craftsman with an artistic flair. Just my dos centavos.
Bruce


Yea, it is an interesting point to debate, and, can be chewed
over for quite a while. This is a good point you bring up here.
IMHO, it is kind of mixed. First off, starting, early 50s (and
perhaps perhaps, as early as the late 40s), there was an increasing
change in attitude in American society. Through much of our history,
college was a goal for a fairly small section of society, and, it was
pretty much accepted that this was the case. For much of society,
High School WAS their "higher education", and, for many folks, only
a year or two of that, as they moved out into the "real" world and
started working.
However, sometime in that period, after WW2, the paradigm
changed to the attitude, which persists today, that EVERYONE needed
to go to college and get a degree. In the 60s and 70s, when I was
in elementary and high school, while there was still some attention
paid to the vocational arts, the whole emphesis of the system was
to prepare each of us to go to college and "get the sheepskin".
The problem here was that there was an implied attitude that
the only "good" job, the only job that was respected, was one
that required a college degree - typically a management/white
collar job. Jobs that involved getting one's hands dirty were
implicitly or explicitly denegrated. The attitude was that
folks that did work with their hands were not as bright
as other folks, and, that "we" were better than that.
So...for several decades now, we have had an erosion
of knowledge and skills required to actually DO the hands-on
manufacturing necessary for an industrial base, and, an
increasing prejudice against folks that DID that sort of thing.
That narrowing base of people that were capable of and
interested in manufacturing meant that there were fewer folks
available for work. The laws of supply and demand kicked in,
and wages went up (of course, the Unions had some influence
in this too).
Added to this mix is the fact that transportation
became cheaper and easier with the advent of increasingly
large cargo ships.
These things all came together to "suddenly" make
it both feasible and economical to manufacture an item
many thousands of miles from its market, transport it,
and still be able to sell it at an economic price.
When THIS kicked in, the manufacturing nations (China,
Tiawan, Korea, India, etc) also started implementing national
policies which fostered this sort of trade, making it
even cheaper and easier for them to take over the
manufacturing jobs in the USA.
Yet another factor is the evolution of focus
in today's business world. Today, the attitude seems to be
"make as much money as possible for us and for the
shareholders and who cares what the product is". While
the purpose of business has ALWAYS been to make money,
it seems to me that 30 years ago, there was a pride of
product in that process. The atttitude seemed to be
more that of "Let's make a great product, that folks will
be REALLY attracted to, and make a ton of money off it".
Combining that with the fact that today's world is
a lot tougher for business, what with the increased
costs, smaller margins and almost cancer-like growth
of government bureaucracy, regulations and laws, really
forces the American businessman to outsource as
much of the work as possible. Paying an American
worker $15 or more an hour to sew pants might
destroy a business, whereas paying someone in
a Third World nation $5/day to produce the same
thing means that they show great profits.
Speaking of cancer, another factor in this whole
bag of worms is the attitude that the only way
a company can be considered "good" is if it shows
a growth of return in every Quarter. If a
company returns the same dividend for two or
three quarters in a row, it is looked upon with
suspicion, and, the stock's value may fall. It
has been my observation that the only thing that
grows continually is cancer...and we KNOW how
good that is for an organism.
The bottom line is that as long as Americans
follow the path where continual, growing returns on
investments; always searching for the lowest price;
and folks that work with their hands are looked upon
with scorn are the rules of the game, our jobs will
continue to vanish overseas.
At some point, I expect that things will
collapse, simply because if all the revenue sources
are gone, we will not have the bucks to buy those
imports from overseas, and, our country will appear
weak enough to be easy pickings for one of the other
countries in the world. That will be a time of
serious chaos for America...and one that I am
not sure can be avoided.
Regards
Dave Mundt