"jim" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:

The key is that manufacturing has had productivity improvements at a
rate
close to twice that of the US economy as a whole for over 20 years;
around
4% annually.

A lot of that is smoke and mirrors.
Accounting tricks really.

No, most of it is real, Jim. I've been reporting on it since 1974, and
I've
watched it happen before my eyes.

Well good. If you are the expert then tell me how
many of the workers out on floor in a typical manufacturing facility
are employees working for temp agencies?


It's something like 10% - 12% of the shop-floor workforce. I don't have
current figures. When I was reporting on it, the number was around 900,000,
which had the effect of increasing the apparent productivity by 0.4% per
year. That probably was the greatest effect in recent history, measured in
the early 2000s.

But that was during the period that manufacturers sharply expanded their
temporary workforce. Once they establish a higher level of temporary
employees, the actual number has no further effect on rates of productivity.
Productivity only changes from thise source when you change the percentage
of temporary workers.


And we are not talking just temporary employees.
Many of the employees in manufacturing from temp agencies
work the same job at the same facility for years.

They're counted as temps, however, in employment figures.


And how many employees used to have jobs that are now
out-sourced to private companies?
How much of the work that used to be done by employees
of the manufacturer is now out-sourced to private contractors?

It doesn't matter. If it's manufacturing work, the output shows up in the
figures from the contradicting companies.


Everything from accountants, engineers, secretaries, custodians,
maintenance, food service employees used to be counted as
manufacturing jobs.

Not in most counts. BLS and similar-quality sources separate
production/non-supervisory positions from management and non-production jobs
in manufacturing. You just have to know what you're looking at, and stories
in the press may require some extra checking to find out.

The workers are still there - they just
aren't counted as part of the workforce any more.

They're still part of the workforce, as they always were. They never were
counted as part of the manufacturing workforce in production-worker counts.


I have been in manufacturing facilities where 3/4 of the
workers in that facility are not on the company payroll.

A typical number in US manufacturing it 10% - 12%.




I know two trained engineers that are working
as tempo's and there are thousands of less skilled workers that
doing manufacturing work as temporary employees
Why?
The whole purpose is to make it look like the
company is squeezing much more work out of its employees
since there is so much work being done with so little payroll.


It's eaten into the manufacturing jobs, and those that remain
require much more education than they used to. So it is a serious
economic
problem but most of it is the result of a combination of productivity
improvements and competition from low-wage countries for the lower-end
work,
especially consumer products.

US manufacturing jobs are taxed at 15%-30%.
Whereas the labor component of goods made abroad are often taxed at 0%

I'm not following you. WHO are you saying is taxed at 15% - 30%?
Individual
workers? If so, that's true, but where are they taxed at 0%?

Most places in the world the lower skilled wages have no tax. Even in
Canada
they have progressive taxation so the lowest wage jobs are taxed at
something
like 3% for a full time employee
In the US it starts at 15% no matter how little the worker makes
It is no wonder that products that involve some low paying jobs
are disappearing.

The tax bracket in Canada is 5% higher than the US, up to $34,500 of taxable
income. (15% up to $41,500 in Canada; 10% up to $8,500 in the US; 15% from
$8,500 to $34,500 in the US). And then Canada's Provincial/Territorial
income tax adds roughly another 5% - 11% on top of that.

I don't think you'll find the answers there.

--
Ed Huntress





--
Ed Huntress

That is a huge cost dis-advantage to US manufacturing labor

-jim





This is a structural issue and no amount of
wishful thinking will change it.

--
Ed Huntress