Joel Koltner wrote:

I wouldn't be surprised if many of the production lines jobs didn't really
require that many more skills than mowing grass does...

I can vouch for that, and I'm not even union and it's not a union shop!
Once we had an NC machine going and they had me, the tech writer/
company geek/detail draftsman sit there and watch it make parts. My
job was to load the blank, hit "go," and watch the machine work; when
it was done I'd take out the part, load the next blank, and so on.
While the machine was making the part, I also had the job of deburring
the previous part, which took about 30 seconds and could be done by
a capuchin monkey.

But they were paying my "tech writer" wage, which was $15.00/hour; it
was OK, though, because the parts I was watching it make were worth
more than that. :-)

Cheers!
Rich