Maybe Domestic Manufacturing Should Come Back

Eric Medlin

History instructor. Writer. Rising star in the world of affordable housing.

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24 Responses

  1. Brent F says:

    Unless your suggesting the government highly subsidize low productivity manufacturing, then domestic manufacturing is people with advanced degrees running robots, not high school grads getting jobs at Ford.

    Maybe instead of that, you should unionize the service industry so that job is as good as an old factory job.Report

    • Damon in reply to Brent F says:

      Who’s going to pay 50 dollars for a Starbuck’s coffee after you do that?Report

      • Philip H in reply to Damon says:

        given how many Starbucks have successfully unionized, please show us the representative price increases . . .Report

      • Brent F in reply to Damon says:

        Apply the same logic to manufacturing, why should a washing machine cost 20,000 in direct and indirect costs because people fetishize the factory floor experience.Report

        • Damon in reply to Brent F says:

          I was simply taking your comment “Maybe instead of that, you should unionize the service industry so that job is as good as an old factory job” and running with it. What’s a reasonable union wage? 25/HR This gets you @ 52K a year. That’s a decent factory wage, and it’s in line with what BMW is paying production workers in Greenville SC. That wage is NOT sufficient to support yourself in a lot of areas….Northern Virginia, much of Cali, etc. So, while it may not be 50 dollars for a cup of coffee, it damn well may be more like 2 or 3 x the current cost, or even more.

          Indeed has Baristas making 7 to 22 dollars per hour in DC. If everyone was moved up to 25 dollars per hour, the marginal costs would be significant. How’s a company to offset that cost increase? Higher productivity, lower non labor costs? Not sure that’s gonna happen without a price increase.Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to Damon says:

        There’s a unionized Starbucks right in my neighborhood. I could walk there from my house if I were of a mind to drink Starbucks (as opposed to the superior product available at a closer, local coffeehouse). Coffee there costs no more than at a non-unionized Starbucks elsewhere in the city.

        There are also a few fast food places that have unionized here as well, particularly a local chain called Burgerville. Not every Burgerville location is unionized but the two closest to my home are.

        The only difference I’ve noticed at these unionized coffee and fast food places is that I am presented with an opportunity to leave a tip for the staff when I pay electronically. Upon inquiry, I find that the tips are pooled. I’ve noticed no differences whatsoever in the prices of the products or the quality of the service.Report

  2. Philip H says:

    Manufacturing jobs overall appear to have peaked in the US about 1978, and then fallen, though they were already coming back beginning in 2010 (https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling-manufacturing-employment.htm).While a good many liberals like to blame the free trade agreements, the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement (which became NAFTA) wasn’t signed until 1988. Some of the subtrends are fascinating, but it’s unlikely that old school large item manufacturing will ever come back to the US.Report

  3. North says:

    Gotta go with Brent on this. Onshoring manufacturing may create some jobs but they’ll be overwhelmingly high tech, high skill jobs and modest in numbers. I suppose there’ll be some loaders, movers and forklift drivers too (but don’t knock the latter, forklift driving is a high skill job) but there’ll be nothing like the leijons of manufacturing employees that Eric is happily imagining.
    We did, do and will manufacture a lot of stuff- but we don’t use a lot of people to do it anymore.Report

    • InMD in reply to North says:

      I think this is true but also that there is a strong case for exercising way more discretion in which points of origin we accept. One of our biggest assets as a country is a big rich consumer market and we shouldn’t sell access to it short. For better or worse (mostly worse) it’s also become clear that the cheapest sources of manufacturing aren’t necessarily the best if they serve to empower adversarial countries like China. There are times where it really is worth paying a little extra if it helps friendly countries, or even just small countries that pose no real threat no matter how rich they get.Report

      • North in reply to InMD says:

        I am 110% on board with “friendshoring”; I’m not at all a free trade absolutist. Trade, particularly with a market like ours, should be used at least partially as an instrument of foreign policy.Report

  4. Damon says:

    Any domestic programs to bring manufacturing back to the state should be focused on critical components needed for our industries and those that support the military and near military areas. Given the restrictions on sourcing many parts from China, due to security concerns, I’ve seen it become much harder to source stuff during covid/post covid because there are fewer and fewer “safe” alternatives than China.Report

  5. LeeEsq says:

    There is no evidence that bringing back manufacturing jobs would reverse the feelings that lead to the rise of Trumpism, more driven by hatred of social change.Report

  6. PD Shaw says:

    I think Keynes was right that for high-income countries, at least larger ones, the benefits of free trade become rather insignificant in most cases and begin to give way to the advantages of “bringing the product and the consumer within the ambit of the same national, economic, and financial organization.”

    “I sympathize…with those who would minimize, rather than with those who maximize, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel – these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and above all, let finance be primarily national.” (Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency”)Report

  7. Chip Daniels says:

    This is where I bang the drum about automation and AI.

    Manufacturing isn’t going to ever again require vast armies of worker bees. The only place where the massive factories employing tens of thousands of people are in places where humans are so cheap and disposable that they are literally cheaper than machines.

    Even now most machine shops use software and CCM to craft machine parts, and the human components range from low skill to high, but very few.

    It just doesn’t take very many humans to produce a prodigious amount of stuff and never will.Report

  8. Dark Matter says:

    Energy costs are going up. Demographics are going down, way down. Fewer young people, more retirees, especially in China. Russia is getting kicked out of the global networks, China might manage to do the same.

    We will probably see a return of domestic manufacturing to some degree.Report

    • My own opinion is that the fundamental question is, “Can the working population produce the goods and services the overall population wants (in a realistic sense) to consume?” Automation can lift a lot of the burden for things. Increasing skillful software helps on the services end. Hardest parts would seem to be hands-on services like staff at nursing and dementia facilities.Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to Dark Matter says:

      Forced to return to domestic manufacturing, as inflation returns to our shores.

      Yes. However after that we might be looking at a 1950’s style boom because North America’s demographics are that much better than everyone else. The American Market is going to be a big deal.

      Kicking Russia out of the global networks has dramatic, world-altering implications to Breton Woods II.

      Russia going full genocidal expansionistic no-rules empire has deeper implications to various systems than that.

      You can’t let yourself be addicted to their oil because they might turn it off to make you freeze. You can’t have your people in the country because they might be forced at gunpoint to die on the front line. You can’t have your assets in their country because they will be stolen. You can’t trade with them because any economic benefits they might get will be used to commit war atrocities.

      We’ve lost a gas station and the source of a good amount of the world’s minerals that we would have used for the green revolution.Report

  9. Burt Likko says:

    Particularly given that modern robotics means that any American manufacturing renaissance will probably not bring massive numbers of jobs along with it (and thus not provide a substantial amount of the psychological benefits spoken of in the OP), it bears a moment’s thought as to why we would want more manufacturing here.

    There will be some jobs, of course.

    It would boost our GDP.

    It would cultivate industrial infrastructure.

    It could help our import-export ratio.

    It would allow us more control over how the goods are made (specifically thinking about environmental concerns here).

    It could be a point of national pride.

    All of these things may well be worth it and important. Certainly they all sound good. My point here is that it is important to not see growth in our manufacturing sector as an inherent good, but rather as a means to some other end. It helps us have an intelligent discussion and make intelligent decisions in pursuit of this goal if we understand the benefit we seek.Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to Burt Likko says:

      Make supply chains less subject to disruption, be it from Covid, Evil Dictatorships, Pirates, transportation, or whatever.

      Risk is a thing as those who were expecting Russia to play nice (Germany) have found out.Report