
The US South’s manufacturing renaissance comes with a heavy price - ayanai
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-23/inside-alabama-s-auto-jobs-boom-cheap-wages-little-training-crushed-limbs
======
hackuser
> The team had a quota of 420 dashboard frames per shift but seldom made more
> than 350

For me, one of the most thought-provoking expressions of the perspective of
the factory worker came from the Studs Terkel book, _Working_ , where he
interviewed a factory worker and UAW local president named Gary Bryner in the
early 1970s or late 1960s. Bryner:

 _" In that little book of quotes I have: 'The workingman has but one thing to
sell, his labor. Once he loses control of that, he loses everything.'" ...

"They use time, stopwatches. They say ... We know it takes so many seconds to
shoot a screw. We know the gun turns so fast, the screw's so long, the hole's
so deep. Our argument has always been: That's mechanical; that's not human."

"The workers said, We perspire, we sweat, we have hangovers, we have upset
stomachs, we have feelings and emotions, and we're not about to be placed in a
category of a machine. When you talk about that watch, you talk about it for a
minute. We talk about a lifetime. We're gonna do what's normal and we're gonna
tell you what's normal. We'll negotiate from there. ..."

"If the guys didn't stand up and fight, they'd become robots too. They're
interested in being able to smoke a cigarette, bullshit a little bit with the
guy next to 'em, open a book, look at something, just daydream if nothing
else. You can't do that if you become a machine. / Thirty-five, thirty-six
seconds to do your job - that includes the walking, the picking up of the
parts, the assembly. Go to the next job, with never a letup, never a second to
stand and think. The guys at our plant fought like hell to keep that right."_

...

I'm not sure how much factory work is still like that, but imagine if that was
your job today ... or for 8 hours per day, for the rest of your life.

~~~
lazulicurio
I work at a manufacturing company in the Midwest and, to me, the confusing
part is where the modern push to treat workers like machines is coming from.
In school, we were taught how Taylor was the "father" of scientific
management, but that his ideas had mostly been superseded by those of Deming,
who was a huge contributor to the post-war manufacturing miracle in Japan. And
yet, the management at my current company---and from what I gather, many
others---is decidedly Taylorist. It's like a race to the bottom where the
prize is... something? I'm honestly not sure.

~~~
a3n
It's short term quarterly thinking. Get my review and bonuses and get out. If
any manager thinks the company will be around, he doesn't really care. He's
not in it to build a company or a legacy or pride, he's there to get his money
and get out.

Driving your workers as fast as possible maximizes your bonus. Who cares what
happens in ten years?

~~~
jz87
Yeah if you read the article what you see is companies saving $7000 to avoid
installing safety devices that ended up causing injuries that costed them
multi-million dollar payouts in lawsuits.

The thing is, the incentives to the executives making these decisions is
skewed. If they avoid investing in safety equipment, they make their bonuses,
which can add up as long as nothing too bad happens. Yet if there is a serious
injury costing the company millions, the worst thing that can happen is they
lose their jobs. For senior executives, the bonuses can be larger than their
base salaries, so the upside is larger than the downside.

------
lotsofpulp
>Elsea was 20 and not easily deterred. “She thought she was rich when she
brought home that first paycheck,” Ogle says. Elsea and her boyfriend got
engaged. She worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, hoping to move from
temporary status at Ajin to full time, which would bring a raise from $8.75 an
hour to $10.50. College can wait, she told her mom and stepdad.

And I wasn't contemplating having a family unless I was making at least
$150k/year...just goes to show how out of touch one can get in your own
network.

~~~
costcopizza
Can anyone comment why so many positions are temporary and contract nowadays?

How did such a shift happen whereby full-time permanent jobs became a luxury?

~~~
martalist
I can think of a few things:

\- global competition, in that factory workers are competing against the
pay/living-standards of those in poorer nations

\- no unions

\- a preparedness of employees to work for a pittance, towards unobtainable
quotas, in unsafe conditions, for dangerously long periods of time.

I'm not sure work gets any more full-time than 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.
"Full-time permanent" sounds like semantics and a loophole for companies to
exploit.

~~~
chaostheory
You probably need to add the continually evolving automation and mechanization
tech to the list.

~~~
martalist
indeed

------
timthelion
Manufacturing is dangerous everywhere. In Europe it is safest the US is also
quite safe. China is much worse, and India is a catastrophe. By doing metal
work in the US and not in China or India, you are saving lives. Fewer
Americans will die then Chinese or Indians would have. The woman who died,
according to the article, "and entered the screened-off area around the robot
to clear the fault herself." She actually went into an area that was marked as
unsafe. Of course, there is a simple fix for this, which is implemented in
many good factories, you can have a gate which you have to open to get into
that area, and by opening the gate you flip a dead switch which must be
manually turned and pressed again in order to restart the robot. Either that,
or there are mats which either turn the machine off or mats which you must be
standing on for the machine to stay on.

I am, however, wary of safty regulations that, for example, make it so that
there has to be a shield with a saftey switch on stamping machines. Here is a
video of how they work
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_WITEHwjqI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_WITEHwjqI)
you can imagine how an unsheilded one is dangerous, but to open the
polycarbonate casing for each part and close it again before stamping is far
slower.

I think that instead, there should be tabular fines for companies. If an
employee loses their finger in a press, then they get fined $200,000 no mater
what tech was used. That leaves it up to the company to figure out a good way
to prevent injuries.

~~~
Spooky23
> I think that instead, there should be tabular fines for companies. If an
> employee loses their finger in a press, then they get fined $200,000 no
> mater what tech was used. That leaves it up to the company to figure out a
> good way to prevent injuries.

In red states, that's known as oppressive regulation where useless bureaucrats
are telling business owners how to do their job.

~~~
timthelion
Using a fine is oppressive regulation or having standards is?

~~~
lovich
Both. If you are incredibly libertarian you view all business as contracts
between consenting adults that the government should only be involved in if
one side welshes on the deal

~~~
eutropia
Gov shouldn't even be involved then except insofar as it is necessary to
establish the rule of law. Lawyers and courts can resolve those deal
disagreements. If a buyer owes the seller money that's the seller's problem.
(in this worldview)

------
macawfish
I was not expecting that. Something out of a science fiction movie.

" _She died the next day. Her mom still hasn’t heard a word from Ajin’s owners
or senior executives. They sent a single artificial flower to her funeral._ "

~~~
wahern
It sounds like a cultural thing.

------
csense
Rust Belt checking in here. My hometown's in a northern union stronghold where
waves of plant closings starting in the 1980's completely wrecked the local
and regional economy. Which still hasn't recovered -- and seems to be getting
worse, after being rocked by the financial crisis a few years ago and the
currently ongoing drug overdose epidemic.

Laws or union restrictions can stop firms from getting away with extremely low
pay, treating their employees like crap and shitting all over the environment.
But only if those firms don't have the option of relocating to other places
that don't have similar restrictions.

I fully recognize Donald Trump has many very obvious shortcomings as a person
and as a politician. But if his election finally results in _shutting down the
global free trade policies that have utterly wrecked my community,_ then all
the negative things I'm sure he'll do likely won't outweigh that single
positive achievement.

~~~
mcphage
Rust Belt checking in here, too. If you're letting the future of your
community ride on hopes of traditional manufacturing jobs coming back, you're
never going to get out of the hole you're in. Getting rid of free trade isn't
going to stop China from roflstomping our manufacturing economy, and whatever
they don't crush, robots will. The future doesn't lie that way, and hoping a
pathological liar was lying to everyone _but_ you is a recipe for disaster.

~~~
malandrew
Even those not in the rust belt have a good reason to want those jobs to stay
here: current account and exchange rates.

The more jobs move abroad, the more money flows out of our economy, bolstering
the purchasing power of those other economies, helping them invest in ways
roflstomp our economy in more ways than just manufacturing.

Rising exchange rates will only hurt those US businesses that rely on exports
when the cost of manufacturing the same goods is higher in the US versus
elsewhere in the world. That said, fully automated businesses should have
approximately the same cost anywhere in the world.

The better our current account, the more our money buys both here in the US
and from the rest of the world.

~~~
a3n
> Even those not in the rust belt have a good reason to want those jobs to
> stay here: current account and exchange rates.

Yes, everyone wants those jobs, or, _jobs_ , to stay. But almost no one
working today has a job that looks anything like a job of 100 years ago, and I
doubt anyone would want those jobs.

Almost every job worked today is going to disappear, or change beyond
recognition that it's still the same job.

Those lost manufacturing jobs are just among the first of the current set of
jobs to disappear. Yes, it's painful and tragic; not because those specific
jobs were lost, but because we have mis-managed the idleness of the people
whose jobs vanished.

The fix is not to cling to jobs that the free market says should not exist,
and that consumers also say should not exist by buying the cheapest available
products, often products not previously available. Some of those consumers are
the very ones that have lost their old jobs.

The only way for _those_ manufacturing jobs to stay or come back is to never
buy anything that didn't exist 50 years ago, and to stay out of Walmart and
Amazon and everywhere else that sells anything at all from outside America.

Who starts?

We've lost the recognition that the reason we band together into communities
and governments is to support each other. We've come to act as if "I've got my
support, sorry you lost yours" is the proper way to treat each other.

We need to stop being so punitive and miserly, automatically blaming people
for their condition. How anyone got anywhere doesn't much matter. How we move
each other to the next better thing is what we should be focusing on.

I despair that we can get anywhere near that as long as quarterly, my bonus,
my election thinking allows the few to stay a few steps ahead of everyone
else. We treat each other as social petri dishes, and we're quite willing to
throw the experiment materials out if it doesn't fit our data, our view of how
we think the world is and how it ought to be.

------
justintocci
My son's were recently offered a job setting up these robots and turned it
down for non-safety reasons. Like it or not, robots will take 80% or more of
the jobs that are returning to the USA from overseas.

The solution we should be thinking about is how to make it so that you don't
have to turn off a robot for it to know a human is in range. Problem solved.

~~~
costatus
This is exactly what the manufactures are working on. Google: Collaborative
Robotics

------
tsomctl
How does this compare to 50 years ago, at the "peak" of US manufacturing?
Obviously, there weren't robots back then to crush people, but there was still
heavy equipment, corrosive and carcinogenic chemicals, etc.

~~~
duskwuff
Calling these machines "robots" is new, but the risks aren't. Workers 50 years
ago would probably recognize most of these machines, and their hazards, given
different names: mill, press, lathe...

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
And there are cartoons from about 100 years ago about the same hazards:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=bull+of+the+woods+machinist&...](https://www.google.com/search?q=bull+of+the+woods+machinist&espv=2&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZ9dySmPDSAhWj24MKHYLWCwgQsAQIKw&biw=1084&bih=547#imgrc=OtCgppDxiVeC0M):

------
woodandsteel
Remember, one of Trump's promises is to reduce governmental regulations on
businesses, and presumably that includes in the factory safety area. Plus you
can expect the Republican-dominated congress to help him out here.

~~~
alphabettsy
Voted on this week: [https://ohsonline.com/articles/2017/02/27/congress-
moving-bi...](https://ohsonline.com/articles/2017/02/27/congress-moving-bill-
to-repeal-2016-recordkeeping-rule.aspx?m=2)

[https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/hjres83/summary](https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/hjres83/summary)

------
vermontdevil
It'll get worse with all these regulations being gutted or ignored over the
next 4 years.

------
leereeves
What's Bloomberg's agenda here?

An article exactly like this one, graphically describing bloody car accidents
from last week, could make the case that driving comes with a heavy price.

Or an article detailing the aftermath of failed surgeries paid for by the ACA:
"universal health care comes with a heavy price".

Terrifying anecdotes are provocative, but unenlightening.

~~~
ky3
The hidden agenda is promoting more laws and regulations. It's like the lawyer
who insists to you that "The more court cases we file, the more justice there
is in the world."

Lots of unsexy but well-paying jobs exist in regulation compliance in the USA.
In fact it's a huge industry that has its share of tech startups with below
average risks of coming up empty.

Sure beats being treated like a robot.

~~~
abiox
is there a laws and regulations lobby?

~~~
ky3
Why lobby when such pieces designed to prick the public's moral indignation
work so much better?

The cognoscenti recognize that lobbying is but one of multiple levers they
could pull.

------
horsecaptin
The US consumer doesn't give a shit about worker's safety, even if those
workers are American. The only people fighting for workers' safety are unions
and no one likes unions.

~~~
allengeorge
This, I think, is the core issue. While unions have their faults, they have
also fought for workers' rights and for reasonable conditions, promotions,
etc. In our drive to demonize unions and fetishize business we've forgotten
that there is a powerful "drive to the bottom", and it doesn't care about who
(or how many) people are in its path.

~~~
jacquesm
The problem with unions is that over time they devolve into yet-another-
powerstructure whose main goal seems to be self preservation rather than to
protect those workers rights leading to all kinds of abuses and nonsense
regulations that in fact harm those workers.

~~~
prawn
You can say this about many/most human-led organisations, right?

I've wondered when we might see someone pitch to YC a technical solution to
what unions do, without the cruft that can come from human influence (losing
sight of purpose, developing corruption, etc). Is there even a way to do it?

~~~
jacquesm
> You can say this about many/most human-led organisations, right?

Yes, that's true.

> I've wondered when we might see someone pitch to YC a technical solution to
> what unions do, without the cruft that can come from human influence (losing
> sight of purpose, developing corruption, etc). Is there even a way to do it?

These are social problems, not technical problems. Solving social problems
requires the cooperation of all the parties involved. Democracy is one nice
example of a technical solution to a social problem, money another. Both rely
heavily on everybody playing by the rules.

