Politicians and people endlessly drone about the necessity for renewing or bringing back or creating manufacturing jobs, but are manufacturing jobs actually good for a nation’s economy and people?
I’ve always felt like its a matter of aesthetics, surely you’d rather want to create an economy where your people are all highly educated and do skilled work rather than being unskilled laborers in textile factories or some such.
Is there any good data on this topic? I’m really curious because it seems unintuitive
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Manufacturing jobs imply that the production capabilities are also in the host country. The property, plant and equipment (PPE) are located where the jobs are. PPE are ‘hard’ assets and not easily transferable out of the country. They establish an industrial base that the politicians and workers can rely upon. PPE lends stability where service jobs do not. Service jobs can be moved offshore much more easily.
In summary, manufacturing jobs themselves are not the goal. Manufacturing jobs are are good sound bite vs industrial base.
Creating manufacturing jobs that give work to people who are otherwise unemployed or economically inactive is a good thing for an economy.
Creating manufacturing jobs and filling them with people who have the ability (but not opportunity) to do other more highly skilled work is far from optimal strategy for anyone.
Manufacturing is automation. The jobs are much less and more for maintaining the machines than humans performing assembly. There’s still some aspects of it that work better with humans than machines, but I’m sure over time that won’t be true. Literal manufacturing jobs also don’t have much upward mobility other than becoming a manager and you only need so many of those. With that said, I don’t have an answer on what to do with unskilled labor.
10 trillion dollar hit to the market to bring back factories so Americans can make socks for 8 bucks an hour….yeah, must be some kind of special genius to think this is a good plan….
Not everybody wants a college education or a desk job. And some people literally are not capable of either.
If your country has no manufacturing jobs, you are dependent on other countries’ imports. What happens if that other country decides to cut you off?