I feel like we need to get better at manufacturing as a nation.
This is a complex problem, but I don’t think it is necessarily a hard problem. It will, however, take about a generation to really solve.
A big part of the problem is that we need to make the hard work of manufacturing more attractive for both manual laborers and white-collar workers.
First, we need to make skilled labor more attractive.
We need to stop automatically telling kids they should go to college and instead help them find the right fit. I was never explicitly told that I needed to go to college, but there was a strong cultural influence pushing me in that direction.
Part of helping kids find the right fit is helping them understand the cost-to-career benefit of college. College can be a great investment, but that doesn’t mean every degree at every price is a great investment. Skilled trades should be presented as another legitimate path, not the path you take if college doesn’t work out.
We also need to improve the working environment for manual laborers.
I don’t know if we can ever make manufacturing hours as nice as a banker’s hours, but we should try. That might mean hiring more people so the hours aren’t as long. We should try to level out some of the boom-and-bust cycles that result in people periodically being laid off. And companies need to treat people better. Workers are not pieces of equipment.
Maybe there is value in unions here, although I think that system needs some improvement too.
We also need to think much more seriously about the physical toll of this work.
Manual laborers should be taught how to maintain their bodies, and companies should have real programs designed to keep people from destroying their bodies over a 20- or 30-year career. Athletes have physical regimens designed to keep their bodies functioning. Why shouldn’t someone whose livelihood also depends on their body?
Part of the reason people have pushed their kids toward “brain work” instead of manual labor is that manual labor can break down your body. If we want people to choose these careers, we should take that problem seriously.
There also needs to be a career path for someone after they have done enough physical labor. A 25-year-old and a 55-year-old probably shouldn’t be expected to do the exact same job. Experience should create a path toward training, supervision, maintenance, planning, quality, or other work where decades of knowledge are valuable even if someone’s body can’t keep doing the same physical work.
And we need to pay people better.
If this work is important, pay people like it is important.
Work seems to end up where the money goes. If manufacturing is really strategically important to the country, then eventually money has to go there too.
I am afraid that right now we are paying lip service to the problem. We say we need more manufacturing, but we also say we don’t want the things we buy to cost more.
Those two ideas may not be compatible.
There is another side of this that I don’t think gets talked about enough: manufacturing may simply be a harder business than people realize.
You have the constraints of the physical world. You have equipment, materials, suppliers, quality problems, maintenance, logistics, and a large number of people who all have to be rowing in the same direction. You have to invest money before you can produce anything, and it can take a long time for that investment to pay off.
Compare that with businesses where another customer can sometimes be added with very little additional cost.
Maybe one reason we have gotten worse at manufacturing isn’t simply that we stopped valuing factory workers. Maybe we also stopped valuing the kind of companies that employ them.
If every company is primarily treated as a financial instrument that needs to maximize its return over the next few quarters, manufacturing is going to have a hard time competing for capital against businesses that can produce faster returns.
Rebuilding manufacturing, then, isn’t just about building factories.
It means rebuilding the ecosystem around them: the workers, the career paths, the working conditions, the skills, the management systems, and the willingness to invest money for a long time before seeing the return.