When I imagine those thousands of new "high-paying" auto manufacturing jobs, I have to wonder how many of them will be nothing more than oiling the robots.
Trump is hell-bent on killing OSHA in the process of getting rid of unions. These unions are vital for workplace safety. We will see a rise in injuries and maybe even in deaths.
Here's another thing---when and if the factories return the vast majority of work will be done by robots. The people involved will need some specific technical training. We will not be able to compare this type of operation to what happened in "the good old days".
AND no one in my family LOVED being a factory worker, but it definitely fed and clothed us while keeping a roof over our heads.
Thankfully the unions lift all boats; I saw that in my own life working in management.
At DOL, I was parliimentartian in OSHA regulation hearings --. last I was involved -- silicon heaings in 2014. Yesterday, I was told that agencies like the FLRA, Federal Labor Relations Authority, were due to be phased out by June. I am advised the MSHA -- Mine Safety and Health Administration -- inspectors have been also been phased out.
Thom didn't mention that there is a Musk/Amazon case pending that may mean the death knell for collective bargaining, for the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, that may be the predicate to the elimination of a right to organize. https://prospect.org/labor/2025-02-05-musk-bezos-war-collective-bargaining/
I did not hear OSHA hearings per se -- they have their own cadre of judges -- but we heard about 26 kinds of whistleblower cases that are investigated by OSHA and many other types of cases where OSHA was involved.
Musk and Bezos argue that the NLRB’s power to charge unions and employers for labor law violations and have administrative courts hold hearings and rule on those charges is unconstitutional. Upheld by the Supreme Court in 1937 that had gone unchallenged ever since.
Among other cases that were within my jurisdiction were workers' comp type statutes, "traditional" labor law, like child labor and wage and hour disputes and the DOL Office of Labor-Management Standards.
My former colleagues have been under attack is certain other areas, even before the eclection, like our immigration cases -- 22 kinds of visa cases. In essence, the argument is that any case should go to US District Court if money damages are involved.
What an excellent history lesson. One thing missing from Thom's overview is what motivated killing off unions. Factory workers vote too, so it is a self-inflicted wound. What I observed over the past 7-plus decades is the GOP successfully equating unions with socialism and socialism with communism. Of course, Russian communism scared the crap out of Europ and the US out of fear that unions would retard the profitability of "capitalist" businesses. A consequence of that myth- building is that all Americans boast that they are capitalists, when in fact, very few actually are living off their wealth.
The problem with Russian and Chinese communism is dictatorship, not economics.
What the socialism=communism myth has achieved is to give Republicans leverage to pass laws weakening unions. Most Americans have no idea what they are missing out on by opposing socialist policies and programs because few Americans ever visit Denmark or any other EU country. Even when they do, they visit in American bubbles that insulate them from the inhabitants. OMG, college is free? Healthcare too? And, it is as good as what US capitalism provides for a price - a very high price.
Unfortunately, thanks to movie-actor Reagan and real-estate mogul Trump, Americans have been conned and brainwashed to accept GOP myths, regardless of party affiliation. Like the movie "Wall Street" made clear, American business long ago tossed its moral compass and replaced it with a simple philosophy: "Greed is Good." This notion is gradually eliminating middle-class prosperity. Only unions or a progressive legislature like FDR's can change that.
One of Reagan's first acts was to eliminate the union that represented air traffic controllers.
One of my law shcool classmates was appointed a couple of times as genral counsel to the NLRB although he openly espoused abolishing collective bargaining.
Many people died to organize unions. It was necessary for survival because workers were living on starvation wages, much like today. More people are insecure about food and housing than our outdated measures of GDP and unemployment reveal. Automation is likely to create an oversupply of labor which will likely require a universal basic income to prevent riots and the slaugher of protestors, which I believe Trump and his "morons" will gladly oversee.
Manufacturing will never come back to America. I vividly remember the beginning of the environmental movement, Rachel Carsons, A Quiet Spring, the Love Canal problem, Pittsburgh was so unhealthy that some form of lung disease was de jure, one could walk across the Hudson River, not swim in it, our rivers and streams were polluted, the air in cities unbreathable. My sisters family moved from Pomona , CA to Mt Airy Md, because the family was contracting asthma.
LA had a perpetual fog of pollutants. We cleaned up our polluted country, by exporting the industries to Mexico and Asia.
The local communist organizer in my college, held a meeting and waved the book, The Greening of America in which he claimed was the tool to kill capitalism. hard de har har, what an ignorant fool.
Unions didn't help either. To justify their salaries and perks, Union offiicals kept demanding greater wages and benefits, way beyond justifiable. In the 1970's UAW members were getting $45 an hour as I recall, while the minimum wage was $1 an hour.
And of course the price of labor is, in great part, what makes up the price of the product.
American cars were too expensive, Japanese cars were cheaper, but then tariffs forced the Japanese, followed by the Koreans, to move their assembly factories to America and where did they move to? Right to work for less states in the South. Boeing moved some of it's assembly to Kansas and Georgia for the same reason.
What we do now is assemble equipment, whose parts are made all over the world.
Boeing's Shenyang Commercial Aircraft Corporation (SACC), a subsidiary of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), manufactures parts for the 777, including horizontal stabilizers and tips for the vertical fin and horizontal stabilizer
Canada makes the landing gear.
Scheduled aircraft maintenance is performed in El Salvador, by people who can't read English, the tech manuals are kept in the office under lock and key.
If a corporation wants to return manufacturing to America, it will take years to get the permits, and build the factory, not to mention the specialized technological machinery and robots needed to build today's cars, computers and toys.
What does America export? Grain (wheat, rye, corn), apples, grapes, oil. The computers and cell phones sold by Dell and Apple are actually made in Asia. Our clothing is made in Central America and Asia. Most of the food we eat is imported from Asia, we even import beef from Brazil.
Whole Foods canned goods brand, 365 is canned in Asia, our farmed shrimp comes from Asia.
The Gulf of Mexico is so polluted by oil spills that you don't want to eat their seafood, and many fishermen who have made a living have closed shop and gone bankrupt.
And the pollutants that we exported don't stay exported, the are carried back to us by ocean and atmospheric currents, just like the sands of the Sahara feed the coral reefs of the Caribbean, carried by the wind.
And the plastics that we need to live comfortably, show up in our bodies, Latest find is nano plastics in penis's.
Trump is full of it but Biden did a wonderful job of bringing back some -- CHIPS.
Job Creation:
The CHIPS Act aims to create jobs in both construction and manufacturing of semiconductor facilities.
The Commerce Department reports that the incentives will create more than 115,000 jobs, including 78,000 construction jobs and 36,000 production jobs.
Some reports estimate that the act will create about 93,000 construction jobs as chip factories go up in the United States and 43,000 permanent jobs once they're in operation.
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) estimated that a $50 billion investment would help create an estimated 10 additional chip factories in the US, creating 42,000 direct jobs and 101,500 indirect jobs.
Economic Impact:
The CHIPS Act aims to revive U.S. manufacturing of semiconductors and reduce the country's reliance on foreign-made computer chips.
The act is expected to add $24.6 billion annually to the U.S. economy and would create an average of 185,000 temporary jobs annually throughout the U.S. economy from 2021 and 2026.
The US could see about 42,000 direct jobs at the companies building these factories and 101,500 indirect jobs at chipmakers' suppliers.
Workforce Development:
Over $250 million of CHIPS funding is earmarked for local community workforce development, guided by local stakeholder input, including from academic institutions, training providers, and labor unions.
The industry anticipates a demand for highly-skilled workers of all levels of education, with one estimate expecting at least 25,000 new roles for technicians without four-year degrees and a similar level of demand for highly-educated engineers by 2030.
CHIPS act was a necessary because Intell sat on it's fat ass, instead of investing in R&D and upgading technology, it decided to reward investors with profits.
Same problem with Boeing, from a company that would rather close it's doors than build an unsafe airplane, the board of directors hired sociopaths that were interested in one thing only, the quarterly Profits and Earnings statement and Return on Investment. and then the planes started coming apart. Do you really want to fly in an airplane whose Vertical stabilizer was made in China, that uses electronic components made in China.
Think of how many of our aircraft and battlefield weaspons have electronic components made in China.
All China has to do is stop exporting and our defense industry and indeed our economy will come to a halt, as I said our super power is that we are a consumer, and producer nations actually have power over us.
Yes Mr. Solomon, electronic chips are an important, relatively new product. And old Joe Biden did his best to encourage them here in the U.S.
But the constituent elements that go into the construction of chips cross many international borders as they are shipped on their way to the chip factory. About 80%+ of all known sources of rare earth minerals come from China. Trump is ruining this gift from Biden with tariffs and other dumbbell policies; some of which [the dumbbell policies] are no more than Trump's punishment of his domestic enemies.
Mr. Solomon, organic elements to design a battery are intriguing. But it is the non-renewable natural resources of copper and zinc which constitute the heart of the potato example you pointed to. The potato is the medium for electron or ion drift. While the metals actually do the job.
Mr. Solomon, I have always believed that if some brilliant engineer figures out a way to make a battery from aluminum; the game will be over. Because aluminum is the most abundant metal found in the earth's surface.
Well, I just read that some Japanese company has developed a battery based on aluminum. After it has been exhausted to zero and recharged 10,000 times; it still retains 90% of its life.
Almost too good to be true?
Almost.... The batteries deliver a slightly lower wattage per pound of overall weight when compared to currently used lithium-cobalt-nickel batteries. So very large batteries are required to do the work of the smaller "inferior" current batteries. But hey, engineers can never leave anything alone. They are always improving things.
Mr. Farrar, what in the world makes you think UAW workers were making $45 per hour in the 1970s? Line workers at Fisher Body made around $4 per hour. I know. I worked there. My pay was $3.14 per hour, as I was a new hire.
Maybe it wasn't the 70's but I have memory, and remember that number.
Here is what AI generative says:
While there's no specific historical point where auto workers universally earned $45 an hour, the United Auto Workers (UAW) has demanded a 40% pay raise over four years, which would increase the top rate to roughly $45 an hour.
Why not AI gets it right sometimes,sometimes it doesn't In this case AI conformed my own memory,so yes. I don't know the specifics of when and where, but I do remember the number and thought then, this is outrageous, especailly when I got tired of hearing the rattle in my 56 Ford door,and found an empty whiskey bottle (drinking on the line), also found a wrench under the back seat embedded in the sound deadening coating on a 1960 Corvair.
Mr. Farrar, what AI gave you is a prediction, based on questionable assumptions. What I gave you is fact. I was there. Think again about what AI is doing. I think you will agree with me that it is a prediction.
As for the rattle in your car and the whiskey bottle you found in it. I can vouch for that kind of thing because I watched as an alcoholic who worked on the line repeatedly put empty whiskey bottles into the door vacancies of Buick doors at Fisher Body. I installed sound deadening in Buick doors[and I had other duties as well]. That sound deadening stuff fell off after several years of regular driving. It was a cost-saving measure which was cheaper than designing tighter-fitting body panels and doors which would reduce rattle noise. Cadillacs were more expensive partly because they produced closer tolerances on their body and door panels. If you looked closely at those old Cadillacs they looked aesthetically more pleasing because of the closer-fitting seams.
Fords in the 1950s were notorious for rattling and squeaking. Your whiskey bottle was a cherry on the cake. Ford cars were coming off the line at river rouge in those days with rust already showing on the inside of the rocker panels. Ford steel was so inferior that the company could not sell their over-supply on the international market. No one would buy it.
Ford has immensely improved its cars since then. But only because the Japanese competition eventually forced them to do so.
I predict that Ford will, for various reasons [too detailed to go into here], take a huge bite out of Tesla's sales. Tesla threw down the gauntlet and Ford picked it up. Tesla is now in for a rough ride, due at least largely, to Ford. Anyone who doubts this, should look into the history of what the Big Three did to John DeLorean.
AI did not give me a prediction Gerald. AI does not predict the past. Your personal experience is one thing, but my memory accords with what AI said.
As regards Fords. I bought a six cylinder Maverick in 1969, a 1970 model, I drove it hard 13 years, 113,000 miles, Some asshole stole the gas cap cover and I didn't find out until there was water in the gas tank, it rusted of course and the rust would clog up my inline filter, I would stop, clean out the inline filter by blowing through it, and continue on.
With that problem I drove from Illinois to Panama in 1975, stopping a few times to clean out the filter. My tool kit was a flat nose screw drive and a pair of pliers, that is all I ever needed in 13 years. It was a stick shift and I used the clutch to hold me on hills, never had a problem with the clutch. I changed the brakes at 75,000 miles because I thought I should, did all of the work myself. I emptied my tank and poured airplane epoxy paint in it, the stuff they use on fighter jets. No more clogged fuel tanks, in 1980 the bottom of my gas tank fall off, but the paint held and I continued to drive it for a couple of more years, before I sold it for $500.
I changed out the Spark plugs around 90,000 miles, because I thought that I should, but they were heat welded into the cylinder head, and one broke and fell into a piston, so I had to remove the head, did so sitting on the radiator. The spark plugs did not need replacing at all. I never did an oil change in 113,000 miles either.
Best car I ever owned, but no power. A VW bus full of people passed me once on the way up Mt Rainier. and it lumbered badly going over the continential divide outside of Mexico city.
One of the fallacies I hear is that unions were the cause of shoddy workmanship which led to the rise of foreign goods flooding our markets. When I hear this argument, I try to point out, although it falls mostly on deaf ears, that it was management that accepted and in fact supported shoddy products because the profits far outweighed the cost of the resulting damages caused by their products. It was only after they started to lose market share to superior foreign products such as cars that they began to improve their own products.
Yes Ms. Maloney, you are correct. An old college buddy of mine was hired to engineer testing machines which would make certain that doors on automobiles would open and close properly for a given amount of cycles, [no more more/no less] and then they would fail. This was called"quality control engineering". Honestly!
Of course the actual number of predicted cycles was distributed on the Normal approximation to the binomial distribution. I taught this kind of statistical stuff for 36 years. Almost all social science research work [like poling] uses this math.
Yes Mr. Bushard. Toyota's rise to world domination was due to one thing only: superior reliability of the product. If one were to look at the CONSUMER REPORT accounts of automobiles over the last 5 decades, as I have, one would see this clearly. Also, I buy Toyota autos exclusively because when I pay a great deal for a product like an auto, I expect it to work well for a long time. They do.
Then there is the topic of automatic dishwashers in American kitchens. Kitchen Aid [an American brand] was rated #1 by CONSUMER REPORT and dominated the market for about 3 decades. Then the German company Bosch built a washer with lower frequency of repair and jumped up to #1. Kitchen Aid is still a good machine. But it is now #2.
I could go on about many other companies like Honda, BMW motorcycles and so forth.
Strange to say, it is not always the case that the "best" product leads the pack and survives as a business. The "best" lager in America [As determined by professional judges at annual American beer conferences] was, for many years: Strohs. It was also the biggest brewery in the country. It has since fallen on hard times and I have not seen it on grocery shelves for a long time. Strohs has been bought by a combine of other brewers and no longer enjoys any advantage in the market of booze. The bean counters and owners ruined Strohs beer.
Trump's economic moves are not just about destroying democracy or his drive to create an autocratic realm with himself as a the king, he wants to take the U.S. economy back to the Gilded Age, where he believes America was was at its zenith. Of course, the os magical thinking. There is a reason Mark Twain called the period between 1876 and 1914 the Gilded Age.
Well, let’s not put up with this ! Get the word out and make it visible for those who believe in middle class!
That is literally what made our life good! Be strong and be a partner( full) in building your own power. From teachers to flight attendants to doctors to nurses to Amazon drivers and anyone who works. Be a team with your own company. Be strong and demand fair wages and conditions or fob’s work!
Screw their greed! Share it with you or do not be there!
1. Zero sum game. If someone lost $3 trillion, somebody else won it. IMHO Trump has surrounded himself with people who know how to short the market.
2. A few right wing Republicans are opposing him. Grassley has a bill that would remove his power to adjust tarriffs. A right-wing group with financial ties to Leonard Leo and the Koch network, the New Civil Liberties Alliance sued, claiming that Trump’s decision to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not give him the power to “usurp” Congress’s right to control tariffs or “upset the Constitution’s separation of powers.” https://newrepublic.com/post/193612/donald-trump-lawsuit-tariffs-far-right-group
3. He now is at odds with Musk, who is recommending a tariff free zone, the US and EU.
Yes Mr. Solomon. Recent reports claim that Musk and the insane ex convict Peter Navarro are openly trading insults over tariffs at cabinet meetings because billions of dollars worth of Tesla parts are imported to the U.S. Tesla plant.
The corruption of Krasnov is not going to be abated by false job promises without any money going into the economy by the rule of law from the Congresses which is the only way any CEO is going to build a building to house manufacturing jobs. Pretending motions and proclaiming it as a jobs program that cost no money is a joke but media is acting as if this is real. The Chosen One is coming and I wounder who is going to oppose him. An army opposed by dragons is going to flee.
CEOs these days are entirely into instant gratification. They don't give a shit whether the company survives as long as they beat their current expectations.
To me, the simple reality is that the usual group that would in fact build factories to not only support the population but also their other money-making endeavors will never go back to the era where they exclusively hire human beings to assemble goods. First off, goods in themselves are riddled with problems, vis-a-vis, tariffs, for instance. Then unions in themselves keep profits down, and to Boards and CEO’s profit is the ONLY reason to be in business—not employment. Another problem is people themselves. They have the nerve to demand decent working conditions, pay, and hours. So, the only manufacturing that really makes them big bucks without headaches are not centered around for the good of the “people”.
Big manufacturing are looking for ways to eliminate the people factor as much as possible. This is the real reason they embrace AI and robotics—no people—fewer problems.
However, and this is a very big however, without jobs there is no way to purchase what is being manufactured. So, what’s profitable without worrying about manufacturing what people really need? War. Manufacturing for war is always a win for them. War does 2 things immediately: culls the population and allows billionaires to pick up land and property of all kinds really cheap. Armament manufacturing can be anywhere and as people-less as possible and they make a fortune because arms are never cheap to buy.
We the people are just an angry buzz that keeps big money, powerful men, from enjoying important things—golf, unrestricted sex, avarice, keeping score through wealth, and most importantly, power mongering.
You are right on here, Thom. Too bad, we would not have needed unions if corporate America had not exploited, used, and abused their dedicated employees. But of course we do need them because they function as a check and balance on the greedy overlords. As you say, the unions existence sets standards that create overall wage and benefit improvements for non-union workers as well. I well remember that during the Reagan years many of the unions were broken due to allowing monopolies in different sectors of manufacturing, thereby, controlling the markets as well as prevailing worker wages, i.e.....wipe out the competition.
Thom, We have, and are currently, providing incentive compensation to corporate management for maximizing shareholder value over the interests of employees/consumers. Changing this culture and compensation structure would accomplish much more than unions could. Efficient and effective capital markets were created with the SEC. Efficient and effective employment markets could be created with an SEC-type entity for the employment markets. This would balance influence and income between the shareholders and employees. I've outliined an approach to doing this at www.informedcitizens.com. I hope that you and others will consider this as a way to address our broken economic and political systems.
Sales and cost of goods sold mean nothing if you are a "growth" investor. Their only job is to increase share price. They use tricks like buybacks, water the stock, etc. to do that.
Mr. Hartmann, please stop and re-examine your claim about unions bringing back prosperity. They will not save working people. They have failed us. You said it yourself. There was a time when about 35% of the workforce was unionized. But now it is about 6%. This is historically; institutional failure.
I have been a member of the UAW and the NEA and I am grateful for the help these organizations gave me and my colleagues. But that period is over now. It is painful for me to admit it. But it is so.
It is time for the American economy to evolve to its new stage. The next period in our development. That stage is one dominated by Co-operatives. This is a form of socialism wherein the people who do the work also own the company and make the important decisions. No all-powerful bosses, no wealthy owners who siphon off the fruit of the workers' labor for those owners' private, personal profits; leaving the workers with what is left after that small group of filthy rich, owners [or as you say "morbidly rich owners"] take the lion's share of the wealth for their exclusive use. That wealth was created by WORKERS. The workers should be the ones who decide what to do with that wealth.
I have no doubt workers in that kind of system would use the wealth to give themselves universal healthcare, universal housing, universal education, universal mass transportation, universal access to healthful food.
There would no new aircraft carriers or attack planes or assault rifles.
When I imagine those thousands of new "high-paying" auto manufacturing jobs, I have to wonder how many of them will be nothing more than oiling the robots.
They have robot oilers.
The robots will be oiling themselves, while the 1 percent crowd will be oiling their pockets as always….
Trump is hell-bent on killing OSHA in the process of getting rid of unions. These unions are vital for workplace safety. We will see a rise in injuries and maybe even in deaths.
Here's another thing---when and if the factories return the vast majority of work will be done by robots. The people involved will need some specific technical training. We will not be able to compare this type of operation to what happened in "the good old days".
AND no one in my family LOVED being a factory worker, but it definitely fed and clothed us while keeping a roof over our heads.
Thankfully the unions lift all boats; I saw that in my own life working in management.
At DOL, I was parliimentartian in OSHA regulation hearings --. last I was involved -- silicon heaings in 2014. Yesterday, I was told that agencies like the FLRA, Federal Labor Relations Authority, were due to be phased out by June. I am advised the MSHA -- Mine Safety and Health Administration -- inspectors have been also been phased out.
Thom didn't mention that there is a Musk/Amazon case pending that may mean the death knell for collective bargaining, for the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, that may be the predicate to the elimination of a right to organize. https://prospect.org/labor/2025-02-05-musk-bezos-war-collective-bargaining/
I did not hear OSHA hearings per se -- they have their own cadre of judges -- but we heard about 26 kinds of whistleblower cases that are investigated by OSHA and many other types of cases where OSHA was involved.
Musk and Bezos argue that the NLRB’s power to charge unions and employers for labor law violations and have administrative courts hold hearings and rule on those charges is unconstitutional. Upheld by the Supreme Court in 1937 that had gone unchallenged ever since.
Among other cases that were within my jurisdiction were workers' comp type statutes, "traditional" labor law, like child labor and wage and hour disputes and the DOL Office of Labor-Management Standards.
My former colleagues have been under attack is certain other areas, even before the eclection, like our immigration cases -- 22 kinds of visa cases. In essence, the argument is that any case should go to US District Court if money damages are involved.
What an excellent history lesson. One thing missing from Thom's overview is what motivated killing off unions. Factory workers vote too, so it is a self-inflicted wound. What I observed over the past 7-plus decades is the GOP successfully equating unions with socialism and socialism with communism. Of course, Russian communism scared the crap out of Europ and the US out of fear that unions would retard the profitability of "capitalist" businesses. A consequence of that myth- building is that all Americans boast that they are capitalists, when in fact, very few actually are living off their wealth.
The problem with Russian and Chinese communism is dictatorship, not economics.
What the socialism=communism myth has achieved is to give Republicans leverage to pass laws weakening unions. Most Americans have no idea what they are missing out on by opposing socialist policies and programs because few Americans ever visit Denmark or any other EU country. Even when they do, they visit in American bubbles that insulate them from the inhabitants. OMG, college is free? Healthcare too? And, it is as good as what US capitalism provides for a price - a very high price.
Unfortunately, thanks to movie-actor Reagan and real-estate mogul Trump, Americans have been conned and brainwashed to accept GOP myths, regardless of party affiliation. Like the movie "Wall Street" made clear, American business long ago tossed its moral compass and replaced it with a simple philosophy: "Greed is Good." This notion is gradually eliminating middle-class prosperity. Only unions or a progressive legislature like FDR's can change that.
Well said and agreed! Thank you, Tomonthebeach.
One of Reagan's first acts was to eliminate the union that represented air traffic controllers.
One of my law shcool classmates was appointed a couple of times as genral counsel to the NLRB although he openly espoused abolishing collective bargaining.
I remember that now! That created quite a crisis, if I'm remembering correctly?
I like everything you said, Tomonthebeach, except your last sentence. We need co-ops., not unions.
Many people died to organize unions. It was necessary for survival because workers were living on starvation wages, much like today. More people are insecure about food and housing than our outdated measures of GDP and unemployment reveal. Automation is likely to create an oversupply of labor which will likely require a universal basic income to prevent riots and the slaugher of protestors, which I believe Trump and his "morons" will gladly oversee.
Manufacturing will never come back to America. I vividly remember the beginning of the environmental movement, Rachel Carsons, A Quiet Spring, the Love Canal problem, Pittsburgh was so unhealthy that some form of lung disease was de jure, one could walk across the Hudson River, not swim in it, our rivers and streams were polluted, the air in cities unbreathable. My sisters family moved from Pomona , CA to Mt Airy Md, because the family was contracting asthma.
LA had a perpetual fog of pollutants. We cleaned up our polluted country, by exporting the industries to Mexico and Asia.
The local communist organizer in my college, held a meeting and waved the book, The Greening of America in which he claimed was the tool to kill capitalism. hard de har har, what an ignorant fool.
Unions didn't help either. To justify their salaries and perks, Union offiicals kept demanding greater wages and benefits, way beyond justifiable. In the 1970's UAW members were getting $45 an hour as I recall, while the minimum wage was $1 an hour.
And of course the price of labor is, in great part, what makes up the price of the product.
American cars were too expensive, Japanese cars were cheaper, but then tariffs forced the Japanese, followed by the Koreans, to move their assembly factories to America and where did they move to? Right to work for less states in the South. Boeing moved some of it's assembly to Kansas and Georgia for the same reason.
What we do now is assemble equipment, whose parts are made all over the world.
Boeing's Shenyang Commercial Aircraft Corporation (SACC), a subsidiary of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), manufactures parts for the 777, including horizontal stabilizers and tips for the vertical fin and horizontal stabilizer
Canada makes the landing gear.
Scheduled aircraft maintenance is performed in El Salvador, by people who can't read English, the tech manuals are kept in the office under lock and key.
If a corporation wants to return manufacturing to America, it will take years to get the permits, and build the factory, not to mention the specialized technological machinery and robots needed to build today's cars, computers and toys.
What does America export? Grain (wheat, rye, corn), apples, grapes, oil. The computers and cell phones sold by Dell and Apple are actually made in Asia. Our clothing is made in Central America and Asia. Most of the food we eat is imported from Asia, we even import beef from Brazil.
Whole Foods canned goods brand, 365 is canned in Asia, our farmed shrimp comes from Asia.
The Gulf of Mexico is so polluted by oil spills that you don't want to eat their seafood, and many fishermen who have made a living have closed shop and gone bankrupt.
And the pollutants that we exported don't stay exported, the are carried back to us by ocean and atmospheric currents, just like the sands of the Sahara feed the coral reefs of the Caribbean, carried by the wind.
And the plastics that we need to live comfortably, show up in our bodies, Latest find is nano plastics in penis's.
Trump is full of it but Biden did a wonderful job of bringing back some -- CHIPS.
Job Creation:
The CHIPS Act aims to create jobs in both construction and manufacturing of semiconductor facilities.
The Commerce Department reports that the incentives will create more than 115,000 jobs, including 78,000 construction jobs and 36,000 production jobs.
Some reports estimate that the act will create about 93,000 construction jobs as chip factories go up in the United States and 43,000 permanent jobs once they're in operation.
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) estimated that a $50 billion investment would help create an estimated 10 additional chip factories in the US, creating 42,000 direct jobs and 101,500 indirect jobs.
Economic Impact:
The CHIPS Act aims to revive U.S. manufacturing of semiconductors and reduce the country's reliance on foreign-made computer chips.
The act is expected to add $24.6 billion annually to the U.S. economy and would create an average of 185,000 temporary jobs annually throughout the U.S. economy from 2021 and 2026.
The US could see about 42,000 direct jobs at the companies building these factories and 101,500 indirect jobs at chipmakers' suppliers.
Workforce Development:
Over $250 million of CHIPS funding is earmarked for local community workforce development, guided by local stakeholder input, including from academic institutions, training providers, and labor unions.
The industry anticipates a demand for highly-skilled workers of all levels of education, with one estimate expecting at least 25,000 new roles for technicians without four-year degrees and a similar level of demand for highly-educated engineers by 2030.
Thanks Daniel. Well aware.
CHIPS act was a necessary because Intell sat on it's fat ass, instead of investing in R&D and upgading technology, it decided to reward investors with profits.
Same problem with Boeing, from a company that would rather close it's doors than build an unsafe airplane, the board of directors hired sociopaths that were interested in one thing only, the quarterly Profits and Earnings statement and Return on Investment. and then the planes started coming apart. Do you really want to fly in an airplane whose Vertical stabilizer was made in China, that uses electronic components made in China.
Think of how many of our aircraft and battlefield weaspons have electronic components made in China.
All China has to do is stop exporting and our defense industry and indeed our economy will come to a halt, as I said our super power is that we are a consumer, and producer nations actually have power over us.
Aren't Chinese soldiers fighting with the Russians now at the Ukraine border?
North Korean.
So true, Mr. Farrar.
Yes Mr. Solomon, electronic chips are an important, relatively new product. And old Joe Biden did his best to encourage them here in the U.S.
But the constituent elements that go into the construction of chips cross many international borders as they are shipped on their way to the chip factory. About 80%+ of all known sources of rare earth minerals come from China. Trump is ruining this gift from Biden with tariffs and other dumbbell policies; some of which [the dumbbell policies] are no more than Trump's punishment of his domestic enemies.
I'm hoping that we don't need them. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-hemp-viable-alternative-lithium-battery-technology
Mr. Solomon, ooops, I think I responded to the wrong comment of yours. But, no doubt you get it.
Mr. Solomon, organic elements to design a battery are intriguing. But it is the non-renewable natural resources of copper and zinc which constitute the heart of the potato example you pointed to. The potato is the medium for electron or ion drift. While the metals actually do the job.
Storage!
With hemp, get both power and storage...plus regenerates american agriculture.
Mr. Solomon, I have always believed that if some brilliant engineer figures out a way to make a battery from aluminum; the game will be over. Because aluminum is the most abundant metal found in the earth's surface.
Well, I just read that some Japanese company has developed a battery based on aluminum. After it has been exhausted to zero and recharged 10,000 times; it still retains 90% of its life.
Almost too good to be true?
Almost.... The batteries deliver a slightly lower wattage per pound of overall weight when compared to currently used lithium-cobalt-nickel batteries. So very large batteries are required to do the work of the smaller "inferior" current batteries. But hey, engineers can never leave anything alone. They are always improving things.
I like organic materials -- like potatoes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWIzEp2FZJE
Regenerate themselves.
I think Trump cancelled The Chips Act.
Trump is not Congress.
Mr. Farrar, what in the world makes you think UAW workers were making $45 per hour in the 1970s? Line workers at Fisher Body made around $4 per hour. I know. I worked there. My pay was $3.14 per hour, as I was a new hire.
Maybe it wasn't the 70's but I have memory, and remember that number.
Here is what AI generative says:
While there's no specific historical point where auto workers universally earned $45 an hour, the United Auto Workers (UAW) has demanded a 40% pay raise over four years, which would increase the top rate to roughly $45 an hour.
Mr. Farrar, I find it hard to believe that you would accept the veracity of AI.
Why not AI gets it right sometimes,sometimes it doesn't In this case AI conformed my own memory,so yes. I don't know the specifics of when and where, but I do remember the number and thought then, this is outrageous, especailly when I got tired of hearing the rattle in my 56 Ford door,and found an empty whiskey bottle (drinking on the line), also found a wrench under the back seat embedded in the sound deadening coating on a 1960 Corvair.
Mr. Farrar, what AI gave you is a prediction, based on questionable assumptions. What I gave you is fact. I was there. Think again about what AI is doing. I think you will agree with me that it is a prediction.
As for the rattle in your car and the whiskey bottle you found in it. I can vouch for that kind of thing because I watched as an alcoholic who worked on the line repeatedly put empty whiskey bottles into the door vacancies of Buick doors at Fisher Body. I installed sound deadening in Buick doors[and I had other duties as well]. That sound deadening stuff fell off after several years of regular driving. It was a cost-saving measure which was cheaper than designing tighter-fitting body panels and doors which would reduce rattle noise. Cadillacs were more expensive partly because they produced closer tolerances on their body and door panels. If you looked closely at those old Cadillacs they looked aesthetically more pleasing because of the closer-fitting seams.
Fords in the 1950s were notorious for rattling and squeaking. Your whiskey bottle was a cherry on the cake. Ford cars were coming off the line at river rouge in those days with rust already showing on the inside of the rocker panels. Ford steel was so inferior that the company could not sell their over-supply on the international market. No one would buy it.
Ford has immensely improved its cars since then. But only because the Japanese competition eventually forced them to do so.
I predict that Ford will, for various reasons [too detailed to go into here], take a huge bite out of Tesla's sales. Tesla threw down the gauntlet and Ford picked it up. Tesla is now in for a rough ride, due at least largely, to Ford. Anyone who doubts this, should look into the history of what the Big Three did to John DeLorean.
AI did not give me a prediction Gerald. AI does not predict the past. Your personal experience is one thing, but my memory accords with what AI said.
As regards Fords. I bought a six cylinder Maverick in 1969, a 1970 model, I drove it hard 13 years, 113,000 miles, Some asshole stole the gas cap cover and I didn't find out until there was water in the gas tank, it rusted of course and the rust would clog up my inline filter, I would stop, clean out the inline filter by blowing through it, and continue on.
With that problem I drove from Illinois to Panama in 1975, stopping a few times to clean out the filter. My tool kit was a flat nose screw drive and a pair of pliers, that is all I ever needed in 13 years. It was a stick shift and I used the clutch to hold me on hills, never had a problem with the clutch. I changed the brakes at 75,000 miles because I thought I should, did all of the work myself. I emptied my tank and poured airplane epoxy paint in it, the stuff they use on fighter jets. No more clogged fuel tanks, in 1980 the bottom of my gas tank fall off, but the paint held and I continued to drive it for a couple of more years, before I sold it for $500.
I changed out the Spark plugs around 90,000 miles, because I thought that I should, but they were heat welded into the cylinder head, and one broke and fell into a piston, so I had to remove the head, did so sitting on the radiator. The spark plugs did not need replacing at all. I never did an oil change in 113,000 miles either.
Best car I ever owned, but no power. A VW bus full of people passed me once on the way up Mt Rainier. and it lumbered badly going over the continential divide outside of Mexico city.
Wi
One of the fallacies I hear is that unions were the cause of shoddy workmanship which led to the rise of foreign goods flooding our markets. When I hear this argument, I try to point out, although it falls mostly on deaf ears, that it was management that accepted and in fact supported shoddy products because the profits far outweighed the cost of the resulting damages caused by their products. It was only after they started to lose market share to superior foreign products such as cars that they began to improve their own products.
Greedy US manufacturers bought into "planned obsolescence."
Correct built in by the 1952 Tax Act.
Yes Ms. Maloney, you are correct. An old college buddy of mine was hired to engineer testing machines which would make certain that doors on automobiles would open and close properly for a given amount of cycles, [no more more/no less] and then they would fail. This was called"quality control engineering". Honestly!
Of course the actual number of predicted cycles was distributed on the Normal approximation to the binomial distribution. I taught this kind of statistical stuff for 36 years. Almost all social science research work [like poling] uses this math.
Yes Mr. Bushard. Toyota's rise to world domination was due to one thing only: superior reliability of the product. If one were to look at the CONSUMER REPORT accounts of automobiles over the last 5 decades, as I have, one would see this clearly. Also, I buy Toyota autos exclusively because when I pay a great deal for a product like an auto, I expect it to work well for a long time. They do.
Then there is the topic of automatic dishwashers in American kitchens. Kitchen Aid [an American brand] was rated #1 by CONSUMER REPORT and dominated the market for about 3 decades. Then the German company Bosch built a washer with lower frequency of repair and jumped up to #1. Kitchen Aid is still a good machine. But it is now #2.
I could go on about many other companies like Honda, BMW motorcycles and so forth.
Strange to say, it is not always the case that the "best" product leads the pack and survives as a business. The "best" lager in America [As determined by professional judges at annual American beer conferences] was, for many years: Strohs. It was also the biggest brewery in the country. It has since fallen on hard times and I have not seen it on grocery shelves for a long time. Strohs has been bought by a combine of other brewers and no longer enjoys any advantage in the market of booze. The bean counters and owners ruined Strohs beer.
Thom! You speak the TRUTH!
Without labor unions, factories are sweatshops!
Trump's economic moves are not just about destroying democracy or his drive to create an autocratic realm with himself as a the king, he wants to take the U.S. economy back to the Gilded Age, where he believes America was was at its zenith. Of course, the os magical thinking. There is a reason Mark Twain called the period between 1876 and 1914 the Gilded Age.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/lutnick-flummoxes-business-leaders-and-white-house-aides/ar-AA1CtT14
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-wrong-mckinleys-tariff-legacy-100047876.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/12/business/trump-william-mckinley-tariffs/index.html
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/note-to-trump-mckinleys-legacy-is-about-more-than-tariffs-and-territory/
https://images.app.goo.gl/eVTe6E79tEySgjb89
https://images.app.goo.gl/TzBbsZLmVqky9GLVA
Yes Ms. Hockemeyer, Howard Lutnik and the ex convict Peter Navarro [who both closely advise Trump] sound insane.
IMHO this may be deja vu all over again. https://alternativefundinsight.com/how-next-us-treasury-secretary-once-broke-the-bank-of-england/
Well, let’s not put up with this ! Get the word out and make it visible for those who believe in middle class!
That is literally what made our life good! Be strong and be a partner( full) in building your own power. From teachers to flight attendants to doctors to nurses to Amazon drivers and anyone who works. Be a team with your own company. Be strong and demand fair wages and conditions or fob’s work!
Screw their greed! Share it with you or do not be there!
1. Zero sum game. If someone lost $3 trillion, somebody else won it. IMHO Trump has surrounded himself with people who know how to short the market.
2. A few right wing Republicans are opposing him. Grassley has a bill that would remove his power to adjust tarriffs. A right-wing group with financial ties to Leonard Leo and the Koch network, the New Civil Liberties Alliance sued, claiming that Trump’s decision to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not give him the power to “usurp” Congress’s right to control tariffs or “upset the Constitution’s separation of powers.” https://newrepublic.com/post/193612/donald-trump-lawsuit-tariffs-far-right-group
3. He now is at odds with Musk, who is recommending a tariff free zone, the US and EU.
4. We can take advantage. Read Feathers of Hope. https://jerryweiss.substack.com/
Only takes 3 Republican House members to kick it off
Yes Mr. Solomon. Recent reports claim that Musk and the insane ex convict Peter Navarro are openly trading insults over tariffs at cabinet meetings because billions of dollars worth of Tesla parts are imported to the U.S. Tesla plant.
The corruption of Krasnov is not going to be abated by false job promises without any money going into the economy by the rule of law from the Congresses which is the only way any CEO is going to build a building to house manufacturing jobs. Pretending motions and proclaiming it as a jobs program that cost no money is a joke but media is acting as if this is real. The Chosen One is coming and I wounder who is going to oppose him. An army opposed by dragons is going to flee.
He doesn't give a shit about us...
CEOs these days are entirely into instant gratification. They don't give a shit whether the company survives as long as they beat their current expectations.
The formation of labor unions invented the ‘middle class’.
To me, the simple reality is that the usual group that would in fact build factories to not only support the population but also their other money-making endeavors will never go back to the era where they exclusively hire human beings to assemble goods. First off, goods in themselves are riddled with problems, vis-a-vis, tariffs, for instance. Then unions in themselves keep profits down, and to Boards and CEO’s profit is the ONLY reason to be in business—not employment. Another problem is people themselves. They have the nerve to demand decent working conditions, pay, and hours. So, the only manufacturing that really makes them big bucks without headaches are not centered around for the good of the “people”.
Big manufacturing are looking for ways to eliminate the people factor as much as possible. This is the real reason they embrace AI and robotics—no people—fewer problems.
However, and this is a very big however, without jobs there is no way to purchase what is being manufactured. So, what’s profitable without worrying about manufacturing what people really need? War. Manufacturing for war is always a win for them. War does 2 things immediately: culls the population and allows billionaires to pick up land and property of all kinds really cheap. Armament manufacturing can be anywhere and as people-less as possible and they make a fortune because arms are never cheap to buy.
We the people are just an angry buzz that keeps big money, powerful men, from enjoying important things—golf, unrestricted sex, avarice, keeping score through wealth, and most importantly, power mongering.
You are right on here, Thom. Too bad, we would not have needed unions if corporate America had not exploited, used, and abused their dedicated employees. But of course we do need them because they function as a check and balance on the greedy overlords. As you say, the unions existence sets standards that create overall wage and benefit improvements for non-union workers as well. I well remember that during the Reagan years many of the unions were broken due to allowing monopolies in different sectors of manufacturing, thereby, controlling the markets as well as prevailing worker wages, i.e.....wipe out the competition.
Yes unionization was critically important. So too was the deliberate use of DEFICITS to maintain full employment.
Thom, We have, and are currently, providing incentive compensation to corporate management for maximizing shareholder value over the interests of employees/consumers. Changing this culture and compensation structure would accomplish much more than unions could. Efficient and effective capital markets were created with the SEC. Efficient and effective employment markets could be created with an SEC-type entity for the employment markets. This would balance influence and income between the shareholders and employees. I've outliined an approach to doing this at www.informedcitizens.com. I hope that you and others will consider this as a way to address our broken economic and political systems.
Sales and cost of goods sold mean nothing if you are a "growth" investor. Their only job is to increase share price. They use tricks like buybacks, water the stock, etc. to do that.
Mr. Hartmann, please stop and re-examine your claim about unions bringing back prosperity. They will not save working people. They have failed us. You said it yourself. There was a time when about 35% of the workforce was unionized. But now it is about 6%. This is historically; institutional failure.
I have been a member of the UAW and the NEA and I am grateful for the help these organizations gave me and my colleagues. But that period is over now. It is painful for me to admit it. But it is so.
It is time for the American economy to evolve to its new stage. The next period in our development. That stage is one dominated by Co-operatives. This is a form of socialism wherein the people who do the work also own the company and make the important decisions. No all-powerful bosses, no wealthy owners who siphon off the fruit of the workers' labor for those owners' private, personal profits; leaving the workers with what is left after that small group of filthy rich, owners [or as you say "morbidly rich owners"] take the lion's share of the wealth for their exclusive use. That wealth was created by WORKERS. The workers should be the ones who decide what to do with that wealth.
I have no doubt workers in that kind of system would use the wealth to give themselves universal healthcare, universal housing, universal education, universal mass transportation, universal access to healthful food.
There would no new aircraft carriers or attack planes or assault rifles.