The Washington Post ran a very good piece on US manufacturing. The gist of it is that there are factory jobs but they’re hard to fill. Among other reasons, there’s this:
“It’s a glamour issue,” said Dave Van Dam, 37. “The kids come in here and see a dirty, loud place. We get oil on ourselves. Then they go upstairs and they see the designers in their cubicles with two screens and headphones on listening to music.
About ten years ago, I was part of this exact problem. I worked at a CNC shop over the summer; being unskilled, I was given pig iron to cut. Sometimes I’d help the CNC operators with the more brainless tasks, of which there were many: fetching raw materials, loading and unloading, refilling the coolant reservoirs, cleaning the area.
It was a dirty, noisy, dumb job. Everything and everyone was covered in grease and thin metal slivers flying off the machines. The whirr of the mills, conveyor belts, and air compressors made it impossible to carry on a conversation. The airbag parts we made came off the mills bearing razor-sharp edges before they were tumbled or sandblasted, and I was only allowed to wear gloves in some areas. (Wearing gloves around very large saws is a bad idea because you risk losing not just a finger, but your whole arm when the fabric of the glove gets pulled in instead of cutting off cleanly.) Even then, the gloves would fill up with those damned shaving-needles and the smelly coolant. My hands were red and always scratched up. My left arm had a 6” gash from a band-saw blade that bounced and cut me.
Maybe this was just a particularly lousy shop. I really don’t know.
There was a deathly staffing-spiral at work here. The less staff they had, the worse the conditions were for those who stayed and those who’d come in. Shifts moved from eight to twelve hours. I worked the single worst shift I can imagine: Friday through Sunday, 7 AM - 7PM. I’d wake up at 5:30 AM, come home at 7:30, spend half an hour scrubbing off the oil, coolant, and metal shavings, and pass out after dinner. (I was taking college classes during the week.) All this would add up to 36 hours, just low enough that I remained a part-time employee without benefits etc. There were few opportunities for upward mobility.
I knew that the designers in the adjacent office made less money. Nevertheless, I would’ve eagerly traded places with them. I eventually moved on to a call-center job that paid about the same, but it put me in a chair in an air-conditioned room with a carpet.
Now, I wasn’t making parts for machines that saved people’s lives; I was interrupting people’s dinners. But I had enough time and energy to pursue my design interests after work, and I could hang out with people on my break, and I commuted to a respectable little urban plaza instead of the middle-of-nowhere warehouse where machining shops are usually located.
I helped ruin American factories. I’m not proud of it, but I’d do it again.
