Of course, this was never a universal reality. But, there was a time, post-WWII, when it was true for many White families in the US. And that's the dream they're chasing when they say they want to make America "great again."
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And not just for white families--during the Great Migration nearly half the country's Black population moved out of the South. Those industrial jobs made for a solid middle-class life in vibrant cities, most of which have been hollowed out in recent decades. So there may be some nostalgia there too.
And they don’t realize that the reason many of those jobs were “good” was UNIONS.
There’s nothing inherently good about a manufacturing job as compared to another industry. It’s about unionization. Even if you’re not in a union, wages generally go up throughout the industry.
"Nice" house in 1950 would be very low-end today, which people forget with the nostalgia. Likewise for cars. Eating out at a restaurant no more than once a week, fruit only in season or in cans...
But they are also the ones who voted to dismantle all the things that made that possible. You can't have a functional democracy when the electorate is completely ignorant I'd what government does and how it works. Everything we learn in school is completely wrong
They forget that we'd bombed the rest of the industrialized would flat and we were the only source of goods for the entire world for a couple of decades before other countries could put themselves back together.
YES AND: They wistfully look back on a time when women and people of colour and the disabled and queer people and etc. were shut out of that prosperity.
The age of “things used to be great when I was a kid” was the same time the rich paid a realistic tax rate. Since Reaganomics, “trickle down” is the rich pissing on everyone underneath them.
The problem is: they've mistaken correlation for causation. They think their parents and grandparents had a good life *because* of manufacturing jobs. When, in reality, their parents and grandparents had a good life *despite* manufacturing jobs, because of unions, high taxes, and social policies.
As someone who worked in adult education in career pathways for a while, I can say that a lot of my students—now almost universally Trump supporters—were resistant to the idea of working in most of these fields bc it typically still required training or certs (just non-college)
Many are also v region-dependent, requiring a move first to a trade school offering the relevant training (like lineman work) and then requiring that you be in the town where the giant cogen facility or w/e is located. Obvi manufacturing is too, but when you’re just imagining it, it’s in *your* town
The "staying close to home" priority is interesting b/c so many college grads/people w/advanced degrees move everywhere, all the time. It's understood as necessary to pursue the profession they studied for. The degrees aren't worth nearly as much if you're not willing to move.
To be fair, a good deal of the state investment in public universities is justified by creating value for the local economy. Urban campuses, college towns & university regions (e.g. research triangle) generate real jobs, economic value, and opportunities for graduates and locals
Oh, yeah. V aware of that as a firsthand sufferer who did not want to be moved away from my entire family and community lol. A lot of it is genuine economic barriers—access to family is needed to receive childcare/provide eldercare. But I also do think it’s unimaginable to a lot of ppl to be alone
And decent compensation if you are laid off for any reason. It used to be rare that companies would do layoffs, now it seems commonplace, and they seem to do it just to juice their bottom line & pump the stock.
And this happened to coincide with a time when minorities could not participate in this very economic growth due to segregation, so similarly, causation/correlation they associate desegregation with their perceived plight.
The other thing with manufacturing is that it simply takes FAR fewer people to produce a product via heavy manufacturing now than it did even 30 years ago. The man hours required to produce 1 ton of steel have fallen something like 80% since the 1990s.
But can we agree that it would be a better world if it only took a single income to sustain a family’s middle-class existence including housing, education, and healthcare. And that this was once possible and is no longer? It’s not just nostalgia. It’s the erosion of unions and social safety nets.
Yeah that was more of a historical aberration due to the aftermath of WW2 where the US pretty much was the only major power with an intact industrial base. Historically, women's work was very important to the finances of the home.
not to mention, for many people those components of the "American Dream" (good public schools, affordable college education) also meant that many parents and grandparents working manufacturing jobs did so in order for their kids to have a chance at NOT working factory jobs
Exactly--my Dad's job at GM was exhausting work with changing shift times. However, thanks to the UAW and my mother also working full time we made it into the lower middle class, & as white students in suburban Minnesota my brother and i went to college
But couldn’t you make a similar argument for construction or farming? Construction work is infinitely safer & less destructive to bodies than 75 years ago. (Still hard on bodies, I know; my step-brother is an electrician who fell 18 ft & shattered his ankle.) And unionized tradesmen make…
…in part bc unless you were an electrician, millwright etc it was boring shitty work. But they loved their kids being engineers. And a lot of the Bidenomics-type manufacturing jobs are closer to engineering than to Frederick Taylor-designed assembly line work.
Ultimately that’s what rich folks and Big Biz wanna fight, which is their power to dictate terms to workers. For most, it’s an even bigger deal than profits
I think there's something different going on with those fields, as farming and construction have huge unmet demand for workers. I suspect it's because farm and construction labor are still physically grueling. And construction trades, despite having high income potential, require lots of training.
The Fair Wages and Standards Act also has an exemption to minimum wage laws for farm workers so, there is that too
(Plus the way Monsanto and John Deere have exploited intellectual property law to make seeds and tractor repair needlessly expensive for the people running farms)
To be clear, I’m not talking about agricultural laborers, not even permanent workers like on dairy farms. I’m talking more about people who own & run commodity, dairy, cattle, & poultry farms.
Gotcha. I want to say I saw a disturbing documentary on poultry farming that includes similar ways big corporations shaft people who own and run poultry farms (similar in spirit to the GMO seeds / John Deere DRM issues)
Can we just tax billionaires fairly, and all sit at our pools with cocktails, while checking in on the efficiency gains we made with computers and networks over the past 25 years once or twice a week?
They also have a fairytale vision of how things were back then. Families lived in tiny houses with no a/c and not always appropriate heat and the houses were sometimes insulated with just grass. Life was tough, that’s is why our grandparents and parents worked hard to make things better for us.
Yup. My grandparents built a house right across the street from where my great-grandparents built a house. Spent a lot of time in both, lived in one of them myself.
My great-grandparents raised three kids in a two bedroom house. My grandparents raised four.
This. My boomer mom was raised in a small house with two bedrooms and one bathroom. For a family of seven. And that was on the salary of her architectural designer dad.
Without those protections, manufacturing jobs mean child labor, black lung disease, and high risks of on-the-job limb and life loss, like with the women who perished in the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
Yep. I wrote recently about how GOP policies don't match that post WWII middle class lifestyle.That period had much higher taxes, stronger unions, stronger gov regulation of finance. All of these added up to much less inequality than we have today. That's why grandparents seemed to have it better.
Exactly. In addition, why should a company that receives tax relief invest it if there is no increasing demand for its products? However, increased demand can only occur if the middle class and low-income earners are given more money through tax relief, because they are much more …/1
This period also had very low levels of immigration. That part is left out, but the past doesn't fit either side's narrative when it is fully taken in.
Thank you! I yell this every time I hear anyone say “bring back good jobs.” Factory jobs were the worst things you can imagine. The only reason they were ever “good”is because the workers forced them to be. There’s no reason barista or fry cook can’t be added to the “good” jobs list.
This! My dad worked in a steel mill. He NEVER wanted his kids to work in one. His stepdad would have to take salt pills so he didn’t die from the amount of sodium he lost through sweat.
Studs Terkel opens his book Jobs with an interview with a steel mill worker who basically just talks about how much it sucks and how he wants his kid to go to college so he doesn’t have work in a steel mill too
Fry cook and barista *could* be good jobs if the minimum wage had been increased as the cost of living rose.
In a European country with high cost of living but high government benefits, like Denmark, say, a fry cook or barista (the lowest wage earners in that country) earns just over $19/hour.
That what always pissed me off when politicians and pundits (and to be fair, too many union members) talked about “good jobs.” They were always talking about blue collar industries that organized in the late 19th early 20th century. You want more good jobs? Make it easier to organize new industries
I always took the meaning as jobs that didn't require a degree but paid well. It doesn't matter what it was. There was a time when there were many different jobs in that category. This started to change in the 80s w/anti union movement. Move factories down south. When that wasn't enough, overseas.
As a union electrician, I absolutely consider writers and artists and anyone else that works for a living brothers, sisters, siblings and cousins in the good fight.
We have no capacity as a society to agree on basic levels of government support for everyone. It’s not just free childcare for minimum wage folks, but for mid income ppl in expensive regions hey let’s pay 250 or 500 a month for daycare instead of 2000-2500. Even middle class white collar are hurting
On a practical note, manufacturing requires a whole ecosystem of suppliers, tooling, engineering and expertise with machines that we just don’t have anymore.
Machinists don’t get paid shit right now. Also it’s insanely expensive to have tooling made in the US compared to China.
Genuinely don’t think they care if we die though. I think, at least with Musk, it’s all part of some sick, natural selection idea that we’d be thinning out the herd so that more “geniuses” like him will be able to break through.
…And my grandfather whose back was broke in a steel fabrication plant when a swinging beam hit him, spoke no English, and the family had to relocate to Brooklyn, so my grandmother could clean toilets in the city’s buildings. No compensation, to only be able iron clothes for his family.
True! And those things didn't just happen on their own. A lot of people had to fight (in some cases literally) very hard for unionization, the New Deal, etc.
The point that is being missed by Trump and his cronies is that American companies have become wealthy from outsourcing jobs, which has resulted in high end jobs being created in America and an increase in tax collected by the IRS.
True, but there's a lot of overlap between the people who championed the "new" post-industrial economy and the people who said we didn't need unions, high taxes, and social policies anymore.
Everytime I tell these mouthbreathers that fact of their life, they act like it's impossible that they ever benefited from the government and it just shows how rotted theire entire idea is from 40 years of programming telling them that.
Exactly! There's no reason why jobs in our current service-oriented society couldn't provide those same benefits, except that organized labor has been completely gutted.
And I'm not a sociologist, but there's likely some racism and misogyny baked into why manufacturing jobs were seen as deserving of those benefits, while more service-oriented jobs were not.
Yes. I live in Wales, and it's not that bringing coal mining and its health issues back would be great for anyone, but the fact so many towns NEVER recovered, even 40 yrs later, because there was nothing to replace those jobs is definitely a thing.
Actually they never talked to their grandparents who fought in World War Ii, drafted at 18 or 19, had to do as they were told in many foreign countries without hygiene and nation welcomed them home with GI bill to go to college and become teachers, small business owners, and doctors.
They've never heard the term "neoliberalism". That type of lifestyle isn't coming back until there are *huge* systemic changes to society. Republicans are feeding them nostalgia via vengeance and grievances, not material changes. Eroding the state just harms them even more and they can't see it
Exactly this! Also to add to this, the Breton Woods monetary system, as well as the separation of investment & commercial banking, kept global markets very stable, and there were no major economic recessions while it was in place. As soon as it ended, recessions started.
This is where failing to educate American students (K-12) on basic economic and business principles fails us all. Even if returning to a heavy manufacturing economy was good (it isn't), blanket tariffs are exactly what you don't do to promote it. This path does not lead where they think it does.
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There’s nothing inherently good about a manufacturing job as compared to another industry. It’s about unionization. Even if you’re not in a union, wages generally go up throughout the industry.
#FuckAmericanVoters
https://bsky.app/profile/aaas.org/post/3llwj7frivk25
Nostalgia is a helluva drug. The good old days often weren't.
And, if you compare the advances we've made against what we've lost, we might still find a net gain (depending on how one values various things.)
This was not the reality for the majority of Americans even then unfortunately.
Married women joined the labor force at rapid rates in the 1950s and 60s. The poverty rate in the 50s was double what it is now.
Similar w farming. Way less grinding on people, & engages their knowledge/skills in numerous fields; many if not most have ag degrees
Problem w manufacturing is that as manufacturing became more sophisticated it was offshored or…
But the kinds of manufacturing jobs we gained in recent years are safer, require more knowledge/skills, & are more interesting & collaborative
My dad’s generation didn’t want us to work in factories…
(Plus the way Monsanto and John Deere have exploited intellectual property law to make seeds and tractor repair needlessly expensive for the people running farms)
My great-grandparents raised three kids in a two bedroom house. My grandparents raised four.
Small, no AC, crappy windows.
In a European country with high cost of living but high government benefits, like Denmark, say, a fry cook or barista (the lowest wage earners in that country) earns just over $19/hour.
Machinists don’t get paid shit right now. Also it’s insanely expensive to have tooling made in the US compared to China.
Paywall-free: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/maybe-it-was-never-about-the-factory-jobs/ar-BB1rmHb4
I've seen what loss of manufacturing jobs does in British industrial towns.