not for nothing, but there's been a genuinely bipartisan rhetorical obsession with manufacturing in our politics since nafta that's a big contributor to this kind of incoherence and i think it probably behooves liberal politicians to rethink that obsession - ThreadSky

golikehellmachine.com • 2 days ago

not for nothing, but there's been a genuinely bipartisan rhetorical obsession with manufacturing in our politics since nafta that's a big contributor to this kind of incoherence and i think it probably behooves liberal politicians to rethink that obsession

Reposted from Jonathan Cohn

The bipartisan belief that America would be a better place if *other people* worked in a factory.

www.ft.com/content/8459...

Comments

minerva1.bsky.social•2 days ago

America reached full employment under Joe Biden.

Everyone had jobs so why didn’t we just pivot to paying people more?

schrunglowe.bsky.social•2 days ago

Protectionism is one of those things that Americans say they like/want til they have to experience firsthand. Like withdrawing from Afghanistan

economymedicine.bsky.social•2 days ago

A shift to a focus on jobs that only require a high school diploma vs manufacturing needs to happen. Problem is that we have let service jobs be treated as only for women and manufacturing as for men.

tambl.ing•2 days ago

Frank Sobotka is a television character from twenty years ago, we can stop pretending he is the median voter.

shaenon.bsky.social•2 days ago

Ever since the collapse of American heavy manufacturing in the 70s there's been nonstop talk about bringing that work back and zero talk about what that would realistically look like

shaenon.bsky.social•2 days ago

Say what you will about neoliberal cynicism but Bill Clinton was the one president who planned for a service job economy instead of promising Big Steel will come back to life if we all clap

economymedicine.bsky.social•2 days ago

And if big steel did do the investments to be competitive it would employ much fewer but more highly educated workers as much of the process would be automated (which is good from a safety perspective).

shaenon.bsky.social•2 days ago

Understand, I don't *want* a service-based economy over a manufacturing-based economy. I want either of those more than I want a political climate based on telling white men in the Rust Belt to be eternally resentful that they weren't handed the union jobs their grandpas had

alextrusk007.bsky.social•2 days ago

The only thing Trump is manufacturing is leverage for bribes to personally enrich himself.

golikehellmachine.com•2 days ago

listen, i want all workers to win and succeed, but we've been hearing about auto workers in the midwest for thirty fucking years with barely a peep about, like, home health aides or janitors or baristas, and guess which one of these four can afford a mortgage

beckya.bsky.social•1 day ago

This is what really annoys me about this discourse, the equation of factory work by white men=good job. It’s a leftover from the brief period in the 50’s when the private manufacturing labor force was mostly white, almost all male, and (relatively) heavily unionized.

bellhui1b.bsky.social•1 day ago

which one of these four can afford a mortgage? The one in the Union, on Union Pay!

noctouyan.bsky.social•2 days ago

man i remember the good old days where we were talking about helping the care economy (fall 2021) 😔

americanarchitect.bsky.social•2 days ago

Seriously. And we should be giving up cars entirely at this point anyway

annabellelecter.bsky.social•2 days ago

Shawn Fain traipsing around with Bernie Sanders, snarking that people were too worried about their 401 k s and Sean O'Brien's cutesy appearance at the Republican Convention were a pretty good indication that unions have a case of the I got mines that non union people don't need to subsidize anymore.

repetitiveuser.bsky.social•1 day ago

It's like the nineties obsession with COAL MINERS and LOGGERS

golikehellmachine.com•2 days ago

there are a lot of reasons politicians focus on "manufacturing" over, say, service industry work, even though the latter employs exponentially more americans, and one area where i think most dems have genuinely fallen down on the job is in speaking up for the latter

kanexan.bsky.social•2 days ago

Yeah, I think this is critical, and I think it's screwing with a lot of people's perceptions of 'working' across ideology. Like, the vast majority of Americans work outside the traditional proletariat; most are either service workers or white collar professionals (often for service companies!)

kanexan.bsky.social•2 days ago

And I think to a degree the relationship of those professionals to labor and management is changing. Like, being an architect is undeniably white collar, but if you're an architecture-degree-having design employee for an architect firm, you are wildly overworked and wildly underpaid!

kanexan.bsky.social•2 days ago

Mostly an aside, but in terms of time and effort in school to payout and employability after school, I genuinely think the architecture degree might be the worst bang for your buck of any undergrad. The school is incredibly demanding, the field is overcrowded, and the pay as an architect is abysmal.

snarkranger.bsky.social•2 days ago

And this is why we need to understand that everyone who sells their labor for wages to survive is part of the working class. All else is aesthetics.

kanexan.bsky.social•2 days ago

I think there's more nuance than that - one other big difference here is that in Europe in 1867, there was still a serious amount of like, straight up nobility. Landed gentry collecting taxes and making money for absolutely nothing but privilege of birth. Nowadays, even nobles need actual jobs!

kanexan.bsky.social•2 days ago

Even our very wealthiest people have, at least nominally, wage-paying jobs they rely on for income. The number of guys who lay around on gold couches and do nothing but hunt foxes while raking in cash is utterly minuscule (outside the Arabian Gulf States anyways) and that's a whole other dynamic.

lizamazel.bsky.social•2 days ago

honestly i think too many people are confusing “factory work” with “benefits as won by good unionizing”

lizamazel.bsky.social•2 days ago

one more reason AOC is the woman of the hour

kmthurman.bsky.social•2 days ago

I am still struggling to see these results as incoherence. It says 25% of people want to work in a factory, that’s a lot of workers. I don’t believe them, but it says something about current workplaces i’d love to know employed vs unemployed & type of jobs for employed.

snarkranger.bsky.social•2 days ago

Manufacturers can't find enough employees to fill the jobs they have now. The manufacturing unemployment rate is 3.2 percent. https://www.uschamber.com/workforce/understanding-americas-labor-shortage-the-most-impacted-industries

kmthurman.bsky.social•2 days ago

I get that hence why i am fascinated by the 25%.

economymedicine.bsky.social•2 days ago

Some of it is skill mismatch. A good manufacturing job may be appealing but if you aren't certified or have a certain level of education getting in is hard. They want the idea of being able to drop out of highschool and get a good paying job at the factory.

snarkranger.bsky.social•2 days ago

It's all culture. They think they sound heroic and manly when they say they want to be in a factory. But nobody's actually quitting their e-mail jobs and moving to Norfolk to take high-paying manufacturing jobs building submarines

leonenglish.bsky.social•2 days ago

They were promising like $10,000 bonuses for jobs here a few years ago

leonenglish.bsky.social•2 days ago

What was actually great for Americans was the tight labor market that made that a thing, but oh well.

snarkranger.bsky.social•2 days ago

Revealed preference says a lot of those people who claim that they'd be better off working in a factory are lying.

yeospaceman.bsky.social•2 days ago

feel like the main animus here is again gender

winniethewitch.bsky.social•2 days ago

This has happened in no small part because service worker jobs are invariably coded as feminine.

catsashimi.bsky.social•2 days ago

All too often when we say "manufacturing jobs" we mean "jobs w/ high union density" which Republicans will not admit on principle and Democrats may admit from time to time but lack consensus on what to do about it

sainttimonious.bsky.social•1 day ago

As has been said, people *say* they want to bring back manufacturing so someone right out of high school can get a decent, middle class job. What they *mean* is that they want to bring back union density. But can't cuz So-shull-izm

loudanduniformed.bsky.social•2 days ago

I think this is a broader phenomenon in US culture. This dissonance runs deep through ideas about who works hard vs who doesn’t, who needs help from the gov vs who doesn’t, who is deserving of x vs who is not. We are not so much an individualistic culture as we are an unempathetic one.

millennialpusheen.bsky.social•2 days ago

Add to the same list that "the enconomy is always bad, but i'm usually fine", "crime is worse than ever, but i'm safe where i am" and "schools are awful and teachers suck, except at the schools i've familiar with" are all on

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply