More Free Traitor Nonsense: "The Manufacturing Jobs We've Lost Weren't Good Jobs Anyway"

A popular meme put forth by people who feel America benefits by closing factories and putting Americans out of work, is that we don't need those jobs anyway. Or worse, they are bad jobs and we should get rid of them.

Case in point:


Lost Manufacturing Jobs: Good Riddance?

There is no question that the U.S. has lost an enormous number of manufacturing jobs to lower wage countries.  These countries include mega economies like China and a number of smaller countries such as Vietnam that have large numbers of workers willing to work for low wages. Given the current high unemployment rate in the United States, it is understandable that politicians point out that we need to regain manufacturing jobs and that the loss of jobs to other countries is a major problem for the U.S.

But before we accept the loss of many low skilled manufacturing jobs as a major negative for the U.S. and that it should be halted and perhaps even reversed, it is important to put it in the context of what we know about the social impact of simple, repetitive work.  The fact is that this type of work often has numerous negative impacts on both individuals and society in general. This was highlighted recently by the news about riots taking place in Foxconn’s Chinese factories.

Even in China, low wage repetitive work can create major conflicts between workers and corporations and be destructive to society. We learned this long ago in the U.S. and it resulted in major U.S. corporations offshoring repetitive, manufacturing work or upgrading it through technology to the point where it became skilled work. In terms of social sustainability, repetitive low skilled work is a major negative. It causes employee dissatisfaction and turnover, stress-related mental and physical health problems, dysfunctional union/management relationships and large social class differences in wealth.

The bottom line is that instead of complaining about offshoring manufacturing jobs, we should be focusing on keeping and creating the right kind of manufacturing jobs. What kinds of jobs are those? In essence, I am talking about the kind of knowledge work jobs that exist in the high-tech world and the advanced manufacturing plants of some major manufacturers. We can only keep these jobs in the U.S. if we have a skilled workforce who can meet the challenges that knowledge, information technology, and engineering present.

When you hear these arguments, remember there are two obvious fatal flaws in this argument that you probably already know, but haven't been able to point out clearly before:

1) The knowledge economy that these guys talk about, is inherently too small. So is advanced manufacturing. The number of jobs that these fields will produce are high-paying and we do need them as part of our economy and industrial base, but the inherent reality of both advanced knowledge-based jobs and advanced manufacturing is that they are high productivity jobs. Knowledge-based and high-tech manufacturing industries are inherently designed to employ fewer people to do the same amount of work. Take a look around you. How many innovation-based jobs and advanced manufacturing jobs are there? How many people are out of work? The enormous ratio of unemployed people to "advanced" jobs ratio is one that is not going to change by much even in the best of times. These jobs are tragically insufficient in numbers to cover even the people who were put out of work from regular manufacturing by foreign outsourcing.

Simply put there will never be as many of these knowledge based jobs or high tech manufacturing jobs to cover the number of people thrown out of work when we send the lower end manufacturing jobs overseas. Period. No economist can hope to keep a straight face and tell you otherwise. 

The other thing you will want to remind someone of when they spout these stupid arguments is that we already have tons of college graduates in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) industries out there right now, and they cannot find work in the STEM fields. Consider a man who holds a Ph D in plasma physics - not even he can get a job in this so-called knowledge based economy. 

Consider these statistics, too:

There are 101,000 U.S.-born individuals with engineering degrees who are unemployed.
There are an additional 244,000 U.S.-born individuals under age 65 who have a degree in engineering but who are not in the labor market. This means they are not working nor are they looking for work, and are therefore not counted as unemployed.
In addition to those unemployed and out of the labor force, there are an additional 1.47 million U.S.-born individuals who report they have an engineering degree and have a job, but do not work as engineers.
President Obama specifically used the words “highly skilled.” In 2010, there were 25,000 unemployed U.S.-born individuals with engineering degrees who have a Master’s or Ph.D. and another 68,000 with advanced degrees not in the labor force. There were also 489,000 U.S.-born individuals with graduate degrees who were working, but not as engineers.

If knowledge based jobs are the next big thing then why do we have so many knowledge workers who are unemployed or not even working in the STEM industry?

This is where free traitors retreat to their last resort: bigotry against American workers. "They're all incompetent!" 

2) We're already shipping knowledge work overseas. Biotech has research already moved overseas. Intel has moved a major research center to China. And let's not mention the devastation that foreign outsourcing is inflicting upon the knowledge jobs of the tech industry.

The problem with globalization is that knowledge work - innovation and research - is as easily mobile as manufacturing. It doesn't matter if you have a Ph D - someone in India could have a Ph D, too, and do the same work for pennies to your dollar. Free traitors like to avoid discussing this. Remember to hammer them about it. Mercilessly.

3) China faces unrest not because manufacturing jobs are inherently jobs where workers get abused, but because China, unlike the United States, still allows rampant abuse, overworking and underpayment of their workers. America had beaten this problem of worker abuse with workplace safety laws and wage laws, to name a few basic rights that Chinese workers don't have. In China they put you in a dorm and wake you up at random in order to fulfill a company's emergency order for a new product. They can't get away with that in America.

As for the "dissatisfaction and turnover, stress-related mental and physical health problems" - all of which are less severe in American manufacturing jobs, mind you (thank labor unions for that) - there is one other point to consider: does this genius of an author think unemployment causes less of this?

4) Knowledge based jobs and high-tech manufacturing jobs require workers with college degrees. Anyone who tells you otherwise is blowing smoke out their butts. Has this author looked outside for a second to see what the cost of such degrees are, nowadays?

So the plan here is for unemployed American manufacturing workers to run the gauntlet of high tuition costs and massive student debt to get a STEM based degree to compete with the other STEM grads out there who are unemployed and looking for work. And to compete with cheap STEM labor from other countries, too. 

What could possibly go wrong with that?