US manufacturers in dire need for skilled workers

[Gargamellow]

omg a smurf avatar

[Gaazy]

My hate for day care started when one of my good buddies had his baby neice shook to death to get her to stop crying by a 18 year old punk whos mom ran the day care a few years back. Fuckin kid only got like 40 years out of it I reckon

[Iccarra]

omg a smurf avatar

You just noticed that? Hehe...it's kind of an inside joke.

[Harrison]

skilled labor doesnt really mean a decent wage anymore though.

Exactly. Raising a family on 14 dollars an hour isn't easy. Especially in this so called great economy.

probably depends a lot on where you live, but most of the skilled tradesman i know are well above the 14 an hour range. 6 figures in not uncommon anymore.

people in trades not making a lot of money has more to do with shit for brains than it does opportunity.

ding ding ding!

My friend Keith is a general contractor and he isn't even 21 yet. He mainly operates roofing, siding, and simple remodeling. He can do pretty much anything however.

The machinists I work with make well over the 25$/hr range. I do a little of their work with them because I need to know how to do everything from the ground up in the end, if need be.

From where I am now, I go into composites technician training. (Fiberglass and carbon fiber mast construction)

We have our own autoclave too. (it has its own fucking building it's so huge)

[Minrott]

Oh I missed this.

Let's see, I've got no student loans, in 5 years I've been in the trade my wage has more than doubled, I have equal to or greater than benefits compared to the union workers I know (and as a bonus of not being union, I actually get evaluated on my abilities and not how many years I showed up on time), I would say 40% of the guys I work with make over 6 figures a year living in a community where the average house is less than 200k and property taxes are under 4k, and my company exports 100% of it's product to Japan and China.

I think I'm sitting pretty good.

What I would not want to be right now is a "professional" in manufacturing. Companies are going lean, and they're realizing that they really need people like me, but not so much weight at the top, because regardless how many papers get shuffled or meetings get held, people actually building stuff makes them more money.

[Minrott]

Actually, I don't have such dire predictions about US manufacturing as I used to. I think what's happened in the last 10-20 years has simply been a natural culling of the manufacturing industry. Manufacturers producing a low skill to build product of course had to go over seas, top heavy companies buckled under their own weight, and anyone left after that who was too stubborn to see that in order to compete with low wage labor they would have to actually move ahead technologically and idealisticly were either sold out or bankrupt.

What's left today I think is here to stay for quite a while. The industries that are left are doing more with less people, continually improving quality control, continually improving automation, and producing a product impossible to produce with a low wage low skill labor force.

Look at Germany. If you think that American industry is so bloated and fat that it'll "all be in china" soon, then why are they still building and exporting and competing with their 32 hour paid for 40 weeks? Because they concentrate on producing things that require a high degree of technology, innovation, quality control, and when it comes to certain things, that makes it worth paying a higher price than Zing Zang would charge.