The exact same thing has been going on in high tech. I'm newly retired but looking back 40 years one of the big differences is that employers were really good about wanting their workforce to upgrade. Most companies paid even the lowliest workers college courses at a rate that they could actually finish in a reasonable amount of time. I was in the military in the 1970s and went in for the old GI bill but after I got out I found my employer would pay for courses I took for an Electrical Engineering degree and later I did a computer science degree and paid for an MBA on my own after companies stopped paying for their employees education.
Now the companies are very very few that pay their workforces college education. I say few because I am not aware of any, but then they also used the H1-B to hold down pay for decades. You can argue this all you want but remember the basic rules of supply and demand. The H1-B made supply unlimited so for the last 20 years working as an engineer I competed against the best engineers that about 4-6 Billion other people could produce. Working in engineering was like being in the UN, and actually I enjoyed it but PAY remained flat as I completed a masters degree and many additional courses paid by myself just to remain relevant to the workforce. Those who didn't, were mostly pushed out.
I despised Trump ( and still do even more) but when he killed the H1-B program during his first term, for the first time I made some decent financial gains - companies had to compete demand dropped. This proves in Trumps case a stopped clock is right twice a day and that they were for a period of time giving US citizens the opportunities at the top spots.
This pay gain of course were eroded when the Dems came back to office and then the rates actually dropped from what I could see. I wrote lots of letters to my senators and congresspeople but got either no reply or piles of wasted paper not directed to any response - money in politics is cancer.
Education elsewhere is very inexpensive compared to he US, the US stopped funding it's colleges long long ago in any meaningful way as to hold down tuition, In the mid 1970s I could go to state school (Umass) for $300 a semester which I could easily earn working in the summer doing farm labor, Now they put kids in chains and lifetime debilitating debt. The oligarchs learned the lessons of slavery, if you are a master with a plantation, it is expensive to take care to feed, cloth, house, and keep your workforce in good health.
It's much cheaper to run a sweatshop where if someone doesn't perform, kick them out into the street and get another. Welcome to H1-B. All of this happened as the top grew wealthy beyond all expectation, and the working class and educated professionals unless self employed watched their pay flatline. To quote Warren Buffet "Of course there is a class war, and my side is winning" ( paraphrased said about 15 years ago). To make my point, we are at war, the working class and professional class are at war, and if they don't start fighting back with the same or greater ruthlessness as those ( both corporate Dems and GoP, though this particular administration is by far the most corrupt and ruthless ever) who will put both us our kids into dire poverty for another golden toilet or Temu ballroom. We need to make billionaires millionaires, get money out of politics - because corporations ARE NOT PEOPLE they are just a veil to prevent litigation and to hide the intentions of those running them.
Lay down and surrender you and your your kids future, or stand up and fight ruthlessly with NO empathy towards the enemy as they have done to you for decades. Gloves off, it will be very ugly but if you really want your country back, you have to do it. Educate yourself ALL the time. Toss Schumer and the other sell outs, yes, people were suffering, maybe they meant well but they were weak and stupid.
We need strong leaders who are not stupid and can talk themselves into selling out America for the good of the few rather than the welfare of the many, The suffering they enabled by a group that has been directly culpable to let millions die through cuts to programs like USAID and food and medical programs in the US for mismanagement on the covid epidemic cost the lives of hundreds of thousands because he didn't want his makeup to get mussed by his mask.
Make no mistake, the empathy they have towards starving African children and AIDs patience is exactly the same as for American citizens - ZERO. Glad to have Veterans die, children die, Americans die, and see anything destroyed for tax cuts. Get strong now, stand up now. You are fighting the oligarchy who would keep us divided, and use that to impoverish and repress us to serve themselves.
Our oligarchs don't want to invest in domestic education, because they can import already educated specialists. Now they complain of a lack of "high quality individuals."
Good observations, I was there when Lazy Boy closed the Tremonton facility to chase low labor costs in Mexico. As I recall they had to move again when that didn't work out. I've worked in a different industry getting things off the ground in China. One HUGE difference I observed was China & the Chinese valued education. The "service economy" was once the "New American Economy". The truth is, moving a mouth, adds limited value and none when that movement serves only to manipulate instead of to lead. I was also there when BIC pens were shot through a board to prove they would still write, they didn't tell you how many pens it took to get a survivor. When being entertained and "winning" is given greater value than "contribution" and "creation of real value" we loose. Corbin is right, we've let it happen. I always heard folks from Asian cultures accuse American's of "short term planning". They are also right. The corporate board room focus on the next quarter is part of what has sunk us. Our snorkel is taking water.
Great article and everything you wrote is spot on. However; I will respectfully disagree with you that unions did not fight NAFTA and the neo-liberal agenda. I know because I was right in the middle of that fight. I am a retired 60 year dues paying member of the Machinist Union. At that time I was President of the Florida State Council of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Which is the Political arm in Florida. I was also a full time lobbyist working in Tallahassee and DC. I remember meeting many times with the Democrats in DC with my International President William W. Winpisinger the most progressive union President on the AFL-CIO Executive Council. Also the IAMAW'S International Political Director was involved. We warned them-many times-what would happen to America's manufacturing base. We warned them that plants would close and jobs would be out sourced to low wage country's. We warned them that American technological lead would evaporate. We warned them that they would cost millions of union and non-union Americans their jobs and thus their most important source of campaign support and voters. We warned them that Reagan began the demise of the union movement and with their vote on NAFTA they would complete the destruction. Hell, we even told them that company's like Boeing were taking taxpayer dollars, developing secret engineering and technologically innovative designs of military equipment including- top airplane designs- and running to China with this information and giving it away to form their greedy partnerships. And that is but a small picture of what was transpiring throughout Americas industrial base. There were also many other unions fighting the NAFTA giveaways. Again, I know because I was working shoulder to shoulder with my Sisters and Brothers in the fight to save America from the stupidity, ignorance, and greed running rampant in Washington. We told them. We warned them. We fought them. And we were sold out, especially by the Democratic party. And everything we told them happened.
I too worked at a couple of companies in the early 2000s as they transitioned manufacturing offshore to places like China and Mexico. While saving on labor, costs in other areas, such as transportation and travel, increased significantly. Seemed to me the loss of expertise was never considered since that’s not measured financially, much like impacts to the country and climate.
Great article. But my analysis of America's decline begins before the rise of neoliberalism. The first blows against US industrial capacity did not come from offshoring to nations with cheap labor, but from another industrial power, i.e., Japan. This was most notable in the automotive and consumer electronics industries. Japan beat us because they built a better product and a product that Americans preferred. The US consumer electronics industry insisted on building TV and stereos encased in furniture. The high end market for stereo was considered a niche market and we were content to let the Germans have it. The Japanese came in and said, "You don't want a TV or stereo encased in furniture and, by the way, we make a product that's as good as the German stuff." Within a matter of years, not decades, electronic factories across the nation closed. With cars, Japan entered the market with cheap and gas efficient economy models that the US refused to make. Our first new car was a 76 Toyota Corona. We ran it until we got sick of it (over 200,00 miles) and upgraded to a Mazda 323 in the mid 1980s. By that time, Toyota and Honda had captured much of the sedan market as well as the economy car market. Of course, Japan and others now make cars in the USA, but the industry is concentrated along interstate corridors, like I-85, in the South. The other event in America's decline that occurred before the rise of neoliberalism was the war in Indochina. People who grew up after Vietnam tend not to understand how that war devastated the US morally, intellectually, economically, and politically. But that's a story for another day.
American manufacturers wouldn’t listen to W Edward’s Demming so he went to Japan and taught them the principles of statistical management of production quality. Coming out of that Taiichi Ohno and colleagues developed the Toyota production system. TPS was my guiding light for my years in American manufacturing first in the semiconductor industry, and then biotech and pharmaceuticals. TPS is worker focused. One of its core principles is those who do the work should design the work. It was the opposite ofTaylorism.
So happy to see the name of Deming pop up! I was a systems expert, leading managers in projects designed to restructure their businesses. I watched films of Deming's lectures to American industrialists, and educators. No one could hear him. A real loss to us.
which reminds me that the most reliable automobile produced in the US during the1990S was the Chevrolet Nova--it was made in Fremont, CA, under Toyota management. The plant now produces Teslas..
No doubt. My point was merely to say that American decline predated neoliberalism which is usually, but not always, associated with the Carter administration.
All true, but few know the role played by the US State Department in this process, which made a conscious decision to tacitly support the resurgence of Japanese and German industrial power via favourable trading arrangements at the expense of American labour as part of its “containment of communism” strategy. The gory details (along with rise of financialization and all of its associated effects) are covered in Judith Stein’s “Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies”
Thanks for this, Corbin. I'm curious how you think about this -- I'm not sure what to call it -- puzzle?
To bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, we need to unravel at least some labor and environmental regulations. But because the race to the bottom is in full swing, we’ll need to continue degrading the workplace on an ongoing basis to keep standards competitive. And of course, we need to remember why we cared about bringing jobs back in the first place: to provide dignity and purpose to US manufacturing communities that were left behind, as you quite eloquently describe in your piece.
How do we (1) lower standards, (2) keep lowering them, and (3) ensure dignity for workers and communities? It may be helpful to note that I'm coming at this from the perspective of a human rights attorney focused on corporate liability for abuses in global supply chains. My take is that, in addition to all the fixes you recommend, we must consistently hold US companies accountable for their behavior overseas. In other words, raise standards everywhere US corps do business, rather than lower standards here.
Yeah, I'm a little confused about the lowering of standards. The cost to people and the environment has been from one standard - get rid of employees and regulations to keep costs down. But that doesn't work, since we pay for whatever damage unemployment and deregulation inflicts. It seems to me that the largest issue is that we fail to accept the one dominant standard that cannot be ignored. Earth. That will include making less and wanting less for some time to come. So getting paid for doing a job has to be redefined. We still make and buy as if Earth were boundless.
I don't think unravelling labor and environmental regulations will do it. I think that's a theme that companies use to further their agenda, namely increasing profits. Large costs for labor include healthcare costs, education loans, housing costs, childcare. It's also important for companies (i.e., Wall Street) to recognize that "profit margins" of yesterday cannot go forward. "Profit" does not account for the lost knowledge, skills, etc., which went unvalued/undervalued. If we address some of these causes, wages+benefits can reset to appropriate levels.
Relatedly, I think our primary educational system is broken: UCSD's report shows that many matriculating student do not have middle school math or English skills. How is that even possible? We can't train people for jobs (manufacturing or otherwise) without basic math and language skills. We also need to understand that getting high-end manufacturing is unreasonable without first bringing back lower-end manufacturing. We have lost many of the skills as the workforce retired.
We are slipping away via the Friedman Flatline. Profit is the only reality. Profit is a cancer, a parasite eating the guts of everything that lives and breathes. But it delusion sells more fat burgers than the golden arches, while the blood and carcasses slime the once clean waterways of 'murka.
What do we now produce? Waste. Waste. Waste. Turns out the 'products' of all that offshoring consume profane amounts of, wait for it, FF Energy. That is 'murkan consumption. Trump - 6 million gallons of jet fuel just campaigning. Now that has at least doubled. Private jets consume more fuel than almost the entire commercial industry, flying most jumps less than 200 miles.
What do we now produce, other than waste. Fakery. Data centers and AI fuels, you know, the new and improved 'counts' of everything in a microsecond that mean almost nothing except gigawatts of heat-producing energy and the trillions of gallons of water needed to cool the idiotic counts of how fast the world is deteriorating. And how to BS a million people with pseudo-thinking in one internet post.
Fear now drives the ubermen of the oligarch class. Bow down to the maniac who rattles n rambles along lest it take away some of your ill-gotten gold. What the angels of darkness have given, the anti-christ can taketh away. The capitulation was breathlessly seamless, leave out a few idiotic ramblings in an interview and get sued for millions or billions.
We are a nation of cowards, CYAF babies who need a jet to get from one side of LA to the other. Choppers are now just too slow. Haberdashers n book sellers now have rockets as toys and take over ancient cites for lavish weddings. Is there, anywhere in 'murka, such a thing as an independent Fourth Estate watchdog? No, too busy using petty lies to create boogeymen in the Carribean or Portland or Chicago or Memphis.
Quite frankly, there is nothing of value left to manufacture. Our landfills burst with throw aways that could be recycled. We eat only 60 percent of the food we buy. 95 percent of that food is lifeless mush loaded with toxins that addle our brains and rot us out from the inside. The container ships keep 'murkans alive just long enough for us to bury the next 15k.
And now we are deporting thousands a day, using millions of gallons of jet fuel to pay many more millions of tin pot dictators to house these 'prisoners' somewhere else. The COSTS for that? Billions of tax dollars, mostly from the bottom 80 percent.
De-growth must occur, and will occur, and is occurring, because we are shipping out or jailing or poisoning the only persons who know what work is. Not much of a plan, but planning is for suckers. The only plan is the Friedman Plan. Profit at All Costs.
Oligarchs only care about making themselves richer. We have to turn our culture around -- yes, that big a change -- so money and power are subordinated to the public good. Thanks for your work Corbin. Please get an editor to fix those spelling errors (like "use" instead of "us")
My husband and I were pulled through every knothole of the agenda you just described, in the late1990's. We scraped by until 2008, then left the Midwest. People had been told they were just lazy and didn't have what it took to change with the times. But here's the thing I see all the time: people take great joy and pride in building, designing, seeing finished goods in the hands of someone who values the work. I returned to the arts and crafts later, meeting people whose hearts and souls were immersed in making. Sharing skills, learning from one another, these are our spiritual bread and butter. I expect it is the same for technical people today. We are here! We don't need the extractors. What we need is to make our businesses our own, to 'not need' the moneyed. A question for you. Isn't Germany moving back into this kind of manufacturing, albeit with new technologies? I think their training systems in the schools left a more robust manufacturing sector through this downsizing time.
I recently wrote a post called ‘a progressive plan to revive manufacturing’ based on my writings over the last 20 years, https://medium.com/@jonrynn/a-progressive-plan-to-revive-manufacturing-f08aeae5d094. Basically, to revive manufacturing requires a huge infrastructure investment and plan, laid out at GreenNewDealPlan.com, that uses domestic manufacturing for all its needs. My calculation is that such a program would create at least 20 million good jobs, of which at least 5 million would be in manufacturing. and since the government builds it, it would all be guaranteed, thus being attractive to working class voters
I know. But I don’t see any alternative. And there are plenty of examples, even in the US. Everybody uses the interstate highway system (I am very aware of its problems). That was built by the government. China is building everything we are talking about here, and yes, it’s china, but it shows that government can do things. It also highlights that you have to elect the right people, as Corbin is arguing. And at least it provides a vision of a better future, which mamdani showed inspires young (and old) people. What do you think?
Except the “working class voters” do not trust the government!! They have only seen how badly politicians and the government screw them over. My adult kids are about as cynical as you can imagine.
Ralph Nader was against NAFTA. I trusted him. Have you ever looked into Democracy Collaborative's "Community Wealth Building". It's a great concept, that been proven to work in several countries.
My dad was a plumber - had his own business - could fix anything he put his mind to. My father-in-law was an electrician - retired from Bethlehem Steel - my ex-husband also could fix or build whatever he needed to. My son went from being a mechanic to now being a locksmith - also able to pretty much do anything he needs to.
I guess I dont get the idea that working with your hands - being able to fix or repair what is broken puts someone lower in the "class" system that seems to exist now.
The end-all of a college education - sure thats great if someone is working towards a particular goal - but what is needed badly are trade or vocational schools. Rather than exercising their thumbs (!) kids should be learning how to earn a living and how to take care of themselves!
In the 50’s my widowed mother with seven children worked 50-60 hours on weekdays as a seamstress at Skyway Luggage then weekends as a cleaning “lady” for bougie families who had “arrived,” and were now too pretentious to wash their own stained drawers.
Once unions organized, and civil rights and labor laws (largely but not completely) broke the easy exploitation of the underclass, we looked for “new” immigrants but found unlike previous immigrants, they now were largely more educated, more skilled, more business savvy, and in some cases wealthy, and otherwise lacked the willingness to accept automatic assignment to the servant class. So big business moved operations to where the undereducated and desperate lived, and where pesky laws and human rights violations were not an impediment to profit.
Being wealthy enough to have servants, even part-time ones, was and arguably still is the true American dream. Now since the shrinking servant class and our shrinking incomes won’t allow us to become elite jet-setters in need of nannies and maids, we’re mad as hell at the elites when we should be mad at ourselves for believing in their cons in the first place and searching for villains in anyone but ourselves. “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me!” So what are we going to do about it. Look for a “good” Trump? Do we think three times a charm? How about no more white hat saviors, and instead just basic grass roots leadership.
A country whose sole product is to make money is destined to fail. The ones that can do it turn on each other and will constantly be stabbing each other in the back in the quest for more money. of us not wired to do that sort of thing will be penniless and, quite frankly, very, very angry like the French were at Marie Antoinette and her husband. The wealthy need 1% needs to remember: 99% equals to a lot more people, a lot more anger, and a lot more motivation to get out the pitchforks and everything people have thanks to the republican interpretation of the 2nd Amendment.
The exact same thing has been going on in high tech. I'm newly retired but looking back 40 years one of the big differences is that employers were really good about wanting their workforce to upgrade. Most companies paid even the lowliest workers college courses at a rate that they could actually finish in a reasonable amount of time. I was in the military in the 1970s and went in for the old GI bill but after I got out I found my employer would pay for courses I took for an Electrical Engineering degree and later I did a computer science degree and paid for an MBA on my own after companies stopped paying for their employees education.
Now the companies are very very few that pay their workforces college education. I say few because I am not aware of any, but then they also used the H1-B to hold down pay for decades. You can argue this all you want but remember the basic rules of supply and demand. The H1-B made supply unlimited so for the last 20 years working as an engineer I competed against the best engineers that about 4-6 Billion other people could produce. Working in engineering was like being in the UN, and actually I enjoyed it but PAY remained flat as I completed a masters degree and many additional courses paid by myself just to remain relevant to the workforce. Those who didn't, were mostly pushed out.
I despised Trump ( and still do even more) but when he killed the H1-B program during his first term, for the first time I made some decent financial gains - companies had to compete demand dropped. This proves in Trumps case a stopped clock is right twice a day and that they were for a period of time giving US citizens the opportunities at the top spots.
This pay gain of course were eroded when the Dems came back to office and then the rates actually dropped from what I could see. I wrote lots of letters to my senators and congresspeople but got either no reply or piles of wasted paper not directed to any response - money in politics is cancer.
Education elsewhere is very inexpensive compared to he US, the US stopped funding it's colleges long long ago in any meaningful way as to hold down tuition, In the mid 1970s I could go to state school (Umass) for $300 a semester which I could easily earn working in the summer doing farm labor, Now they put kids in chains and lifetime debilitating debt. The oligarchs learned the lessons of slavery, if you are a master with a plantation, it is expensive to take care to feed, cloth, house, and keep your workforce in good health.
It's much cheaper to run a sweatshop where if someone doesn't perform, kick them out into the street and get another. Welcome to H1-B. All of this happened as the top grew wealthy beyond all expectation, and the working class and educated professionals unless self employed watched their pay flatline. To quote Warren Buffet "Of course there is a class war, and my side is winning" ( paraphrased said about 15 years ago). To make my point, we are at war, the working class and professional class are at war, and if they don't start fighting back with the same or greater ruthlessness as those ( both corporate Dems and GoP, though this particular administration is by far the most corrupt and ruthless ever) who will put both us our kids into dire poverty for another golden toilet or Temu ballroom. We need to make billionaires millionaires, get money out of politics - because corporations ARE NOT PEOPLE they are just a veil to prevent litigation and to hide the intentions of those running them.
Lay down and surrender you and your your kids future, or stand up and fight ruthlessly with NO empathy towards the enemy as they have done to you for decades. Gloves off, it will be very ugly but if you really want your country back, you have to do it. Educate yourself ALL the time. Toss Schumer and the other sell outs, yes, people were suffering, maybe they meant well but they were weak and stupid.
We need strong leaders who are not stupid and can talk themselves into selling out America for the good of the few rather than the welfare of the many, The suffering they enabled by a group that has been directly culpable to let millions die through cuts to programs like USAID and food and medical programs in the US for mismanagement on the covid epidemic cost the lives of hundreds of thousands because he didn't want his makeup to get mussed by his mask.
Make no mistake, the empathy they have towards starving African children and AIDs patience is exactly the same as for American citizens - ZERO. Glad to have Veterans die, children die, Americans die, and see anything destroyed for tax cuts. Get strong now, stand up now. You are fighting the oligarchy who would keep us divided, and use that to impoverish and repress us to serve themselves.
Our oligarchs don't want to invest in domestic education, because they can import already educated specialists. Now they complain of a lack of "high quality individuals."
Good observations, I was there when Lazy Boy closed the Tremonton facility to chase low labor costs in Mexico. As I recall they had to move again when that didn't work out. I've worked in a different industry getting things off the ground in China. One HUGE difference I observed was China & the Chinese valued education. The "service economy" was once the "New American Economy". The truth is, moving a mouth, adds limited value and none when that movement serves only to manipulate instead of to lead. I was also there when BIC pens were shot through a board to prove they would still write, they didn't tell you how many pens it took to get a survivor. When being entertained and "winning" is given greater value than "contribution" and "creation of real value" we loose. Corbin is right, we've let it happen. I always heard folks from Asian cultures accuse American's of "short term planning". They are also right. The corporate board room focus on the next quarter is part of what has sunk us. Our snorkel is taking water.
Sad but true. Long term thinking implies investment, which means taxes, and our oligarchs would rather kill us than part with their money.
...and tho disguised somewhat, that is exactly what they're currrently doing.
Great article and everything you wrote is spot on. However; I will respectfully disagree with you that unions did not fight NAFTA and the neo-liberal agenda. I know because I was right in the middle of that fight. I am a retired 60 year dues paying member of the Machinist Union. At that time I was President of the Florida State Council of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Which is the Political arm in Florida. I was also a full time lobbyist working in Tallahassee and DC. I remember meeting many times with the Democrats in DC with my International President William W. Winpisinger the most progressive union President on the AFL-CIO Executive Council. Also the IAMAW'S International Political Director was involved. We warned them-many times-what would happen to America's manufacturing base. We warned them that plants would close and jobs would be out sourced to low wage country's. We warned them that American technological lead would evaporate. We warned them that they would cost millions of union and non-union Americans their jobs and thus their most important source of campaign support and voters. We warned them that Reagan began the demise of the union movement and with their vote on NAFTA they would complete the destruction. Hell, we even told them that company's like Boeing were taking taxpayer dollars, developing secret engineering and technologically innovative designs of military equipment including- top airplane designs- and running to China with this information and giving it away to form their greedy partnerships. And that is but a small picture of what was transpiring throughout Americas industrial base. There were also many other unions fighting the NAFTA giveaways. Again, I know because I was working shoulder to shoulder with my Sisters and Brothers in the fight to save America from the stupidity, ignorance, and greed running rampant in Washington. We told them. We warned them. We fought them. And we were sold out, especially by the Democratic party. And everything we told them happened.
Yes, Luigi, and most of us were happy, because we had cheap consumer goods.
Is this comment missing a /sarc tag?
Thank you for your efforts. We will need people like you to rebuild when we finally throw the bums out for good.
I too worked at a couple of companies in the early 2000s as they transitioned manufacturing offshore to places like China and Mexico. While saving on labor, costs in other areas, such as transportation and travel, increased significantly. Seemed to me the loss of expertise was never considered since that’s not measured financially, much like impacts to the country and climate.
so much for "creative destruction" of capitalism. It is creative only as long as we ignore "externalities," which business does systematically.
Great article. But my analysis of America's decline begins before the rise of neoliberalism. The first blows against US industrial capacity did not come from offshoring to nations with cheap labor, but from another industrial power, i.e., Japan. This was most notable in the automotive and consumer electronics industries. Japan beat us because they built a better product and a product that Americans preferred. The US consumer electronics industry insisted on building TV and stereos encased in furniture. The high end market for stereo was considered a niche market and we were content to let the Germans have it. The Japanese came in and said, "You don't want a TV or stereo encased in furniture and, by the way, we make a product that's as good as the German stuff." Within a matter of years, not decades, electronic factories across the nation closed. With cars, Japan entered the market with cheap and gas efficient economy models that the US refused to make. Our first new car was a 76 Toyota Corona. We ran it until we got sick of it (over 200,00 miles) and upgraded to a Mazda 323 in the mid 1980s. By that time, Toyota and Honda had captured much of the sedan market as well as the economy car market. Of course, Japan and others now make cars in the USA, but the industry is concentrated along interstate corridors, like I-85, in the South. The other event in America's decline that occurred before the rise of neoliberalism was the war in Indochina. People who grew up after Vietnam tend not to understand how that war devastated the US morally, intellectually, economically, and politically. But that's a story for another day.
American manufacturers wouldn’t listen to W Edward’s Demming so he went to Japan and taught them the principles of statistical management of production quality. Coming out of that Taiichi Ohno and colleagues developed the Toyota production system. TPS was my guiding light for my years in American manufacturing first in the semiconductor industry, and then biotech and pharmaceuticals. TPS is worker focused. One of its core principles is those who do the work should design the work. It was the opposite ofTaylorism.
So happy to see the name of Deming pop up! I was a systems expert, leading managers in projects designed to restructure their businesses. I watched films of Deming's lectures to American industrialists, and educators. No one could hear him. A real loss to us.
which reminds me that the most reliable automobile produced in the US during the1990S was the Chevrolet Nova--it was made in Fremont, CA, under Toyota management. The plant now produces Teslas..
There is truth to what you say, Carl, but the opening of China to foreign investment changed the world, the US included.
No doubt. My point was merely to say that American decline predated neoliberalism which is usually, but not always, associated with the Carter administration.
The person computer made its appearance at the end of the Carter administration. It was the beginning of a new ara.
All true, but few know the role played by the US State Department in this process, which made a conscious decision to tacitly support the resurgence of Japanese and German industrial power via favourable trading arrangements at the expense of American labour as part of its “containment of communism” strategy. The gory details (along with rise of financialization and all of its associated effects) are covered in Judith Stein’s “Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7907138-pivotal-decade
Thanks for this, Corbin. I'm curious how you think about this -- I'm not sure what to call it -- puzzle?
To bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, we need to unravel at least some labor and environmental regulations. But because the race to the bottom is in full swing, we’ll need to continue degrading the workplace on an ongoing basis to keep standards competitive. And of course, we need to remember why we cared about bringing jobs back in the first place: to provide dignity and purpose to US manufacturing communities that were left behind, as you quite eloquently describe in your piece.
How do we (1) lower standards, (2) keep lowering them, and (3) ensure dignity for workers and communities? It may be helpful to note that I'm coming at this from the perspective of a human rights attorney focused on corporate liability for abuses in global supply chains. My take is that, in addition to all the fixes you recommend, we must consistently hold US companies accountable for their behavior overseas. In other words, raise standards everywhere US corps do business, rather than lower standards here.
Yeah, I'm a little confused about the lowering of standards. The cost to people and the environment has been from one standard - get rid of employees and regulations to keep costs down. But that doesn't work, since we pay for whatever damage unemployment and deregulation inflicts. It seems to me that the largest issue is that we fail to accept the one dominant standard that cannot be ignored. Earth. That will include making less and wanting less for some time to come. So getting paid for doing a job has to be redefined. We still make and buy as if Earth were boundless.
I don't think unravelling labor and environmental regulations will do it. I think that's a theme that companies use to further their agenda, namely increasing profits. Large costs for labor include healthcare costs, education loans, housing costs, childcare. It's also important for companies (i.e., Wall Street) to recognize that "profit margins" of yesterday cannot go forward. "Profit" does not account for the lost knowledge, skills, etc., which went unvalued/undervalued. If we address some of these causes, wages+benefits can reset to appropriate levels.
Relatedly, I think our primary educational system is broken: UCSD's report shows that many matriculating student do not have middle school math or English skills. How is that even possible? We can't train people for jobs (manufacturing or otherwise) without basic math and language skills. We also need to understand that getting high-end manufacturing is unreasonable without first bringing back lower-end manufacturing. We have lost many of the skills as the workforce retired.
We are slipping away via the Friedman Flatline. Profit is the only reality. Profit is a cancer, a parasite eating the guts of everything that lives and breathes. But it delusion sells more fat burgers than the golden arches, while the blood and carcasses slime the once clean waterways of 'murka.
What do we now produce? Waste. Waste. Waste. Turns out the 'products' of all that offshoring consume profane amounts of, wait for it, FF Energy. That is 'murkan consumption. Trump - 6 million gallons of jet fuel just campaigning. Now that has at least doubled. Private jets consume more fuel than almost the entire commercial industry, flying most jumps less than 200 miles.
What do we now produce, other than waste. Fakery. Data centers and AI fuels, you know, the new and improved 'counts' of everything in a microsecond that mean almost nothing except gigawatts of heat-producing energy and the trillions of gallons of water needed to cool the idiotic counts of how fast the world is deteriorating. And how to BS a million people with pseudo-thinking in one internet post.
Fear now drives the ubermen of the oligarch class. Bow down to the maniac who rattles n rambles along lest it take away some of your ill-gotten gold. What the angels of darkness have given, the anti-christ can taketh away. The capitulation was breathlessly seamless, leave out a few idiotic ramblings in an interview and get sued for millions or billions.
We are a nation of cowards, CYAF babies who need a jet to get from one side of LA to the other. Choppers are now just too slow. Haberdashers n book sellers now have rockets as toys and take over ancient cites for lavish weddings. Is there, anywhere in 'murka, such a thing as an independent Fourth Estate watchdog? No, too busy using petty lies to create boogeymen in the Carribean or Portland or Chicago or Memphis.
Quite frankly, there is nothing of value left to manufacture. Our landfills burst with throw aways that could be recycled. We eat only 60 percent of the food we buy. 95 percent of that food is lifeless mush loaded with toxins that addle our brains and rot us out from the inside. The container ships keep 'murkans alive just long enough for us to bury the next 15k.
And now we are deporting thousands a day, using millions of gallons of jet fuel to pay many more millions of tin pot dictators to house these 'prisoners' somewhere else. The COSTS for that? Billions of tax dollars, mostly from the bottom 80 percent.
De-growth must occur, and will occur, and is occurring, because we are shipping out or jailing or poisoning the only persons who know what work is. Not much of a plan, but planning is for suckers. The only plan is the Friedman Plan. Profit at All Costs.
Oligarchs only care about making themselves richer. We have to turn our culture around -- yes, that big a change -- so money and power are subordinated to the public good. Thanks for your work Corbin. Please get an editor to fix those spelling errors (like "use" instead of "us")
My husband and I were pulled through every knothole of the agenda you just described, in the late1990's. We scraped by until 2008, then left the Midwest. People had been told they were just lazy and didn't have what it took to change with the times. But here's the thing I see all the time: people take great joy and pride in building, designing, seeing finished goods in the hands of someone who values the work. I returned to the arts and crafts later, meeting people whose hearts and souls were immersed in making. Sharing skills, learning from one another, these are our spiritual bread and butter. I expect it is the same for technical people today. We are here! We don't need the extractors. What we need is to make our businesses our own, to 'not need' the moneyed. A question for you. Isn't Germany moving back into this kind of manufacturing, albeit with new technologies? I think their training systems in the schools left a more robust manufacturing sector through this downsizing time.
I recently wrote a post called ‘a progressive plan to revive manufacturing’ based on my writings over the last 20 years, https://medium.com/@jonrynn/a-progressive-plan-to-revive-manufacturing-f08aeae5d094. Basically, to revive manufacturing requires a huge infrastructure investment and plan, laid out at GreenNewDealPlan.com, that uses domestic manufacturing for all its needs. My calculation is that such a program would create at least 20 million good jobs, of which at least 5 million would be in manufacturing. and since the government builds it, it would all be guaranteed, thus being attractive to working class voters
I know. But I don’t see any alternative. And there are plenty of examples, even in the US. Everybody uses the interstate highway system (I am very aware of its problems). That was built by the government. China is building everything we are talking about here, and yes, it’s china, but it shows that government can do things. It also highlights that you have to elect the right people, as Corbin is arguing. And at least it provides a vision of a better future, which mamdani showed inspires young (and old) people. What do you think?
Except the “working class voters” do not trust the government!! They have only seen how badly politicians and the government screw them over. My adult kids are about as cynical as you can imagine.
Encouraging!
Ralph Nader was against NAFTA. I trusted him. Have you ever looked into Democracy Collaborative's "Community Wealth Building". It's a great concept, that been proven to work in several countries.
The only way America survived as anything other than some kind of Balkanized failed state is if we build a new American labor movement.
Fantastic! I look forward to the upcoming articles.
I always thought we were making a mistake in farminv out the industrial capacity.
My dad was a plumber - had his own business - could fix anything he put his mind to. My father-in-law was an electrician - retired from Bethlehem Steel - my ex-husband also could fix or build whatever he needed to. My son went from being a mechanic to now being a locksmith - also able to pretty much do anything he needs to.
I guess I dont get the idea that working with your hands - being able to fix or repair what is broken puts someone lower in the "class" system that seems to exist now.
The end-all of a college education - sure thats great if someone is working towards a particular goal - but what is needed badly are trade or vocational schools. Rather than exercising their thumbs (!) kids should be learning how to earn a living and how to take care of themselves!
In the 50’s my widowed mother with seven children worked 50-60 hours on weekdays as a seamstress at Skyway Luggage then weekends as a cleaning “lady” for bougie families who had “arrived,” and were now too pretentious to wash their own stained drawers.
Once unions organized, and civil rights and labor laws (largely but not completely) broke the easy exploitation of the underclass, we looked for “new” immigrants but found unlike previous immigrants, they now were largely more educated, more skilled, more business savvy, and in some cases wealthy, and otherwise lacked the willingness to accept automatic assignment to the servant class. So big business moved operations to where the undereducated and desperate lived, and where pesky laws and human rights violations were not an impediment to profit.
Being wealthy enough to have servants, even part-time ones, was and arguably still is the true American dream. Now since the shrinking servant class and our shrinking incomes won’t allow us to become elite jet-setters in need of nannies and maids, we’re mad as hell at the elites when we should be mad at ourselves for believing in their cons in the first place and searching for villains in anyone but ourselves. “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me!” So what are we going to do about it. Look for a “good” Trump? Do we think three times a charm? How about no more white hat saviors, and instead just basic grass roots leadership.
A country whose sole product is to make money is destined to fail. The ones that can do it turn on each other and will constantly be stabbing each other in the back in the quest for more money. of us not wired to do that sort of thing will be penniless and, quite frankly, very, very angry like the French were at Marie Antoinette and her husband. The wealthy need 1% needs to remember: 99% equals to a lot more people, a lot more anger, and a lot more motivation to get out the pitchforks and everything people have thanks to the republican interpretation of the 2nd Amendment.