Open thread for night owls: The problem with the return of manufacturing

Felix Salmon writes The problem with the return of manufacturing:

Charles Fishman has an upbeat cover story in the new Atlantic, talking about how manufacturing is making its way back from China to America. As the world demands an ever-more nimble manufacturing sector, able to produce smaller quantities of goods more quickly, it makes sense to make those goods here rather than be forced to spend a month shipping them over from China, especially with shipping costs rising. On top of that, Chinese manufacturing costs are rising too: inputs from labor to natural gas are getting much more expensive. [...] Fishman's enthusiasm for bringing the designers closer to the means of production ' it really does make for much more efficient assembly lines ' means that he papers over the reality of what America's new manufacturing-sector workers are being paid: Appliance Park's union was so fractious in the '70s and '80s that the place was known as 'Strike City.' That same union agreed to a two-tier wage scale in 2005'and today, 70 percent of the jobs there are on the lower tier, which starts at just over $13.50 an hour, almost $8 less than what the starting wage used to be. There's a huge difference between $13.50 per hour and $21 per hour: the latter is something you can actually live on, something you can consider to be a career. The former is not. And that's a problem, as Adam Davidson explains: the reason that people aren't going to college to learn the skills needed on a modern manufacturing assembly line is simply that those skills aren't valued highly enough. Even McDonald's, where there were noisy strikes today, looks attractive in comparison. [...] All of which means that there are two enormous problems with the story that manufacturing is returning to the US. That might be true, but (a) it's not creating many jobs, and (b) the jobs it is creating are not the good jobs which people want to have for many years. Instead, they pay $15ish per hour, which is what teenage babysitters make in New York.

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