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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_States

Manufacturing output in the United States is at an all-time high as of 2023, but employment in the sector has been stagnant following a lengthy decline in the late 20th century.

The Economist reported in January 2017 that manufacturing historically created good paying jobs for workers without a college education, particularly for men. The jobs paid well enough so that women did not have to work when they had young children. Unions were strong and owners did not want to risk strikes in their factories due to large capital investments and significant on the job training. Such jobs are much less available in the post-2001 era in the U.S. though they remain available in Germany, Switzerland and Japan, leading to calls to bring those jobs back from overseas, establish protectionism, and reduce immigration.

Politically, the thing is that historically, manufacturing was something that someone without a lot of specialized skill could do and still make a wage that was comparatively-solid, and so that’s why there’s political impetus behind wanting manufacturing jobs. Having manufacturing jobs that require a highly-skilled workforce isn’t gonna help if your concern is jobs with a low barrier to entry.

I remember an episode that NPR: Planet Money did a decade back that summarized it pretty well.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/13/145039131/the-transformation-of-american-factory-jobs-in-one-company

Larry Sills is the CEO of Standard Motor Products, like his dad and his grandfather before him. The company makes replacement parts for car engines. Larry grew up with the company, and he has seen the workforce change over the years. A few decades ago, a lot of his workers had no high school degree. Some couldn’t read.

“We had a plant in Connecticut where we didn’t realize it, but they were illiterate,” he says. “And then when we switched to the next generation, we had to be able to read the instructions. To our astonishment, they couldn’t do it.”

But in today’s factory, workers don’t just have to know how to read.

“We have a microscope, a hot stand, snap gauges, ID gauges,” Standard employee Ralph Young says. “We use bore mics, go-no-go plugs.”

Young is the perfect model of the new factory worker. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of metals and microscopes, gauges and plugs. He works on the team that makes fuel injectors, which require precision engineering. At the heart of the assembly process is an automated machine run by a computer process known as CNC.

“When I came here 20 years ago, we didn’t have CNC equipment,” he says. “It was more of the hammer and screwdriver fix, to where now it’s all finesse.”

“Now it’s all finesse” could be the motto of American manufacturing today. In factories around the country, manufacturing is becoming a high-tech, high-precision business. And not everyone has the finesse to run a CNC machine.

I can read, I’ve had some computer classes, and I have a Bachelor of Arts degree. But when I asked Ralph’s boss, Tony Scalzitti, if he would hire me and train me on the job, his answer surprised me.

“No,” he said. “The risk of having you being able to come up to speed with training would be a risk I wouldn’t be willing to take.”

To become like Ralph, I’d have to learn the machine’s computer language. I’d have to learn the strengths of various metals and their resistance to various blades. And then there’s something I don’t believe I’d ever be able to achieve: the ability to picture dozens of moving parts in my head. Half the people Tony has trained over the years just never were able to get that skill.

And if you don’t get that skill, a mistake on this machine can be catastrophic. All the work that’s done here happens on a scale of microns. One micron is four-hundred-thousandths of an inch. A human hair, for example, is 70 microns thick. Here, you cannot be off by one-tenth the thickness of a hair.

“A 7- or 8-micron wrong adjustment in this machine cost us a $25,000 workhead spindle,” Young says. “Two seconds, we could lose $25,000.”

“That’s why I wouldn’t hire you,” Scalzitti says."

It’s not all Ralphs who work here.

Madelyn “Maddie” Parlier is more like the old style of worker. She does have a high school diploma, but no further education. She works on a simple machine that seals the the cap of a fuel injector onto the body. All she does is insert two parts and push a button. It requires no discretion, no judgment. There’s only one way to run it: the right way.

“It does it for you,” Maddie says. “All you do is put the piece in, push the clamps down, and push your finger.”

There are a lot of things Ralph knows that Maddie wishes she knew. She wants to know how many microns thick the different parts are. She wants to know the computer language used on the machine she runs. She wants to know all the things that make Ralph’s job prospects so much brighter than her own. And until she knows those things, her future is far less certain.

Maddie has a job, I learned, because of some simple math. A machine could easily replace her — a robotic arm could put the parts in and take them out — but it would cost around $100,000. Maddie makes a lot less than that, and, for now, the math is in her favor.

But if the price of a robotic arm goes down, or a factory in China learns how to make that part for a lot less, Maddie’s job is at risk. Simple calculations like that have cost around 5 million factory workers their jobs over the past decade.