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General Motors To Lay Off 2,000 Workers at Two US Plants (reuters.com)
General Motors plans to lay off 2,000 employees at two U.S. auto plants in early 2017, the automaker said on Wednesday. From a Reuters report:GM said it will furlough the employees when it cuts the third shift at its Lordstown, Ohio and Lansing, Michigan plants in mid-January. The Lordstown plant builds the compact Chevrolet Cruze, whose U.S. sales through October were down 20 percent. The Lansing Grand River plant builds the Cadillac ATS and CTS, whose sales were down 17 percent through October.An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Washington Examiner report, "Trump has already criticized General Motors for reports that it would shift some production to Mexico, a plan that the company hasn't confirmed and didn't allude to Wednesday. The incoming Republican president also has said that he would impose a 35 percent tariff on the products of former U.S. subsidiaries that moved out of the country. When Ford announced the opening of a new factory in Mexico earlier this year, Trump called it an "absolute disgrace" and pledged to tax its imports to the U.S."
The thing is, manufacturing jobs won't come back, because they're gone. In the 70's and 80's, it took 200 people to do what 3 machines running 24/7 with almost no error do now. Even if you were to set up a new factory, you'd have like 40 jobs where you used to have 1000 - enough to actually support a reasonable town. So point 1,
1. You aren't bringing the jobs back.
Here's another amusing point: even if we do get jobs, the value of them will be based against the value of that job globally - so long as businesses and currency is still traded globally, so until we have really brought the quality of life and cost of living to some sort of equilibrium world wide, these jobs will never provide the value they used to. Back when we didn't have to compete with other countries for this work, it was viable. That's no longer the case and it won't ever be. We avoid manufacturing now because it's simply not the best return on investment for a business OR an employee. So point 2,
2. Manufacturing work doesn't make enough money for the business or employee to incentivize companies or workers to do it in the US in past large numbers.
Last, you mentioned vocational skills. Surprising many who haven't looked into it, we do have some vocational training and even government programs to make it cheap and relatively available. The problem? If you churn out 70-200, let's say, air conditioner repairman from the same school, in the same location, every 6 months, you're not going to have enough jobs available for them. The only way that would work is if you got trained and then were required to move at least 20 miles from any other graduate at any point in time. So point 3,
3. Vocational training doesn't work at scale because it saturates the local markets past the point of available jobs
The end tally is this: Neither manufacturing nor vocational jobs have the ability or potential to support a nationwide middle class, nor provide economic mobility to enter the middle class in numbers greater than what we have today, with all likelihood of them actually decreasing in the future.
In layman's terms, manufacturing can't support a large middle class population.
Even China, the manufacturing king of the world, is dealing with this issue right now. It's prompting their hurried transition to a more service-based economy.
Advocating to bring back factory work, you may as well advocate to bring back rat catchers, switchboard operators and video rental stores for all the good it'll do the middle class. The reality is that we're moving towards a more maintainable, fully service-based economy and that necessitates higher levels of education to meet the ever rising bar for good paying skilled jobs if we want to maintain a large middle class. For good or for ill, the college degree is fast becoming the old highschool diploma as far as job hunting goes.
In 1930, in order to raise revenue the Republican Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley increased import tariffs on 20,000 imports. Trading partners did the same for US imports and a trade war started. US imports decreased to about a third and exports decreased by about 61%. The US GDP was cut in half. Was this act the cause? Other things were going on, but the increase in tariffs is blamed by many economists as part of the cause of deepening the Great Depression. Since the end of WW II there has been a continuing process of reducing tariffs and though we've had ups and downs in economic progress the trend has generally been up.
In this particular situation, if GM decides it can't make the Cruze economically in the US and the tariff would make it price uncompetitive then it could just stop making the car. Not only would no US workers make the car and dealers not have it to sell and make a profit, but there would be no Mexican workers making it either. This would be good news for foreign car makers producing similar sized cars made overseas. Another option is to build the car completely using robots. GM knows a lot about industrial robotic car assembly.
Economics is complicated and dramatic, swift changes in policies can have many unintended consequences.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell