'Good' Jobs Aren't Coming Back (The Atlantic)

[inanna]

Older article from 2015, but highly relevant.

Oct 26, 2015

In the last several years some American companies have moved their operations back to the states, but the resulting factory work isn't providing the prosperity and security that such work once did.

...

GM is one of the hundreds of companies, big and small, that have moved manufacturing back to the United States from overseas. Outsourcing decimated American manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s, erasing nearly six million jobs between 1989 and 2009.

But the number of manufacturing jobs has started to slowly grow again, and about 700,000 jobs have been added since 2010. “Onshoring,” as it’s called, is at this stage delivering just a trickle of new jobs, but states such as Tennessee are offering companies generous incentives to try and speed up the process, luring some big-name companies. Whirlpool in 2013 said it was moving production of commercial washing machines from Mexico to the U.S. The company that makes Otis elevators announced in 2012 that it would move production from Mexico to South Carolina. Caterpillar moved some heavy-equipment manufacturing back to the U.S.

But these are not your father’s manufacturing jobs. Many of the companies are locating their new plants in right-to-work states where it’s less likely their workers will join a union, and the prevailing wages are far lower.

In fact, nationally, the average wages of production and non-supervisory employees in manufacturing are lower than they were in 1985, when adjusted for inflation. In September, those employees made an average $8.63 an hour, in 1982 to 1984 dollars, while they made an average of $8.80 an hour in 1985, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/onshoring-jobs/412201/

Excellent article.

[CrispyQ]

1. Pay the proles 1980 wages in a 2017 cost of living world & then, call them losers

when they can't keep their head above water. That's the GOP way.

More from the article:

The Spring Hill GM plant is perhaps an example of the best that onshoring can bring. The plant is unionized and the jobs—with their profit-sharing perks and high-quality health care—are good ones.

This is true even for the plant’s so called “second-tier workers”—new hires who get paid substantially less (topping out at $19.28 an hour) than the long-time workers (at $28 an hour), in a system the union agreed to during negotiations in 2007.

Crystal Conklin had lived paycheck to paycheck, working odd jobs in retail office work, before she was hired as a second-tier worker at the Spring Hill plant a few years ago. Thanks to her $18 an hour wages and subsidized health insurance, she was able to save up enough to buy a car last year, and also bought a house. She wants her 17-year-old son to start working at Spring Hill while he goes to community college.

“Working at the plant has just allowed me to come out of this hole that I was in, in life, going absolutely nowhere, not advancing in anything,” she told me. “Now I’ve bought a house, I drive a brand-new vehicle.”

Why doesn't the GOP want this for all Americans? They don't care that when everyone does better everyone does better, because like the spoiled children they are, they that want it all for themselves.

[democratisphere]

2. GOP slave master's will never be willing give up their slaves; both domestic and outsourced

to other countries. No money, no power.

[RedWedge]

3. Organizing, direct action & collective bargaining is what made those jobs "good" in the first place.

We've done the work before; we'll have to do it again.