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Originally Posted by Americanwoman54
May I ask in what fields and where??? I am curious. But I hope you don't mean the jobs that came back in the automotive field.
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Fabrication, precision machining, some welding. GE has been adding tons of jobs back home finally. Job shops that are capable of servicing multiple sectors have been doing pretty good and have been hiring. Manufacturing of goods for the energy sector has remained strong, hydraulic and diesel has been kicking as well as agricultural, medical and military. Businesses that are diversified stand a much better chance of surviving recessions. These are also sectors that require great precission (sometimes within .0001 of an inch), strong quality control, accurate documentation and tracking... These are things that American businesses excel at and can offer.
Manufacturing of items such as toasters, blenders, cell phones... We can't do it cheap enough being that we are a high wage country. You could pay your workers minimum wage and we still couldn't compete in price. Let the Chinese have that work, because we can't make any money on it. Those jobs have been leaving for years, and we can do without them. Of course, the consumer gets what they pay for.
When speaking of automotive, jobs have been eliminated largely due to technology. It takes a man and a machine to do the work it would have taken 100 men to do a decade or two ago. It wasn't long ago that you had a worker sitting in front of a stamp or press doing one piece at a time, sometimes cutting blanks before hand on a bandsaw. Now an operator loads multiple machines with precut stock while the machine stamps continuously. Sometimes the operator can just load one end of a roll of sheet metal and let the machine gobble it up. Much more efficient and has eliminated the need for tons of workers.
The low skill, brainless jobs have been sent overseas never to return. The mentally demanding, high skill level jobs are the ones that have been returning, or never left in the first place. We will never completely loose manufacturing as long as companies here can complete the work within a week and have it in the customers hot little hands by Friday. As long as companies want inventories to be low, and operations to be lean, manufacturing will always have it's place. None the less, it is a challenging time to operate a manufacturing outfit, but that's a whole other topic