Originally Posted by
Thekri
Manufacturing is not on the way out, it is changing. Much like Agriculture did. In fact, Agriculture is the dominate reason for the changing US economy, not Manufacturing. Manufacturing was a relatively temporary boom, lasting from the last few decades of the 19th Century to about two thirds of the way through the twentieth. Agriculture was the primary industry for labor, and had been for millennia.
The productivity of Agriculture is higher then it has ever been, but it has fragmented, between capitol intensive mechanized farming, which is largely done in developed countries, and labor intensive agriculture, which is largely done in developing nations (With some being immigrant labor in developed countries). Manufacturing is following exactly the same pattern. At the upper end of the scale, US Manufacturing is very much alive. I work in Manufacturing, in a huge plant that makes giant things out of steel. But pretty much nobody in that plant makes less than $30 an hour, and most make considerably more. It wouldn't be efficient to make our steel, so we buy it. We buy most components actually, isn't worth paying the labor costs to produce it here, even though we have more then enough skill. Instead, we use this plant to do the design, experimentation, assembly, and quality stages of each product. We do all the complex bits and moving parts, but we don't cast the frames and such.
A lot of people like looking at the world through nostalgia goggles, and claiming unions killed manufacturing. They didn't. Low shipping costs and global resource availability "Killed" manufacturing. It never died, and it isn't likely too, but the good old days with 1500 workers in a plant are never coming back. We can run it just fine with 150.