[TheForge] jobs

[ries]

I am guessing you guys havent flown into LAX lately- on your approach,  
you fly over rougly 100 miles (no exaggeration- it starts out past  
Riverside) of roofs of warehouses, tiltups, and factories. The number  
of 20,000 sq foot roofs staggers the mind.
Having lived there for ten years, I can tell you that they are  
probably the largest cluster of manufacturing and industrial services  
in the country.
There is no single steel mill that employs 15,000,  or a factory 3  
blocks long- those are 19th century models that were outdated, even in  
places like Pittsburgh, by 1960 or so.
We still have this image in our minds that "manufacturing" must mean a  
huge factory swimming with worker bees.
It just aint so.
I have been in so many shops in LA and surrounds where 5 or 6  
20something kids, wearing $150 sneakers and t shirts, are tending $3  
Million dollars worth of CNC machines, and cranking out the quantity  
of machined parts that it would have taken 200 guys to do in 1955. And  
in dollar volume, those kids, in a 5000sq foot shop, are probably  
about equal or better as well.
The USA rules in things like titanium medical implants, chip fab  
machinery, military electronics, weapons of all sorts more complicated  
than an AK47, aerospace, satellites, deep sea stuff, high end oil  
drilling equipment, and many more very high dollar items.
We manufacture, and export, Billions and Billions of dollars worth of  
stuff- but we no longer need thousands of mindless factory workers to  
do it.
My dad worked summers in Gary Indiana steel mills, Studebaker car  
plants, and similar 50's factories- and he was the single worst tool  
user, uncoordinated guy I have ever met. He once took a government  
skills test for hand eye coordination, and they told him they had  
never seen a lower score- yet he had no trouble getting hired in mass  
production environments.
Nowadays, he would be SOL- the manufacturing jobs are much fewer, but  
the standards are higher, and the productivity is orders of magnitude  
more.

Nope, we will never support 30% of the population again in  
manufacturing- just like we wont see 85% of the population in  
agriculture again- but we make an enormous amount of stuff, and we are  
far from being just a service economy.

Things could be a whole lot better- we could use a national  
manufacturing policy, along with a national energy policy, two things  
Bush and his cronies steadfastedly refused to consider as they  
borrowed us dry for the forseeable future- but we are not dead yet,  
not by a far cry.

I have seen manufacturing concerns around me spring up from nothing  
more than smart people and good ideas, in a few years, to multi  
million dollar industries, because we have such a good system to do  
business in- we have better transparency of government, a better  
infrastructure, better educated workers, and a more flexible  
environment to do business in than almost any country in the world-  
lots of first world countries take 6 months to get a business license.

I have a lot of faith in america.


Ries Niemi
Industrial Artist
http://www.riesniemi.com/