[thaack]

> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.

My family owns a small plastic manufacturing plant in the US. This is the biggest problem they face. The western worker's appetite for a low skill monotonous manufacturing job is very small. The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.

Q: Do you ever use an online job service to advertise jobs and collect applications?

Asking because my 5 sons all learned that job portals auto-trash applications w/o a job history (1st time job seekers).

Other viable but never-seen applicants: Minimal or sporadic job history, the most minimal of criminal records, the wrong zip code.

Seen but never hired: Fully qualified people who are awful at job interviews.

[i80and]

> job portals auto-trash applications w/o a job history (1st time job seekers).

It rather feels lately like civilization is the project of putting up as many catch-22's as we can.

[thaack]

I have no involvement with the plant directly. My understanding is the best luck they had was getting in good graces with local probation officers & craigslist classifieds. Job portals were pretty useless from my understanding.

[Tadpole9181]

I don't mean for this to be as pointed as it probably will come off - but do you allow these workers to listen to music, take regular (not smoke) breaks, and do their job from a chair?

The few factory jobs I've seen were not only monotonous, they were needlessly soul crushing.

For no reason at all, you had to stand for hours on end. Your only breaks were lunch and smokes. Bathroom breaks were monitored like a crime. And you were afforded no distractions from the task, 100% focus required.

Coupled with no care put into making someone feel actually appreciated and the end-products being MBA shrinkflated garbage nobody could be proud of, it's not shocking that no one in their right mind would want to work there.

[shermantanktop]

“MBA shrinkflated garbage”

I’m definitely going to find a way to slip this into a conversation.

[trollbridge]

My local factories are mostly union, and they rely heavily on the union to help fill empty openings. They also set up booths at local job fairs and have a poster board with current openings (typically electricians and pipe fitters, sometimes line workers or machinists). The jobs also have benefits and vacation and sick time off. Everybody I know who works there is always trying to get as many overtime shifts as they can, especially the weekend and holiday ones which are double or 2.5X time. Electricians are IBEW, pipefitters are pipefitters’ union, rest are UAW even though it has nothing to do with cars.

General advice is if you’re down on your luck and need a job, you can go there and be at $25 an hour in a few months (step pay increases are mandated by the union). It’s not for everyone but it certainly has less turnover than the local McDonald’s which starts and stays around $14.

Unions should do a better job of marketing to employers that they can supply a trained work force. For example the IBEW here always has a full book of apprentices. An employer can get a qualified electrician along with an apprentice basically guaranteed.

[bluGill]

> Unions should do a better job of marketing to employers that they can supply a trained work force.

Unions need to quit their management is evil message as well. Unions can do good, but when they call all management evil and breed resentment I can't blame companies for not wanting unions around.

The above is US centrist - in other countries the Unions don't do this.

[kelipso]

Feels like there are a bunch of factories like that in the Midwest even now. There's a Honda factory near the Columbus, OH area where you have a bunch of employees doing absolute monotonous work all day like checking if a screw is the right shape or something. These jobs are slowly getting automated but it's not like no one would do them if they are available.

[selimthegrim]

Marysville

[keiferski]

I guess most of these jobs don’t allow for music or YouTube to be used during work?

I’m just thinking that people already spend a lot of time just consuming content, so if it were possible to watch YouTube while at the factory, maybe it wouldn’t be as unpopular.

[DavidPeiffer]

I work in manufacturing. There are a few instances where watching YouTube may not be a huge hazard, but 98% of the roles I've seen the are reasonable reasons to not permit that. If nothing else, it'd be easy to let quality suffer which causes many bigger headaches.

I went to a panel discussion at a conference last year. Operations managers agreed labor was their biggest challenge. The manager for the promotional materials company who was probably around 60 discussed how he has loosened up a bit the last ~15 years. If someone sends a couple texts and it slightly impacts the units they (personally) do per hour, it was better than being super strict and losing employees. He had to adapt because the mentality was far different than when he started in the workforce.

[rgblambda]

From my limited experience working in a factory environment, listening to music can be a real workplace safety issue if it reduces your ability to hear forklifts or coworkers shouting warnings.

[bluGill]

Music might be allowed - though the factory is often loud enough that it isn't really practical. You still need to be able to hear the safety signals though.

YouTube cannot be allowed - you need to be ready to work when the line moves the next part to you. There are also safety concerns with watching youtube instead of the various hazards which are always there.

[scns]

Listening to music should work, no pun intended. Watching YouTube though?

[bsder]

> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.

I'm SUPER doubtful of this.

When I last bumped into this, the local Amazon warehouse paid more than all the local manufacturing. It wasn't even close.

Local manufacturing got used to being a local monopoly and being able to underpay. Now that they're not a monopoly, all they do is whine and complain.

[kranke155]

The issue is of course there is no market for US made goods at a good salary when other countries were selling their goods in the US market without impediment.

Tariffs were supposed to fix that, but now I don’t know if they are effective at all.

[anonymousDan]

Not trying to troll but it seems like there must be some way to make the job at least a little interesting (e.g. by rotating the tasks required, providing a little space for skill development)?

[candiddevmike]

If they're losing employees, then they must not have that much higher pay or better benefits for it to be worth it to work there. I don't think you can easily blame it on the job being monotonous...

[stouset]

The job being monotonous is clearly enough of a downside that significantly higher pay and benefits are needed to attract talent.

Paying higher wages might help retain employees (or not! there are jobs people just won’t keep doing no matter the pay) but doing so could easily increase costs to the point where your product is uncompetitive in the market. It also might just be worth having higher turnover in order to keep prices low.

[sensanaty]

Sorry but whenever I hear employers say "much better pay/benefits compared to the competition", the reality is in 99.9% of cases that it's a negligible difference for work that is harder and much less desirable.

How much higher is the pay? Cause the first thing that crosses into my mind is oil rigs, where they get paid more than many software engineers I know do, and there's a huge number of people doing the work happily despite the gruelling conditions. I realize not every business can pay Big Oil salaries, but still, it might be worth thinking realistically about whether your pay & benefits really are better than Walmart's (who are the number 1 employer in the states AFAIR, so they must be doing something right).

[culll_kuprey]

I bust out loud laughing the other day when I saw two jobs listed here in rusty southern Ohio.

One was for a semi-skilled manufacturing position. A little more than just assembly line, but nothing super special or niche. The other was a janitor position at the local public school system.

The differential was not huge, but the janitor paid more. Probably less hours too.

[honkostani]

Should hire us autists and allow us to program via voice commands and augmented reality.. i would love something almost automate-able while doing something that also needs higher brain functions.

[profsummergig]

The problem is opportunity cost

Of what?

Of getting on disability (back pain)

And getting more (from the govt.) to sit at home and cook up conspiracy theories on the Internet

[gaindustries]

> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.

Better pay + benefits than the most rock bottom lowest possible pay + benefits is really pathetic.

And based on the vagueness of your claims, we can assume full-time hours are also out of the picture, meaning no health insurance.

On top of that, tyranical small business owners are usually a nightmare to work for.

[thaack]

It's all full time 4x10 work with the employer covering 100% of health insurance premiums.

[jordanb]

Decent chance given that it's a plastics plant probably not unionized and probably in a red state that the air is not healthy to breathe.

[ASalazarMX]

I think you're being too hard. Working at a Wal-Mart is much easier than a factory job, considering the latter is usually dangerous, and has more RSI risk.

It'd have to pay at least double, and me being in a predicament, for me to gamble with my health, and only until I find a better option.

[foobarian]

> There's nothing wrong with "western workers"

Yeah nothing other than not being willing to work 9/9/6 for $2/day

[jltsiren]

Some jobs are just inherently bad. People do them, if there are no better jobs available. If you increase the wage, people will do the job for a while, until they have reached sufficient financial stability. Then they can afford to switch to another job that pays less but provides a better quality of life. Or to retire early in extreme cases.

[pseudocomposer]

Obviously, the “higher pay and significantly better benefits” are not actually significantly better. I’d rather we address that than just exploit some other workers overseas where they’re out of sight, out of mind. Honestly, it seems like tariffs on imported goods would be the way around this, but also, we need to be sure that money is going to the people doing the work, not just the owners.

Speaking of which, I don’t really know your business, but a post starting with “my family owns a business” and ending with “we lose workers to Walmart even though we pay them more” (with no specificity as to how much more)…. This really comes off like a problem with the business itself, not the overall market.

[Spooky23]

I’m not the OP. Heavy labor is… a lot of work. It’s rough in the body and some people aren’t cut for it.

In the 90s as a high school kid, I made $14/hr as a farmhand when the minimum wage was $4.75. They’d hire 4 crews of 4 guys each and we’d lose about half through the summer. They were great family to work for, but the work was hella hard. You could go retrieve shopping carts for $4.75 an hour and smoke weed all day, and many of my former coworkers did.

[yibg]

I'm not sure I agree. Tariffs adds cost, unless domestic manufacturing can be done in a more or less cost effective way. Manufacturing works benefit of course but that's a overall small proportion of the population and ought to be (we probably don't want most people to be doing manufacturing work). But the added costs end up be a tax on everyone and a regressive one at that.

I also don't see offshoring manufacturing as inherently problematic or being out of sight, out of mind (of course exploitation can happen, but that's not inherently a part of offshoring manufacturing).

Workers in China, Vietnam etc are paid significantly less, but their cost of living is less as well. Plus unlike in the west, where manufacturing jobs are not desirable, in places where those manufacturing jobs land they typically provide an economic opportunity that isn't otherwise there.

Basically, why not have high cost of living places produce higher cost goods that pay more, and low cost of living places produce lower cost goods that pays less?

[phillyboy82]

Wrong. Kids brains are fried from phones / social media so much that they struggle with repetitive labor.

I see this all the time at an automotive plant. UAW wages are good, especially after the last contract, but we still get people who struggle putting a sticker on a car for an hour straight before their break or task switch.