[parados]

Former UK manufacturing engineer here (1980s onwards).

The manufacturing industry in the UK at that time suffered from three serious problems:

- Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world.

- Poor quality management. "Working in trade" had a low social status compared to working in, say, the Civil Service. So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturing.

- Lack of access to capital. Banks were very reluctant to lend to that sector which made modernisation really difficult. With the ever present threat of nationalization it was hard to raise capital from shareholders. Why invest in technology when you could be nationalised on a whim?

I don't believe that these were significantly contributory, from experience:

- Margret Thatcher: whilst I'm no fan of her, at most she just administered the needle to a sector that was already on end-of-life support.

- The unions: I worked for a large engineering company (fully unionised) that had not had a strike for 30 years. We also introduced modern automation without resistence. The reason? Good management.

UK manufacturing is what long term decline looks like. Apart from a few small examples the UK has not been a world beater in manufacturing for fifty years or more.

On the other hand the UK is particularly good at Finance, Insurance etc.

[dwayne_dibley]

'"Working in trade" had a low social status' I think the push in the 90's to drive everyone to university also had a big negative impact on the status of 'working in the trades'.

[jack_tripper]

Don't worry, this trend has been in reverse the past couple of years.

[Theodores]

In my opinion, shipbuilding is different to other industries that the UK was known for.

The UK was once an 'island of coal in a sea of fish'. But we used up the easy-to-reach coal and ate all of the fish. Not only that, we also used up all of the easy to access iron ore.

I am no fan of Margaret Thatcher, however, how would shipbuilding make sense in the UK once the raw materials have to be shipped in from the lowest wage mines on the planet?

It would make more sense to build the ships nearer to the raw materials. Yes I know the Koreans, Japanese, Germans and Chinese have the same resource allocation problems, but the workers were cheaper, offsetting the material and energy costs.

Regarding the UK being 'particularly good at finance, insurance, etc.', London is the portal to tax havens, as in the islands that were the former British empire. The U.S. has some financial regulation that London lacks, hence the arrangement and relevance of London.

[lenerdenator]

> - Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world.

> - Poor quality management. "Working in trade" had a low social status compared to working in, say, the Civil Service. So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturing.

I see these as ultimately being caused by your third point:

> - Lack of access to capital. Banks were very reluctant to lend to that sector which made modernisation really difficult. With the ever present threat of nationalization it was hard to raise capital from shareholders. Why invest in technology when you could be nationalised on a whim?

You remove the problems by paying those workers more to be more productive. You pay them more by having more capital with which to do so.

The threat of nationalization exists because capital is unwilling to do this. Why pay Tommy Adkins more when you can set up a shipbuilding yard in a country with loose regulations, low labor costs, and an authoritarian government that's willing to grind the proles into hamburger if they speak up about either of the former issues?

Ultimately, when you can do that, there's no amount of anything that the workforce in the UK, or any other developed nation, can do to keep up. You have to either instill the nationalism in capital, or scrap the entire enterprise.

[AppleBananaPie]

Thanks for sharing :)

I have very little context but it's interesting that, presumably, the lower profit industry was replaced with the higher profit one.

And on top of that the higher profit one is probably of less value to society.

[dijit]

The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.

The second highest value thing you can do is produce machines that help produce food (or other raw materials).

The least value thing you can do is the services that are needed to support the production of machines that produce food.

This is an uncomfortable thing to read for someone (such as myself) working in tech, in fact that's where the "sectors" comes from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sector

The goal of each sector is to make the previous sectors more productive, and so they're squeezed to become commodity.

We therefore intentionally incentivise de-valuing the things that bring us value as a civilisation, and over-valuing the things that don't.

[lenkite]

> I don't believe that these were significantly contributory, from experience: The unions...

The formally commissioned report clearly demonstrates that the ship building unions were dysfunctional:

"…a laborer (member of the Transport and General Workers Union) [to] carry the ladder to site, a rigger (member of the Amalgamated Society of Boilermakers, Shipwrights, Blacksmiths and Structural Workers Union) [to] erect it and place it in the proper position, and an electrician (member of the Electrical Trades Union) [to] actually remove the old bulb and screw in the new one. Production was often halted while waiting for a member of the appropriate union to arrive to perform the job reserved by agreement for them. (sunset 96)"

[michaelt]

> - Poor quality management. [...] So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturing.

There's also the challenge of the Baumol effect.

When hiring engineers in the UK, manufacturing companies are competing for smart, numerate graduates against the likes of Google and Facebook and HSBC and Barclays.

But when selling products, manufacturing companies are competing against the likes of Foxconn - so they can't just raise prices to raise salaries.

[varispeed]

People often miss:

- Productivity is low, because the pay is low and from that comes everything else (thinking of paying the bills instead of the job, being seen as "cheap" by others etc.)

- Nobody cares about "social status" if the pay is right. Status comes from pay.

- There is some merit to that, but I think the real reason was outsourcing. Why invest at home if you can get the same or better cheaper from overseas.

The problem is the UK is the class system. Shareholders see workforce as slaves and not equals. That's why we see wage compression and it is now next to impossible for working class to climb the social ladder. So why bother? Your quality of life will not be vastly different whether you are stacking shelves or develop software. Everything is being creamed by shareholders, who also enjoy preferential tax system and other incentives not available to working class.

[alt227]

The problem IMO is nothing to do with status or pay, specifically in the UK the issue is capitalism.

Capitalism demands that companies show continous growth, or they are classed to be failing. The UK is very small on the world stage, and so inevitably all manufacturers come up against the need to export and grow beyond the UKs borders. This is when aquisitions and mergers from overseas corperations occur, and they have little need for an expensive workforce in the UK.

Foreign investors or parent corporations buy out the UK businesses, strip out the manufacturing, and use the brand recognition to turn them into shell companies for distributing the material which are produced much cheaper overseas.

This has happened time and time again with all raw material manufacturing, and is now happening to the food production industry too (the Cadbury story is used as a regular example around these parts).

[bee_rider]

What does modern manufacturing look like? Are you limited by a lack of people who can, like, use a screwdriver? Or by a lack of people who can use a CAD package?

I worry that kids might hear “not enough people in the trades” and work on their hammer swinging skills. But in the US at least, you can get through k-12 without learning basic intro math stuff, like linear algebra or calculus.

If that was the minimum, we could, I guess, handle basic applied math like intro differential equations in the first year of a 2-year degree, and then spend the second year figuring out how to ask the computer to solve those problems…

[nradov]

Never mind calculus. There are plenty of kids who graduate high school without the basic arithmetic and trigonometry skills necessary to be a good carpenter. The social promotion practice in primary and secondary schools has been a disaster.

[orochimaaru]

Maybe the decline of manufacturing in the UK correlates with freedom of its colonies? There is loss of access to cheap raw material as well as a dumping ground for finished products.

[eszed]

Close enough, but it's the decline of the (ex-colonies) Commonwealth as a trading bloc. That was probably always inevitable, but it long out-lasted the end of direct colonial rule.

[Tiktaalik]

It's all downstream of lack of investment.

The workers weren't productive because they weren't getting better tools. They weren't out there smashing the new machines to stay in the past, they weren't bought in the first place. So how is this the workers' problem that they somehow created?

The problem is the company ownership didn't invest and let those that did pass them by.

[mrguyorama]

I love how often people who are probably in the bay area say this as the unionized members of Hollywood next door have no problem rejecting truly mediocre laborers and paying "10xers" millions of dollars per performance.

Do you know who were literal members of that union? Both Reagan (twice president of the union) and Trump.

Despite having a stranglehold style, where union members are not allowed to work on non-union projects, the industry still cultivates talent and allows both normal people doing day jobs making average wages and Superstar members like Jeff Bridges and Tom Hanks and George Clooney and Meryl Streep and Betty White.

This union has been able to keep up with changes in technology, ensuring their members benefited from streaming taking over the primary content delivery mechanism and getting a contract that accounts for it, and now getting protections from AI.

These big names regularly show support and go to bat for the literal little guy, knowing that if you can't make rent from writing movies, they won't have anything to star in and make a million dollars from.

This union contract is also a major reason actors are able to actually control how they are used, and gives actors control over things like sex scenes

A significant reason why Hollywood is currently full of terrible quality Visual Effects is that CGI has a significant non-unionized portion that is currently getting absolutely abused. Disney doesn't GAF, people still paid half a billion dollars to see the slop that was Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness.