As someone with a factory job, I agree. Admittedly I have a degree, and I’m doing supply chain work in an office, but a 75k setup machinist or CNC programmer job is pretty good compared to spending 100 grand in student loans to make 75K as an office drone.
I wouldn’t advise anyone drop out of medical school to run a packaging line in a factory, but there are a lot of people who do pretty well. You land in a union shop or an ESOP and you can make real money.
Hey, let’s get those factory jobs paying 50 to 75 dollars an hour and we have a deal. Otherwise, goan fuck yourself.
Get fucked, you thief!
“You need to become a factory worker!” Meanwhile, factories are trying to automate every job possible.
Pay them.
Those jobs are all getting automated. And jobs that used to pay decent wages like trucking and being a taxi driver are slotted to be automated away, too.
Same for many, many white collar jobs that were supposed to be the path out of this trap of poverty that the rust belt and other places were thrown into, starting in the 70s. A whole lot of MBAs think that they need to get rid of all the “excess” people on payroll…
He should prove it to us.
Put your money where your mouth is, bitch.
Slavery, he means Slavery.
Woah woah woah. Capitalism is the new terminology that’s what replaced slavery. Also why the aristocrats were all in.
Put your money where your mouth is and open a factory and pay above average wages, Jensen.
You literally run a company that doesn’t manufacture anything itself but designs for others to manufacture.
Sounds like he wants more clients.
Okay then pay them a livable wage, and then they will be successful. Fucking billionaires need to put their money where their mouth is. A bunch of asshats
You don’t get to be filtty rich doing that
They do get paid well…
For example, Lutnick claimed that technician jobs are promising gigs with a low barrier to entry, that can pay anywhere between $70,000 to $90,000 at the onset—no college degree required.
The issue is the quantity of these jobs, not the quality.
And once you’re in, you’re in…
And not in a good way, you’ll get used to that 70k lifestyle in a year or two, but if you lose your job for any reason, there’s insane competition for the few spots you’re qualified for. And anything outside of this, you’ll never make that match.
They’ll pay a little more to a very small amount of employees if it creates a captive and trained workforce.
So, you’re right that “corporations are bad” you just don’t under the long game and the corporations do.
I mean those are technicians, not factory workers. For those see: https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes519199.htm
Those are factory workers they’re just listed in finer detail. Your link is for:
All production workers not listed separately.
140k is now the poverty line. 70k ain’t cutting it for a family of 4. Those aren’t “great” jobs
140k is now the poverty line.
Because a guy said so on substack?
Just because one idiot said something doesn’t make it true.
Fuck that piece of shit. I hope the AI bubble bursts soon and he loses his job and money. Has to work in a factory in unsafe conditions, gets into a horrible accident, becomes paralyzed and shits and pisses in his pants for the rest of his lives.
OK then make traditional factory jobs pay well enough to own a house and see your children through college again.
A factory worker makes less today than they did in the 50’s!!! Because the 1% has managed to grab all the money in their infinite greed. The money grab of the rich is the biggest heist in the history of mankind.Also not every billionaire needs to flaunt with how enormously ignorant they are on basic issues of society.
The rich need to be taxed on their fortune. Nobody needs to be as rich as the 1%.politicians, officials, scotus, those in positions of power, will steal, imbezzle, misuse any funds gained. lobbying should be illegal. this all needs to go or it amounts to little gained.
No problem, just make a single income from one partner working a factory job enough money to live a comfortable middle class life again.
Jobs a good’un
Your wish is granted. Now your phone costs double what it used to
That’s fine, because I’ll be making enough to afford it… as the outlined condition was a factory job that would pay well enough to afford a family home on that income alone.
EDIT: So apparently everyone here is talking fiction not reality and I’m the only one who missed that. Anything can be a true statement if it’s not based on reality. I’m out.
~~I’m blown away by how bad lemmy is in economics. But to be fair, there are no good economics on this planet.
No, you will be fired from your job because your company becomes uncompetitive in global market and goes under, leading to worse economy.
There needs to be such a massive cooperation between all countries (including enemies) that this will never work.~~
You’re missing the entire point here you dingus. We’re not talking about reality, were talking about what it would take for factory jobs to be considered success again.
Obviously it’s not reality. THATS WHAT IM POINTING OUT
So what is the point of this? Might as well talk about economy in Harry Potter and claim you just figured out how to solve socioeconomical disparity
The point is that a billionaire CEO can’t just say “eh, people should be happy working in a factory” when he doesn’t provide the rest of the material reality that went with that when people were happy working in a factory
You know what - I’m starting to think most people here actually didn’t read the article, but only the title, and that’s where the confusion is originating from.
That’s fine with me
That would be great if we didn’t treat factory workers like the dirt on the bottom of our collective shoes. Every factory I’ve ever worked in has been depressing at best and abusive at worst, none of them ever made me feel successful.
Ok but we want the factory jobs from the 50’s that paid one worker an entire family’s living wage. We should go to the 1950’s wealth tax rate of 90% to achieve this. I think what he means is impoverished guilded age slavery though.
We should go to the 1950’s wealth tax rate of 90% to achieve this.
The 90% tax rate wasn’t what made factory pay cover a family of four. Expropriated wealth from the third world, combined with a strong export market for finished goods, allowed Americans to import raw materials at near-zero cost and transform that functionally “free” material into the quality of life improvements they valued.
Also, that high quality of life was reserved largely for the industrial north. Gulf Coast / West Coast states wouldn’t see the jump in prosperity until the oil boom of the 70s and the migration of finance capital into Florida, Texas, and California. And even then, it was a very “Whites Only” kind of prosperity, with labor provided by the racial underclass going to cheap housing and foodstuffs and utilities enjoyed by the American middle class.
By the mid-90s, a lot of the benefits of being a white working class adult had diffused to the racial underclasses. White people no longer felt “rich” because they were competing for homes and jobs and consumables with the historically impoverished PoC. Our cheap consumables were increasingly imported from overseas while our labor force was focused towards the professional (educated) and service (uneducated) sectors. We maintained a policy of low inflation through exporting dollars abroad. We expanded privatization to goose our rate of employment with tons of make-work and bullshit jobs. And we reduced taxes in order to incentivize private capital improvements and consumer spending.
What fucked us in the end wasn’t a lower tax rate, it was a global post-WW2 economic recovery. Once we could no longer spend overpriced American dollars for cheap foreign materials, American buying power declined. Foreign countries began to consume their own quality-of-life products, which boosted American investments abroad but hobbled American consumption at home.
I think what he means is impoverished guilded age slavery though.
He’s asking for Americans to return to the position of the labor underclass at home, in order to prop up a “White” leisure class at the expense of a PoC working class. That doesn’t necessarily mean “slavery” (although you can’t help look sideways at all these new prisons we’re building). It does mean working class Americans continue to lose access to consumption as they fall into competition with their BRICS working class peers.
And it likely means we return to “Whites Only” domestic policies, in order to guarantee a certain fraction of the public access to preferable living conditions at the added expense of PoC.
