"WalMart: A Progressive Success Story", by Jason Furman, chief economic advisor to President Obama

[Fumesucker]

31. Manufacturing may be coming back but a lot of the jobs aren't

I have a neighbor who works as a maintenance mechanic at a local production facility, a union member he makes over $80K and we are in a relatively low wage area by national standards.

He loathes his job because the pressure is relentless and he's forced to work a lot of mandatory overtime because it's cheaper for the company to work the existing mechanics sixty to eighty hours a week than to hire more mechanics.

I could do his job with sufficient training but he and I agree there really aren't that many people with the mindset needed to do effective component level troubleshooting/repair on the type of equipment he works on. Other than maintenance the plant is largely empty, there is a fairly substantial office crew doing office type stuff but not very many actual production workers due to the large amount of automation.

He's pretty busted up too, missing half of one finger and has metal plates and screws here and there from various industrial accidents, largely due to working on equipment that is kept running 24/7 because turning it off costs tens of thousands of dollars per hour in lost production.

What my neighbor tells me is that they go through recent tech school graduates in wholesale quantities because so many of them have the book learning but lack the mechanical aptitude to be truly effective at the job, he's about the opposite has the aptitude but the book learning part comes harder for him but he's also old school and grew up in a family that had a mechanical/construction type business.