“I want to have as few people touching our products as possible.”
So spoke Dan Mishek, the managing director of an industrial plastic products manufacturer in Minnesota, quoted in Catherine Rampell’s NYTimes article yesterday, “Companies Spend on Equipment, Not Workers.” Why would an employer want to keep people away from its products? Germphobia? Elitism? No, just practicality: as hiring becomes increasingly expensive for industry, compared to automation and capital investment in machines in general, more human hands , it seems, can be an unwelcome presence in the factory.
Mr. Mishek also noted that, “You don’t have to train machines.” Or read their resumes (“It’s a huge distraction to sort though all those.”) In essence, where humans proliferate on the shop floor, maximized productivity is threatened.
Mass-production operations have historically minimized the degree to which they depend upon workers (with their insistent human need for wages, training, and accommodations to safety and fatigue); that’s the basic logic of industrial capitalism and once inside that logic, an employer might reasonably feel that no other view of hiring seems rational. And Rampell aptly includes a single point made both by the chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Businesses and by the chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. These analysts note that with demand for products and services low in the current slow-growing economy, employers won’t be “comfortable” with any kind of investment, “human or otherwise.”
In all ways predictable sentiments, entirely consistent with good business practice in the United States. So: Why were they featured on the front page of the New York Times?….
Here’s where it gets interesting: I presume because on some level, Rampell and her editors detect that such discomforting managerial commitments, so clearly out of keeping with ostensible national priorities to put more Americans back to work, keep fading from view. They are perhaps obscured by the bright, shiny glare of other headlines of the moment, such as, “Obama Touts National Manufacturing Certification Program” (seen the day before in IndustryWeek.com).
According to that piece by Jonathan Katz (and thanks to Mary Ebeling for calling it to my attention), the National Association of Manufacturers’ Manufacturing Institute, working with President Obama’s Skills for America’s Future, is supporting a new program to certify half a million community college students with “skills that are critical to manufacturing operations.” We read, as we have so often in the past year or two, that America’s pharmaceutical, aerospace and biotech sectors need people with skills not yet widely distributed among the nation’s workers, skills broadly grouped under the rubric “high-tech.”
As I’ve written here before, new skills, many involving knowledge of new software, applied mathematics and up-to-date machine processes, are no doubt needed by those manufacturers who do still hire, and who do still turn to American labor pools. Obviously, new jobs are mostly going to arise in emergent industries, not in fading “low-tech” sectors. But the power of the “minimize hiring” logic is truly immense in our society. A “skills gap” may well exist on some level, but to picture 500,000 American workers filling such a gap would require a leap over that logic. To pursue, as the NAM’s new training program does, so utterly uncritically the provision of newly trained manufacturing workers is to ignore the tremendous counter-forces that automation, tax incentives for capital investment, and outsourcing exert on the nation’s industrial employers.
What is more, when companies like those quoted here by Katz say they need “engineers,” are they really picturing men and women with community college credentials? Many high-tech industry folks I’ve spoken to worry about that very slippage; associate’s degrees and certificate programs are simply not providing the level of chemistry, physics and material science preparation needed in their companies’ labs or assembly operations.
I know, I know, I’m like a broken record, a virtual mass-producer of such plaints. But the disconnect is so darn pervasive! So persistent! I can’t help but ask yet again: Can all of these high-tech-job boosters possibly be sincere? Are they willfully naive? Why is technical modernization–high tech– constantly painted as a natural and inevitable producer of jobs for American workers, when so very much evidence to the contrary exists?? When managers like Mr. Mishek, to do their jobs well, must–let’s face it–minimize the creation of jobs for others?