Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back

Once again, if your making a product no one would buy due to price, you adjust your pricing. This is how free market works. If the materials are too expensive you don't buy them, forces the supplier to adjust and lower. Yes Regulations and Tax relief would help, and other factors such as mandated minimum wage hikes all have an impact. Keep Big Gov't out of business and let the market dictate prices.

The problem in part is if I need a hammer, $4 at Ross's beats a $20 Stanley. We need to get healthcare costs DOWN, govt can buy BULK pharmacy and cut the malpractice BS way down, a bad operation from well intentions SHOULD NOT be a golden lottery ticket!

1LT Aaron Barr - Once you automate your factory beyond a certain point, cheap labor becomes less important than professionals capable of operating and sustaining your automation, doing quality assurance and managing the plant. Using robots I bought from Japan to build toasters in China doesn't make nearly as much sense now that cheap unskilled and low skilled labor is no longer a major consideration.

SFC Adam Potter - Sergeant; The gist of the analysis is that if you move your factory back to the US, you probably aren't going to want to build a new factory that is as labor intensive as the one that you closed down to move it outside of the US in the first place. If the factory moves back and produces the same amount of product with 10% of the former labor force you are going to be money to the good even if you pay that 10% double the hourly rate you would have paid them before.

If ALL of the manufacturing jobs moved back to the US but only employed 10% of the number of people they employed before they left, you are still going to have the remaining 90% of the labor force without manufacturing jobs no matter if EVERYONE "Bought American" (and that 90% isn't going to be able to do much "Buying American").

We always need humans to work on robots. But then what will happen is robots working on robots working on robots and....oh God. Skynet.

SrA Edward Vong - My Living Doll 1960's came first before Skynet.

I saw Auto workers union kill an aluminum engine block casting plant in Muscle Shoals, AL. The janitor sweeping the floor struck for $18 /hr.. in 1978?!?!

LTC Stephen F. - Colonel; If I owned an inefficient factory and opened one that was just as inefficient but which I could run with lower paid labor, I wouldn't open another inefficient factory where I had to pay higher hourly wages BUT I would consider opening an efficient factory where my total wage bill was lower (which I could do by having a factory with the same output and a smaller labor force).