pablonite wrote:Those examples are all highly automated industries now. Not sure when the last time you walked through a modern manufacturing facility but people are few and far between. Sub assemblies can still be put together by hand in China or whatever but there are also bargains to be had for manufacturers in America right now, especially for a half government half corporate military industrial complex chimera like GE. Hard to say what's going on in China, could be other reasons.
Good point, manufacturing isn't the jobs-creator it used to be. I read an article on this problem a couple weeks ago, along the lines of how the real issue in the modern economy is that so freaking much production is concentrated in so few hands (thanks to automation, robotics, then add in all the outsourcing to offshore).
This over-productivity extends from manufacturing to the financial sector -- the article pointed out that there are many firms with less than a hundred employees making $100 million in profit per year. Obviously, the modern nature of work is just all out of whack -- it just doesn't take as many people for business to make big profits anymore.
Where this will eventually break down is that in the end they're just destroying their own customer base. In the case of financials, that's all rigged and faked and government-pumped anyway, but with manufacturing they do need people to actually buy physical product.
I think that even if we do have a couple lost decades of anemic jobless "recovery," we're going to have accept the fact of a permanently unemployed "middle" class.
Getting back to the OP, someone would have to come up with hard numbers before we could say whether this is a promising trend or just an anomaly. Personally, I don't see much hope with "onshoring." If logistics with Asia get expensive, don't forget there's the great NAFTA Superhighway -- it costs the same really to truck things in from Mexico as it does Alabama.
