Tapsearch Com Editor

While going to college full time in the 1950s, I also worked at four
different factories at the same time. I later was an assistant plant manager and also represented the company in union negotiations. Even when the unions were strong and arrogant, all workers were better off. The Blacks were finally finding middle class wages as production workers too. If the factory jobs I enjoyed while in college were still available there would be millions standing in line to get them including college graduates.

My biggest business mistake was thinking the American workers would wake up when free trade came and would not shop their way out of their jobs. They did and they keep doing it even now. Our news channels let it happen and add insult to injury by promoting free trade and globalization.

The factory foremen in the past, took the young off the streets and taught them a skill. In turn, the young were able to get married, have children, buy a home and set money aside to help their children attend college. In those days there were several layers of added value from the raw product stage to
the manufacturing stage with a vast distribution market playing a major supporting role.

Assembling items was just a small part of the whole. Factory production
then was making things from the bottom up and not just putting something
together with parts coming from the wage slave markets of the world. Free trade is actually the slave trade of our times. Back then we counted on the Made in the USA label which meant everything was composed of American components including the processing. This label is rare today and even
many parts of the manufacturing process is sent somewhere else in the
world and then brought back for final assembly. Today, they use the
term Built in America which means the product is only assembled here.

Just out of high school, I was a set up man for three assembly lines
which was a real accomplishment back then. I took over a job that a
person held for many years. The product was home and industrial oil
furnaces. When the orders slowed down, the workers were taken off the
assembly line to make the parts so that none of these experience workers
would have to be laid off. I help make worm gears that drove some of
the furnaces. It was a specialty and not something everyone could do.
Many others were accomplished in making other components. The parts grew in value just sitting in inventory too. Also the component material came
from some other process in house or from some local producer near by.
Transportation was a major factor and was a cost overhead back then.

Today, free trade wage slave labor is so cheap that it can absorb the
overhead of massive long haul ocean, air, rail and truck shipping. This
overhead is also a dangerous source in the polluting of our atmosphere.
The products are also made in dangerous dirty conditions that we would
have never approved back then. In our country when environmental
regulations start growing, more and more factory processes were sent
outside the country. And this is still be done today in all phases of
manufacturing even by those carrying the label Made in the USA. In the
late 1970s and during the 1980s, many factories and/or dirty processing
was went to the maquiladora factories in Mexico just on the other side
of the border. This made headlines for a time. There were many articles
about the rise in leukemia and birth defects on both sides of the border. However this became old news fast as everyone start doing it using free trade to do it. Energy saving light bulbs travel 8,000 miles to get to market using up all the energy related to long haul shipping. The bulbs come from dirty manufacturing facilities in China where mercury is is out in the open. There, pregnant mothers work around the clock making the bulbs with many cutting themselves in the process with the mercury near by. This should be a big story but it is not.

Instead we have people like Thomas Friedman telling the American workers
they have to be better than average. He gives the example of Steve Jobs
demanding immediate production of his new I Pod or some other electronic
device from Chinese factories. Here Chinese workers work around the lock
and Friedman even referred to them only needing a small breakfast etc. He also tells how U.S. workers must learn to compete with robotic automation world. He never says anything about machines do not pay the taxes the workers once did. Human beings are put against machines that do not have the overhead of the entitlements and so the entitlements fade away too. They compete with machines which do not need these things.

As to the outside training of workers. I learned everything on the job
and companies like Honeywell/GE computers sent me to their corporate
schools for a year while paying me a good wage. In the factories I was
taught to be a good spot welder, a punch press operator and a bender
machine operator. All these took certain skills and workers like myself
were taught on the job and not somewhere else. I found a deep void
between my work day and my college classrooms. Neither side knew what
the other was going through. This hasn't change. We have a real
communication problems. I write about it at
Communications by Rank As far as training of workers are concerned , the present corporate world in a bitter competitive arena will do anything to get the job done as cheap as possible. They will take workers to train for say a six month period at a low wage and promise them regular work and a higher rate of pay after the six months. Most of them never make it past the six months while the company finds a new way of cutting the cost of labor. They just keep hiring and firing the temporary workers. This is possible because of the vast surplus of workers who need a job no matter what.

I learned more about the real world in the factories than I ever learned
in college. To type factory workers as being less skilled than using the
phrase - In search of bright blue collars - is something of an insult to
all who gave everything of themselves for the sake of an ideal life for all.