Manufacturing prosperity

When President Barack Obama asked Steve Jobs at a Silicon Valley dinner party last February what it would take to make iPhones in the United States, Steve Jobs’ response was terse, yet honest.

“Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said.

In a Jan. 21 article entitled, “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone work,” the New York Times investigated the reasons for Jobs’ response.

Through interviews with Apple executives and other industry insiders, the investigation revealed interesting causes for the decline in manufacturing in America that run counter to the popular narrative.

While, yes, labor is cheaper abroad, companies don’t go to places such as China and Taiwan for that reason, as many politicians would have you believe.

Rather, according to the New York Times, they go because they find a labor force better suited to factory work.

They are more “flexible,” “diligent” and properly educated than their American counterparts.

This is not to say Americans are uneducated. Instead, they are too educated.

According to Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the ideal industrial engineer has some level of post-secondary education, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree.

In the U.S., he said, that type of worker is hard to find and mobilize.

According to the New York Times, when Apple began manufacturing the iPhone, it needed 8,700 industrial engineers to coordinate 200,000 factory workers. In the U.S. it would have taken nine months to find those workers. In China, it took 15 days.

But the move away from manufacturing in the U.S. is not necessarily a bad thing. Economies dependent upon manufacturing are often found within societies in transition: Great Britain in the 19th century, America in the 20th and China today.

Manufacturing leads to higher standards of living, stable lives and, after a while, a better-educated, more self-aware workforce whose skills and accustomed lifestyles put them above the often mundane, labor-intensive work typically found in factories and on assembly lines.

In this way, these once-vibrant manufacturing-based economies become service-based economies where the work requires higher skill sets and the functional demands of the job are less labor intensive.

It was not long ago that our grandparents and great-grandparents occupied this transitory role. They welcomed factory jobs because they saw in them an opportunity to rise up the socio-economic ladder.

They put in long hours doing the same mundane work for years, if not decades, until their retirements. For them, these were stable, well paying jobs that their parents never had available to them.

But their kids, like kids of all generations, wanted something more for themselves.

They weren’t content with merely a stable job that brought with it livable wages, they wanted something more challenging and less monotonous, so they went to college.

In college, they developed skills above that which is required to work an assembly line and, as a result, became over-qualified for the jobs their parents so hopefully sought after.

Thus, the path from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based one is an enlightened, educated path that expects more of its travelers than a life on the assembly line.

Countries such as China — that are now in the process of rising up from the grinding poverty that gripped many other pre-industrial nations — see manufacturing jobs as an opportunity for a better life just as our grandparents and great-grandparents did.

They have no problem living in factory dormitories working 12-hour days because it offers something new: an opportunity.

It’s a necessary rung upon the ladder to prosperity.

And later, once the manufacturing generation’s kids and grandkids begin the process of molding their futures, they, too, will look for something better.

This is the story of life: Parents wanting for their kids a life better than their own, and their kids expecting it.

In this way, we should not lament the loss of manufacturing jobs but instead recognize it for what it is: evidence of our continued advancement as a society and an opportunity for other nations to follow suit.

­— nperrino@indiana.edu