[thaack]

My family runs a small plastic (injection molding) business in the USA. Second, soon to be third generation.

The only reason it still exists is because the products made are too expensive to ship from a country with cheaper labor as they are pretty large and heavy. And it's quite a niche product/vertical.

The biggest problem that the business faces on a day-to-day basis is employees. It's a very low skill manufacturing job. You pull parts out of the mold. The pay is good for a large midwestern MCOL city, plus full health benefits (employees don't pay a cent). It is downright impossible to find and retain reliable employees. The job sucks. I worked there when I was younger helping out and you do the same thing every minute for 8 hours a day in a hot and loud factory. It's not a career - just a job. I'm not sure how you fix that. The American appetite for a low skill manufacturing job is dead - I'm not sure it's a bad thing either.

Even the high skill stuff has already been taken over by China, their process is far more efficient. When the business needs design/tool & die for a new plastic injection mold costs and speed associated with getting that mold designed and made in America are astronomical compared to the Chinese. The Chinese will get back to you with a design proof in 24 hours at a 1/4 of the cost.

[driverdan]

If you can't get employees you're not paying enough. What you think you should pay employees is irrelevant, the market defines what "good pay" is. If potential employees have better opportunities you won't be able to hire them unless you make your jobs more appealing than others.

[thaack]

You would think it would be that black and white, and under normal circumstances I would tend to agree, however pay is well above average for the location and skill especially when you factor in the benefit package.

I really think it comes down to the fact that people have no interest in working in low skill manufacturing. The business loses people to Walmart etc. where they get lower pay and no benefits all the time. There is more variety of work and potential for advancement at a company like Walmart. Even at a larger scale low skill manufacturing plant advancement is sparse.

[genocidicbunny]

The pay may be above average for that location, but it might still be too low. Back when I had just finished college, my cohort was also judging locations where they would apply to work based on things like the social scene or the climate, in addition to the usual considerations of the kind of work and pay they would be doing. There were plenty that turned down well-paying jobs that were in undesirable locations because they were also seeking to not only establish a career, but a life too.

One of the guys I worked with at my first job was a few years older than me, and he had given up a much better paying job in one of the flyover states for a lower paying one in a higher COL area; His reasoning was that no amount of money could buy him the things he wanted out there, but he did admit that had the pay been significantly higher, he probably would have stuck it out for longer than he did, though again only to save up a bigger nest egg before he moved away from the area.

[EasyMark]

I dodged a job like this as well. Pay was great, benefits good, however I would have been maintaining legacy perl code and excel sheets (that were functionally databases), doing the same coding day in and out. I did it for a while, while looking for another position to get out of there as quickly as possible.

[ponector]

No, by paying high salary you are not going to retain smart people on dumb physically challenging job.

And they say they can get employees, as pay is decent for low skilled job.

[etskinner]

Did you miss where they said "it's downright impossible to find and retain reliable employees"?

[HDThoreaun]

So you see the problem. Americans wont work these types of jobs at wages that allow businesses to compete with China. Businesses are in a competition. When they raise wages they need to raise prices and they cant do that when competition is knocking at the door.

[peterldowns]

> The American appetite for a low skill manufacturing job is dead - I'm not sure it's a bad thing either.

It probably isn't a bad thing, as long as we continue to invest in automation and high-skill manufacturing. The Economist wrote about this recently: the fantasy of "low-skill factory jobs for all" is just that, a fantasy: https://archive.is/YoMs1

[thaack]

Fascinating article.

They have toyed around with automation but the capital required to retrofit for such a small business would be intensive but is coming down.

Interestingly the automation pieces that they have been testing (multi-axis robot arms) have only became cost effective since the Chinese robots entered the market. The Chinese have completely dropped the floor on automation tooling.

[beloch]

Sounds like the employer has created its own problems.

If an employee is doing an unpleasant, dead-end job with no prospect of advancement, they have to make a value judgment. If there's no prospect of advancement or any kind of wage growth (they're "low skill", so they'll be replaced if someone cheaper comes along), let alone security, then why stick around?

If the working conditions (e.g. heat and noise) are unpleasant, they could be improved. A ramp into other positions could be built to make the "job" an entry point to a "career" (e.g. Costco moves people between many different low skill jobs and then recruits from that pool for management).

[thaack]

>If an employee is doing an unpleasant, dead-end job with no prospect of advancement, they have to make a value judgment. If there's no prospect of advancement or any kind of wage growth (they're "low skill", so they'll be replaced if someone cheaper comes along), let alone security, then why stick around?

Exactly my point, and that's what they are doing.

There is no prospect of advancement possible. It's a small operation with 15 or so total employees. Under normal circumstances I would agree on a much larger scale.

[abe_m]

The majority of people are not suitable for management, and do not advance in "careers". Most people just work the same job over and over, until the retire or die.

But the cost of everything has got out of hand. Why bother going to work if you're going to be basically homeless anyway? Housing+food+health care has detached significantly from wages and the costs of other goods.

[bdcravens]

> because the products made are too expensive to ship from a country with cheaper labor

This particular issue could be solved by producing in Mexico and trucking your product into the US.

[gnopgnip]

You fix that by automating the repetitive tasks. So one employee can oversee several machines and primarily handle edge cases. A lot of tooling that was impossible or outrageously expensive before is affordable now. I support some food manufactures that use machine vision based industrial automation and QC.

[cadamsdotcom]

If you’re having trouble retaining employees because they’re bored of pulling parts out of a mold - have any of them considered having a crack at automating that specific bit of the job with say (and yes this is going to sound naive) a programmable robot?

Could be something they try out of hours.

[slyall]

There will be versions of the machine that automate more of the process. But they will cost money and require maintenance too look after and adjust.

I used to work a similar job[1] at a plastics factory. We had about 12 machines in the area I worked. Some machines automated remove stuff from the mold, some removing the excess, some putting though the leak tester. Each stage of automation was an additional thing that had to be configured and adjusted.

Often we'd only make an item for a shift or two. At one point the company bought a new machine (the size of a 2 car garage) that automated some more bits. The machine took 18 months of adjusting before it worked reliably.

[1] Blowmold, ranging from 750ml bottles, 5-20 litre jerry cans, sections of culvert pipe.

[cadamsdotcom]

> The machine took 18 months of adjusting before it worked reliably

That doesn’t tell the story of the overall ROI. After 18 months of shakiness were those folks able to go do other work? Did the work pay for itself on a 5 year timeline? 10 years? Achieving reliability is huge - did the company spin that for PR?

[slyall]

It was 18 months of somebody working on it full time plus people being flow out from the manufacturer.

From memory once it was going it still didn't live up to all the hype. It worked about as well as the 30 year old machines next to it and required a minimum wage person (ie me) to operate it (plus a fitter for anything technical).

The company I worked for went out of business 10 years later.

This is the sort of machine I'm talking about (although a lot nicer and more uptodate than the ones I used. Faster cycle time too)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMjxBw4bFaA

[Izikiel43]

> you do the same thing every minute for 8 hours a day in a hot and loud factory

Sounds like a robot should do it.

[farceSpherule]

The work on your line might "suck" but it is a good paying job with free benefits and requires no college degree, special trade school, or certification.

There are plenty of poorly qualified, undereducated Americans who can fill these low skill jobs.

There is nothing to fix. It is a job. It pays money. Not everyone has the ability to excel in a "career." They simply need a job.

And, no one can compete with China. All companies operating in China, regardless of ownership (state-owned, private, or foreign-owned), are subject to the same political influence. If the government tells a company to do something, the company does it. China also manipulates its currency as a means to drive its predominantly export-oriented economy.

[thaack]

Then tell me where these poorly qualified, undereducated Americans who can fill these low skill jobs are?

The business's biggest success with finding employees was getting in the good graces of the local probation officers who refer ex-cons to us, and that comes with its own set of problems.

Other than paying a premium for temps at a temp agency that's been the only way as of the last 5-10 years to get employees in the door. Normal applications are crickets.

[SoftTalker]

Raise the pay. I get that at a small scale that might not be possible, but if it isn't that just means they don't have a viable business, at least in their current location.

[fragmede]

I hear China's labor costs are lower. If your point is that Made in USA is maybe too expensive, we've gone full circle.

[SoftTalker]

More expensive than made in China, though with the moral price of supporting sweatshop factories. "Too expensive" is a value judgment. Maybe they could get their customers to accept a higher price, or find other customers who are less price-sensitive or will pay for something they can provide that China cannot.

[HDThoreaun]

Or maybe they cant and this is the best they can do? Maybe they know more about their business than you do?

[farceSpherule]

If you are paying people $7.25 an hour, then perhaps you deserve to go out of business.

Line work in the conditions you describe should be paying $16 to $26 per hour, with an average of about $18 per hour.

[EasyMark]

Surely that's in a LCOL area like some small rural town, right? $18 is what teens around here get for flipping burgers and running cash registers.