[vablings]

As someone who was deeply integrated into the manufacturing industry the population is not lazy.

My former company had plenty of very talented hard-working people ever at basic level jobs such as assembly, that had years of experience that could diagnose an issue with a single part without even without understanding the underlying mechanical engineering and tolerance stack-up.

My former workplaces biggest issues were pressure from other markets consuming market share and the inability of university educated salespeople to promote our unique product for the specific advantages it had over other off the shelf solutions.

Customers who understood the unique advantages always made regular business, but sales folk struggled to actually bring in any new blood. Nothing to do with the manufacturing environment (which I was largely responsible for improvements in). that was very optimized and honestly pretty low cost. I know it's absolutely a fact as for the number of CAM engineers I spoke to who always assured me there was some cycle time to be saved just for them to send me over a program that was 4x longer than our current production programs.

My biggest takeaway after leaving the UK is that it was rigged from the start and the UK is doomed to fail a sad and slow dying death since about the 1970s, well before I was born.