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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday December 28 2017, @07:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the mad-tech-skillz dept.

Robot growing pains: Two U.S. factories show tensions of going digital

President Donald Trump has put bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States at the center of his economic and trade agenda. But when jobs actually come - as they have here in southern Indiana - many factory workers are not prepared for them, and employers are having trouble hiring people with the needed skills.

U.S. manufacturing job openings stand near a 15 year high and factories are hiring workers at the fastest clip since 2014, with many employers saying the hardest-to-fill jobs are those that involve technical skills that command top pay.

In 2000, over half of U.S. manufacturing workers had only high school degrees or less, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Today, 57 percent of manufacturing workers have technical school training, some college or full college degrees, and nearly a third of workers have bachelors or advanced degrees, up from 22 percent in 2000.

Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the digitalization sweeping the economy is forcing employers to hunt for a different mix of workers - and pay more in some cases for workers with technical skills. A new study by Muro found those with the highest digital skills saw average wage growth of 2 percent a year since 2010, while wages for those with medium skills grew by 1.4 percent and those at the bottom by 1.6 percent.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Thursday December 28 2017, @05:39PM

    by legont (4179) on Thursday December 28 2017, @05:39PM (#615175)

    The answer to this is simple - retirement packages with lifetime employment.

    It used to be that most S&P500 companies would offer a retirement package that would allow workers to retire in 20 years. The retirees - in their late 40s - would spend the last 3-5 years training their replacement. Nowadays only Blomberg does it (and rather limited at that).

    This is the only sustainable model. Even in South Korea, once they killed lifetime employment, 90% of the brightest students don't go to work for corporations. They become doctors and lawyers (how many of them can we digest, I wonder). Japan ate this bullet 30 years ago.

    It would take at least 2 generations to fix the issue even if the authorities really want it which they don't.

    There will be blood.

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
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