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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: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday December 28 2017, @06:49PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 28 2017, @06:49PM (#615207)

    the hardest-to-fill jobs are those that involve technical skills that command top pay.

    Most of the comments seem to revolve around the "command top pay" being fictionalized. By "top pay" they mean move than minimum wage.

    Furthermore, even in the same article, somehow

    high-tech

    gets translated into

    workers have to know the basics of how to use computer drop down screens and entering data.

    Finally I love these bullshit propaganda fake news stories where you can fact check in five minutes with a web browser. The full URL is hideous but its obviously

    http://careers.faurecia.com [faurecia.com] (not https?)

    and in the entire country they only have 12 openings and in Columbus Production as per the propaganda article they have Material Handler. Now the responsibilities listed look like the high school grads my dad worked with when I was a kid and helping out at work. Inspect incoming shipments, rotate stock, inventory stock. Not a terribly highly skilled job and $10/hr is probably optimistic. Lets check the demanded requirements holy fucking shit batman ... "Bachelor's degree in Logistics, Supply Chain, Engineering or any related degree." "Minimum 5 years experience including an experience in Manufacturing Environment." "Entrepreneurship mindset." holy fucking shit all that for a stockroom clerk. Let that sink in for a second. A $10/hr stockroom clerk needs a 4 year higher ed engineering degree AND 5 years experience.

    Yeah I'm thinking a mechanical engineering BSME grad five years out of college with SAP experience and might be hard to find for stockroom clerk job. Holy crap. For a job that per glassdoor.com pays "The national average salary for a Warehouse Clerk is $24,882 in United States.".

    Some of this is pure WTF like what would multinational megacorp want with "entrepreneurship experience"?

    In my experience job reqs where the demands are this far out of line with pay and responsibilities are for H1B staffing purposes. Then some dude from India lies on the application about having a BSME from some school that doesn't exist back home in India, but his cousin hires him anyway and all is well and its documented there are no Americans willing to do the job because oddly enough an experienced mech eng doesn't want to work as a stock boy for $10/hr. According to salary.com, the ideal candidate expects ... "The median annual Mechanical Engineer II salary is $79,864" and they're offering $24K. Holy crap!

    The pity of it is other than it being a manufacturing environment this is pretty much the job my high school student coworkers had decades ago, although we were in the food business. Accept and count and inspect stock deliveries, rotate stock, etc. Its not a bad job for, say, a middle school graduate. Its boring and tiring work but not bad for a high school student to learn a little work ethic. I don't really see it as an "adult" level job, but who knows.

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