"The so-called skills gap is really a gap in education, and that affects all of us."
That closing line doesn't really sound like the gist of the piece at all. It sounds like manufacturing employers just don't want to or don't feel they can afford to pay works a fair wage.
Exactly. This article makes it sound like manufacturers somehow aren't restricted to the supply and demand of their labor.
If laborers are leaving manufacturers for better pay at fast food companies, workers need higher pay. Its not that complicated. If the company can't afford higher wages, maybe the demand for this skilled labor isn't what we think it is.
If these skills are actually in high demand, they will pay the bills.
It is the same thing with propping up the auto industry. If a company can't afford higher wages and it isn't economically rational for people to invest their time in an area then maybe the only rational thing to do is for that manufacturing to head offshore.
Here's the thing, though: You have to assume that they are correct. If one believes that they are incorrect, he is effectively stating that he (someone thinking abstractly in the absence of any hard data) is better at pricing the value of the work than the manufacturer (who is directly affected by the outcome and has a wealth of hard data).
Several commenters have basically claimed that the manufacturers are behaving irrationally; a claim like that requires some powerful arguments to credibly support. I haven't seen much of that yet here.
I suspect that the truth is that manufacturers would be willing to pay to train workers if they could be reasonably sure that the investment would have time to pay off. But thanks to Moore's Law and everything that comes with it, manufacturing technology is changing far more rapidly than it used to when everything was more stable.
It seems likely that it's more cost-effective for the manufacturer to lower that risk by training lower-paid labor elsewhere and letting those workers go (or retraining them, if it's cheap to do so) when they're no longer suitable, than it is to do the same thing in first-world countries for much higher cost.
If one believes that they are incorrect, he is effectively stating that he (someone thinking abstractly in the absence of any hard data) is better at pricing the value of the work than the manufacturer (who is directly affected by the outcome and has a wealth of hard data).
The pricing error argument can be made based on a definition of "value" that is in fairly common use around here (market price) and no more data than is included in the article: they offer a certain price for the labor and don't get as much of it as they want, therefore the price they offer is lower than the value.
I'm glad you caught that line because I thought it was confusing
Who are we supposed to understand is under-educated? The employers? Or was this a vain attempt to pull a fast one and shift blame to public schools for...? What? Pumping out kids with the mathematical literacy to understand that $14 is greater than $10 therefore McDonalds pays better than manufacturing?
I also thought that line was unfair. Sure, one can go and get a 4 year degree to run your machines, at their own personal cost of $100,000 to $150,000.
It's not just about "fair wage" at that point - enough to have a place to live, a car, food in your belly... but that "fair rate" also includes being paid enough to afford the $500-1,000/month student loan payment that is the outcome of getting such a degree.
Agreed ... if the applicants are so uneducated, why are they choosing "rationally" (as the article puts it) to avoid these low-paying, high-skilled jobs?
That closing line doesn't really sound like the gist of the piece at all. It sounds like manufacturing employers just don't want to or don't feel they can afford to pay works a fair wage.