The future of manufacturing
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Being a sewist, I also think of textiles and clothing. The U.S. (Canada too) are huge consumers. I think the U.S. buys more to wear than any country globally. Not googling, but I think I read something like 70% of U.S. textiles and garments are made in countries like China, Vietnam, India. These areas of manufacturing account for something like 10% of global CO2 emissions. I’m sure too we’ve heard of the water pollution devastation due to dyeing and finishing processes. I think textile making ranks real high, like ?#3, as far as industrial pollution. These 2 industries employ millions globally and generate huge profits for big companies. What is your President’s grand plan for this other than overseas tariffs? Are Americans going to revive cotton production? How about wool? Where’s your farm land now for this, given our huge appetite for apparel? Is it hot enough, cold enough, nicely fertile now in the U.S. to produce huge amounts of quality natural fibre? Can you, given our present obscene consumption with clothing? What about synthetic fibre production and manufacturing? The U.S. is the #1 exporter of polyethylene for this purpose. Are you going to turn this around, to create textiles, to further pollute your own rivers making synthetics? Are you going to employ masses of low paid home grown labor needed for sewing 24/7 in workrooms the size of football fields? Yes, lots is automated now, cutting edge (ha)with lasers, precisely done overseas .. but lots remains manual labor.
…Just stuff I think of as I piece a quilt with cotton produced in Japan, thread in Italy, on a machine (designed in Germany) made in Taiwan.
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You don't know shit from shinola about growing cotton, do you?
We can produce enough fiber to supply a good bit of the world world, if need be. The rub comes in producing textiles.
There, you have a point. But then, most of that business will remain abroad, no matter if tariffs are high.
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Well you got me there @Jolly . No, I’ve never bled picking cotton; I’ve only seen a cotton gin in a museum, my ancestors weren’t sharecroppers, or slave owners, and my experience with garment sewing with Huntsville’s Martha Pullen was limited to me just living there learning using Swiss and Egyptian cotton, not your SW produced Supima, which yes, is a decent export. I do know the U.S. is a major producer of cotton fibre. But there’s no way you’ve the land, climate, people or industry to satisfy yourselves and the world. And you don’t do wool like the Aussie’s.
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My great-grandfather was a small scale cotton farmer. My in-laws picked cotton by hand, to help put food on the table. My SIL's husband was raised on a 3000 acre farm, where they grew about 1200 acres of cotton. Somewhere around here, there's a picture of seven-year old me on a cotton picker. It's not the King Cotton it once was, but there is still a good bit grown in the South.
We don't grow as much cotton as we used to. We used to grow so much, the Feds instituted cotton allotments, limiting production. Nowadays, the price is low enough that a lot of acreage is planted in other things. Farmers plant what they can make money with and nowadays that's sugar cane if you're not too far north to do so. I live not too far from once was the largest row crop farm in North America, at around 70,000 acres and they don't grow a single cotton plant, but they could if the price was right.
There's a lot of production capacity we simply aren't using.
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My great-grandfather was a small scale cotton farmer. My in-laws picked cotton by hand, to help put food on the table. My SIL's husband was raised on a 3000 acre farm, where they grew about 1200 acres of cotton. Somewhere around here, there's a picture of seven-year old me on a cotton picker. It's not the King Cotton it once was, but there is still a good bit grown in the South.
We don't grow as much cotton as we used to. We used to grow so much, the Feds instituted cotton allotments, limiting production. Nowadays, the price is low enough that a lot of acreage is planted in other things. Farmers plant what they can make money with and nowadays that's sugar cane if you're not too far north to do so. I live not too far from once was the largest row crop farm in North America, at around 70,000 acres and they don't grow a single cotton plant, but they could if the price was right.
There's a lot of production capacity we simply aren't using.
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Here, read this article about a South Carolina town that used to be a textile hub that then transformed into a car manufacturing hub:
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@Doctor-Phibes said in The future of manufacturing:
I've been around a lot of manufacturing plants over the last 30-odd years and it's very noticable how there are fewer and fewer people and more and more automation. That trend is not going to change.
It’s been that way since the Industrial Revolution
@Mik said in The future of manufacturing:
@Doctor-Phibes said in The future of manufacturing:
I've been around a lot of manufacturing plants over the last 30-odd years and it's very noticable how there are fewer and fewer people and more and more automation. That trend is not going to change.
It’s been that way since the Industrial Revolution
Exactly. Just from teh news of the recent dock workers contract where they were happy that the contract had a limit on the automation on the docks.
@LuFins-Dad said in The future of manufacturing:
If shoe factory moves from Vietnam with 5000 workers to the US with robotics and 20 technicians, that’s still a net growth in the US for manufacturing. The first thing holding it back is the robotics equipment is still massively more expensive than 5000 Vietnamese workers.
Yup. I remember (it was a few years ago) talking to a guy who was a sales guy for Capterpiller(?) (or a company like that) and he was saying how hard it was to sell heavy equipment to India. They could hire 1000 workers at a USD$1/day to move at much dirt as a heavy equipment and at a cheaper price.
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"Do you think America would be better off with more <any sort of> jobs" would probably get an 80% "yes" rate. It's a loaded question, though. If you have to interfere with the market through protectionism in order to create those jobs, I doubt people would find it so obvious that those jobs are a good goal.
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“I would be better off if I worked in a factory.”
• 25% of Americans agree
• 73% disagree
• 2% currently work in a factoryIt's quite noteworthy that 25% of Americans think they will better off working "in a factory" while only 2% of American currently do. I think it shows that there is a significant portion of the population who aspires to "working in factory".
I doubt you'll get as positive a response if you replace "factory" with "farm" or "sanitation" or "inns and hotels" or "restaurants," etc.
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@taiwan_girl said in The future of manufacturing:
The graphic, made by the Financial Times and based on a 2024 survey from the Cato Institute, shows that while 80% of Americans believe the country would be better off with more manufacturing jobs, just 25% believe they would individually be better off working in a factory.
They present it as a contradiction, but it’s not. The fact that 25% of Americans think they would be better off working in manufacturing is actually quite telling, especially when only 2% are actually employed as such.
Now, that doesn’t mean that those 25% SHOULD be working in a factory or would actually be in a better position, but it does disprove the theory posted here that nobody wants to work in a factory.
