“Tony explains that Maddie has a job for two
reasons. First, when it comes to making fuel injectors,
the company saves money and minimizes product damage
by having both the precision and non-precision work
done in the same place. Even if Mexican or Chinese workers
could do Maddie’s job more cheaply, shipping fragile,
half-finished parts to another country for processing
would make no sense. Second, Maddie is cheaper than
a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic arm that
could take injector bodies and caps from a tray and
place them precisely in a laser welder.[...] For Tony,
it’s simple: Maddie makes less in two years than
the machine would cost, so her job is safe—for
now. If the robotic machines become a little cheaper,
or if demand for fuel injectors goes up and Standard
starts running three shifts, then investing in those
robots might make sense. ”
—
“It’s hard to imagine what set of circumstances
would reverse recent trends and bring large numbers
of jobs for unskilled laborers back to the U.S. Our
efforts might be more fruitfully focused on getting
Maddie the education she needs for a better shot at
a decent living in the years to come. Subsidized job-training
programs tend to be fairly popular among Democrats and
Republicans, and certainly benefit some people. But
these programs suffer from all the ills in our education
system; opportunities go, disproportionately, to those
who already have initiative, intelligence, and—not
least—family support.
“I never heard Maddie blame others for her situation;
she talked, often, about the bad choices she made as
a teenager and how those have limited her future. I
came to realize, though, that Maddie represents a large
population: people who, for whatever reason, are not
going to be able to leave the workforce long enough
to get the skills they need. Luke doesn’t have
children, and his parents could afford to support him
while he was in school. Those with the right ability
and circumstances will, most likely, make the right
adjustments, get the right skills, and eventually thrive.
But I fear that those who are challenged now will only
fall further behind. To solve all the problems that
keep people from acquiring skills would require tackling
the toughest issues our country faces: a broken educational
system, teen pregnancy, drug use, racial discrimination,
a fractured political culture.”
