AHC: U.S. remains an industrial powerhouse

I say keep the Unions strong would be a good thing to look at as well. So say no Taft-Hartly, and Operation Dixie succeeds(that being the plan to unionize the south by the CIO) would help.

You might like the Unions, but in a globalized world if the Unions are too strong and demanding companies can and do move elsewhere and America without a POD back the the 40s isn’t going protectionist in the Cold War.
 
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ferdi254

Banned
One member had a very important point nailed. In fact large numbers of people with the brains to do something go to Wall Street, Silicon Valley or become lawyers as there is more money in there.

Optimizing quarterly results is also in many cases not a good idea if you run a production company. See Boeing.

And one important factor: The US education system is top notch at the top (MIT Harvard) but is absolutely noncompetitive for those who are not the cream of the cream which then go to the three areas mentioned above.
 

marathag

Banned
I say keep the Unions strong would be a good thing to look at as well. So say no Taft-Hartly, and Operation Dixie succeeds(that being the plan to unionize the south by the CIO) would help.
Then the companies crash and burn, taking the Union jobs with them.
UAW didn't save Packard. Unions didn't keep TV Jobs in Illinois
 
A few things come to mind.
Congress insists for every dollar spent in foreign aid a dollar has to go into the US to help buisnesses and such modernize. So basically we rebuild our factories as we rebuild other counties factories.
We cut incentives to move over seas. One of our attempts at helping modernize/make plants more environmentally friendly actually allowed you to get the tax break and incentives even if you built the new plant in Mexico... go figure
But the big one is we need to keep private own ship up vs selling stock. As soon as you sell stock the people running the company only care about the next year or so vs having a company that the grandkids can inherit. So short term profit is the ONLY thing anyone cares about.
And of course increased automation.
 
But some sectors are just gone.
Not many TV sets made in the US anymore. Off Patent Pharmaceuticals, as well. if its not pleasureboats, or Military there's not much shipbuilding either
But the productivity as a whole stayed the same, so those didn't affect US production in the grand scheme of things. If outsourcing eliminated US manufacturing jobs then productivity would stay the same and total production would decline in concert with declining jobs. In reality productivity went up and total production stayed the same, which means it was caused by automation (or just more efficient manufacturing).

(Also the US shipbuilding industry is one of the most protected in the world.)
 

marathag

Banned
In reality productivity went up and total production stayed the sam
But few TVs, and few old drugs being made in the USA those factories converted or just closed.

Military production isntye main safeguard, but that really doesnt employ that many. Lima is the last Tank plant, and most of what they do is remanufacturing old M1s into the latest version, thousands of old M1s are mothballed.
 
Is there a way to promote the Unions without having excessive promises demanded in good times that are unsustainable in recessions or when foreign competitors et al push harder into American markets?
 
Is there a way to promote the Unions without having excessive promises demanded in good times that are unsustainable in recessions or when foreign competitors et al push harder into American markets?

I would think you would have had to had a different Wagner Act, or different pro-union legislation other than the Wagner Act, that would have promoted a healthier union/management balance instead of the highly union-biased NLRB of OTL.
 
M79 yes there is see Scandinavia most of the Benelux Swiss and Germany.
I agree with the excellent examples but am uncertain it can translate to the US in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. It will be difficult to ask the UAW not to pursue ever-loftier pay/benefits during the boom years.

Maybe promote companies like Saturn and the limited contract with greater representation of workers in process/quality decision making?
 
But some sectors are just gone.
Not many TV sets made in the US anymore. Off Patent Pharmaceuticals, as well. if its not pleasureboats, or Military there's not much shipbuilding either
There’s not much shipbuilding anywhere except China, Korea, and Japan. It’s a little strange, really, because there’s no obvious reason why shipbuilders in Korea and Japan would be so much more successful than those in Europe and the United States. They are developed countries too, so it’s not like they have way cheaper labor.
 

marathag

Banned
They are developed countries too, so it’s not like they have way cheaper labor.
But they did in the '50-60s, for Supertankers, and then later with the growth of Container ships.

By that time, British and US commercial shipbuilding had long since been gone.
Didn't have the advantages of low wage, cheap steel and low regulations, they grabbed near all the marketshare
 
But they did in the '50-60s, for Supertankers, and then later with the growth of Container ships.

By that time, British and US commercial shipbuilding had long since been gone.
Didn't have the advantages of low wage, cheap steel and low regulations, they grabbed near all the marketshare
Korea didn’t become a major shipbuilding power until the 1980s or 1990s, IIRC. In any case, they are still the largest shipbuilding powers despite being developed countries now.
 
There’s not much shipbuilding anywhere except China, Korea, and Japan. It’s a little strange, really, because there’s no obvious reason why shipbuilders in Korea and Japan would be so much more successful than those in Europe and the United States. They are developed countries too, so it’s not like they have way cheaper labor.
Korea generally gets a lot of government support for its shipyards (they would have gone bankrupt if not for that), and Japan's shipyards are about 4 times as productive as US ones, and about twice as productive as European ones.
 
Korea generally gets a lot of government support for its shipyards (they would have gone bankrupt if not for that), and Japan's shipyards are about 4 times as productive as US ones, and about twice as productive as European ones.
I wasn’t aware of the exact numbers, but I knew that something like that was the case. What I was trying to imply was that there was no logical reason why American or European shipyards couldn’t be heavily subsidized and/or modernized to be competitive with Korean and Japanese yards (at least). Hell, the United States already has the Jones Act, just straight-up giving away money doesn’t seem like a big jump...
 
I wasn’t aware of the exact numbers, but I knew that something like that was the case. What I was trying to imply was that there was no logical reason why American or European shipyards couldn’t be heavily subsidized and/or modernized to be competitive with Korean and Japanese yards (at least). Hell, the United States already has the Jones Act, just straight-up giving away money doesn’t seem like a big jump...
The US does heavily subsidize them, that's what the Jones Act is for, and certain government contracts do practically give away money to them since the contracts have to go to US shipyards. Prior to 1981, there were also direct heavy subsidies for all US shipyard construction. But subsidizing or straight-up giving away money doesn't make industries any more efficient or reduce their construction costs, so those didn't help the US industries.
 
Germany had nice, new Factories that implemented the latest production theories.

USA?
Nobody bombed our factories into rubble, so kept using the old ones, even though that by 1955, developments in Steel Mills meant that every works in the USA was functionally obsolete by 1960
Could have the USA done things differently?
sure. But the growth was fueled with cheaper imports. Hard to argue beancounters about that

Wasn't so much theories or even the new factories as it was the need to make capital investments into new machines, which is what I'm trying to see can be changed here. In the example of the steel market, for example, virtually everyone outside of the Big Three did keep up with the changes in steel tech like the new electrical methods. Had output been increasing like it used to, we'd have more industrial workers now then in the 60s.
 
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Shorten drastically or avoid the 12 week steel strike in 1959, and there will be funds available to upgrade and modernize. There are a host of ripple effects from that alone.

That's definitely a good one and there's a lot of evidence that's was the first sign of trouble. Maybe no Korean War so no battle between the President and the Steel industry, allowing Congress in its hearings on the Steel Industry in the late 1950s is able to force them to modernize?
 
I mean, American manufacturing production is at all time highs, and the economic analysis tells us that the vast majority of job loss in the sector was due to automation, not outsourcing

It's kinda a cop out to blame automation nor are we at the highest production output; that was 1988. To quote Oren Cass again:
Faced with this reality, efforts to blame job losses on automation require the fatally flawed assumption that output is not supposed to increase. Holding output constant and comparing the past’s lower productivity with the present’s higher productivity will always reveal that employment would be higher but for the productivity gain. This is how, for instance, an oft-cited report from Ball State University reaches the conclusion that 88 percent of manufacturing job losses are attributable to automation: “Had we kept 2000- levels of productivity and applied them to 2010-levels of production, we would have required 20.9 million manufacturing workers. Instead, we employed only 12.1 million.” But of course we’re employing fewer manufacturing workers than if productivity had not increased—and the same could be said about every decade.

Using this reasoning, we could say that had we kept 1960-levels of productivity and applied them to 1970-levels of production, we would have required 25 million manufacturing workers. Instead, we employed 18 million. Did automation destroy 7 million jobs in the 1960s? Maybe. But this wasn’t a problem, because output rose 62 percent, so manufacturing employment was higher at decade’s end. By contrast, the output of the manufacturing sector in 2016 was only 3 percent higher than it was in 2006. Single years achieved higher growth than that thirty-two times during 1950–2000, at least five times during every decade before 2010.

Further:
In manufacturing, every year will see extraordinary upgrades in some processes. But firms will have to decide how many areas they will risk changing at one time and how much capital they can devote to the effort. With each decision, they will have to balance the benefits of investment in the ideal tool for a specific task with the loss of flexibility that comes from committing to that tool and that task. Even the steel industry, a poster child for automation, required forty years to increase its per-worker output from 260 tons to 1,100 tons—an annual improvement of less than 4 percent.

Across the manufacturing sector globally, the Boston Consulting Group reports that the stock of installed robots grew only 2 percent to 3 percent per year during 2005–14—no faster than total manufacturing output. As robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks observed in MIT Technology Review, “I regularly see decades-old equipment in factories around the world. I even see PCs running Windows 3.0—a software version released in 1990.” Anyone who has peered around a checkout counter to see the readout on the cashier’s screen knows this feeling. Brooks continued: “The principal control mechanism in factories, including brand-new ones in the U.S., Europe, Japan, Korea, and China, is based on programmable logic controllers, or PLCs. These were introduced in 1968 … I just looked on a jobs list, and even today, this very day, Tesla Motors is trying to hire PLC technicians at its factory in Fremont, California.

The problem isn't automation, but actually the lack of it; if output had been increasing like it used to as a result of businesses making the capital investments required in the machinery, manufacturing employment would still be increasing across the board.
 
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