I live in central Japan's manufacturing hub. If you ever come visit me, and
really want to return depressed, I'll arrange for us to take a tour of the company which produces most of the world's cell phone camera gaskets. (A little ring of rubber around the cell phone lens.) You very well might have one in the Japanese cellphone which came in the Chinese paper box and got stamped "Made in China" that you have in your pocket.
Every day, a couple hundred workers report to the factory. The most labor-intensive step in the process is taking a sheet of approximately 1,000 gaskets, manually removing them with a tweezer, inspecting them under a jeweler's loupe, and depositing the passes into the waiting outgoing package. When you fill it, it gets wheeled away for shipping. Your quota is 1,000 passed gaskets per hour, for which you are paid approximately 1,000 yen (at least, that was the pre-crash wage), or about $13 at today's prices.
When you say "We want our manufacturing jobs back", this is the kind of job you really want. It is easily the worst legal job I've heard of in a first-world nation. There's also practically a clock on the wall saying Time Until Robotic Arms Are Sensitive Enough To Do This Without Damaging An Unacceptable Portion Of Gaskets.
One reason that (pre-crash, anyhow) this neighborhood had a lot of immigrants is that the typical worker at this sort of factory 30~50 years ago was a Japanese woman in her twenties and that these days the job is a job Japanese women mostly won't do.
Every day, a couple hundred workers report to the factory. The most labor-intensive step in the process is taking a sheet of approximately 1,000 gaskets, manually removing them with a tweezer, inspecting them under a jeweler's loupe, and depositing the passes into the waiting outgoing package. When you fill it, it gets wheeled away for shipping. Your quota is 1,000 passed gaskets per hour, for which you are paid approximately 1,000 yen (at least, that was the pre-crash wage), or about $13 at today's prices.
When you say "We want our manufacturing jobs back", this is the kind of job you really want. It is easily the worst legal job I've heard of in a first-world nation. There's also practically a clock on the wall saying Time Until Robotic Arms Are Sensitive Enough To Do This Without Damaging An Unacceptable Portion Of Gaskets.
One reason that (pre-crash, anyhow) this neighborhood had a lot of immigrants is that the typical worker at this sort of factory 30~50 years ago was a Japanese woman in her twenties and that these days the job is a job Japanese women mostly won't do.