Comment by DrewADesign

The American manufacturing industry is scrambling to transfer some of the industrial trade and process knowledge from the retiring remnants of pre-offshoring industrial America into the two generations of people that didn’t have apprenticeships, pensions, (often) union membership with good benefits, etc. Trade schools were very expensive for industrial trade skills that were seen as dead-end careers compared to white collar jobs or non-manufacturing trades, and almost none of the companies saw any reason to spend all that money training people into expensive skilled professionals when they had all the professionals they could possibly need for decades after the industry largely collapsed, here. Keeping the workforce viable was always someone else’s problem— the individuals, the governments, larger companies— until it was suddenly everyone’s problem. They spend decades myopically chasing quarterly results before they realized they were running towards a cliff.