Moronic Right Wing Pundits

If you care to, you can find all sorts of shit on X and Untruth Social and other places by right-wing jagoffs who are proclaiming that manufacturing jobs are great for men and that's why we need to bring them back.

I will place one bet: The percentage of those keyboard-warriors who have ever worked in a factory, let alone held a union card, is probably no greater than 3%, if even that.

If they had, they might have learned a few things. First off, most manufacturing jobs are mindlessly repetitive. You do the same task, over and over again, eight hours a day, 270 days a year.

Second, some are dangerous. If your mind wanders while doing that same task over and over, you could get hurt. You could hurt someone else. You might make bad parts. If you're lucky, the company has the latest in machinery equipped with safety guards and if you're really lucky, nobody has fucked with them because they make operating harder. Yes, there were guys who bypassed the two-hands-no-tie-down interlocks so they could adjust the workpiece as the press came down and who lost fingers or hands for that. (On top of that, they then got fired for deliberately operating unsafe equipment.) If you're further lucky, the company furnishes you with the PPE to be safe, but that's far less likely going forward, as OSHA's been pretty much demolished.

Third, some of them are really filthy jobs. They are the kind of jobs where the old workers' houses had showers in the basement; the husband would come home, go into the basement, strip, shower and put on clean clothes before going up into the house. Regardless of how good your PPE is, some of that gets into your body.

Fourth, they are hard on your body. You'll retire with worn-out joints, a bad back, arthritic hands and all the other joys of abusing your body for forty years.

I worked a couple of vacation terms at a chemical plant, the first time between high school and college. There was another kid who was doing the same, except that he liked the money they paid so he didn't go on to college. When I went back there the following year, he was still there. The older men and women on the floor uniformly thought that he was an idiot. One asked me what sort of fool would choose to work there on the factory floor when they could go to college and get a job where they worked at a desk, made good money, and came home as clean as they were when they began their day.

Manufacturing, in the way that the damn pundits think, isn't coming back. The vulture capitalists, like Chainsaw Al Dunlap and Mitt Romney, among others, sent those jobs overseas in order to make shit cheaper, both in costs and quality, so they could make even more obscene amounts of money. The only way those jobs are coming back if there is a global deflationary crash so severe that people will work for shit wages just to survive.

And that, Gentle Reader, may be the plan.