系统提示：若遇到视频无法播放请点击下方链接 https://www.youtube.com/embed/4IdyrtQgnjA American Labor’s Real Problem: It Isn’t Productive Enough https://archive.ph/ORMsA Factory workers want more pay and less hours, but that’s at odds with how U.S. manufacturers have lost ground By Greg Ip Sept. 20, 2023 5:30 am ET Thousands of UAW workers went on strike at General Motors, Stellantis and Ford Motor last Friday. PHOTO: SYLVIA JARRUS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL For the United Auto Workers, it makes perfect sense to demand more pay and better work-life balance from Detroit’s three automakers. After all, workers throughout this historically tight labor market are getting exactly that. But what makes sense to striking factory workers makes no sense for manufacturing as a whole. Pay is ultimately tied to productivity: the quantity and quality of products a company’s workforce churns out. And here, American manufacturing companies and workers are in trouble. The issue isn’t with labor-intensive products such as clothing and furniture, which largely moved offshore long ago. Rather, it’s in the most advanced products: electric cars and batteries, power-generation equipment, commercial aircraft and semiconductors. President Biden might be celebrating a manufacturing renaissance based on new factories, but the share prices of former manufacturing icons Ford Motor, Intel, Boeing and General Electric suggest skepticism is warranted about the durability of this renaissance: All are at a fraction of all-time share-price highs. UAW and Automakers Resume Contract Talks as Strike Continues Play video: UAW and Automakers Resume Contract Talks as Strike Continues The United Auto Workers union and Detroit’s auto companies returned to contract talks Monday. About 12,700 workers entered their fourth day of a strike, with wage increases being a focal point. Photo: Paul Sancya/Associated Press Yes, American companies still lead the world in design and innovation, but the resulting products increasingly are made abroad, especially in Asia. Biden, like former President Donald Trump before him, wants to reverse this, through tariffs, subsidies and other government interventions. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and especially China certainly intervened plenty to help their manufacturers. But attributing manufacturing performance to government policies alone is dangerous; it underplays how far Asian manufacturers have come in cost and quality and how far their American counterparts have slipped. Since 2009, manufacturing output per hour in the U.S. has grown just 0.2% a year, well below the economy as a whole and peer economies in Europe and Asia, except Japan. Manufacturing productivity growth 2009-2022 (annual average) Source: U.S. Labor Dept. (U.S.); OECD (U.K., Germany, France, Italy); CEIC Data (Taiwan, South Korea, Japan) In motor-vehicle manufacturing, the picture is especially bad: From 2012 through last year, productivity plummeted 32%, though some of this was no doubt due to pandemic disruptions. To say American workers aren’t productive enough isn’t to say it’s their fault; after all, productivity depends on a multitude of factors beyond the workers, including management decisions, the supply chain, public infrastructure and regulation. For example, American manufacturers use far fewer robots than their competitors, in particular in Taiwan, South Korea and China, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank. Nonetheless, workers’ fates are inextricably tied to how these factors in combination perform, and for the UAW, they have performed badly. The Detroit Three—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, owner of Chrysler—have been losing market share for years, to imports, and to nonunion U.S. plants. They account for just two of the 10 most dependable brands ranked by J.D. Power and just one of the 10 best cars picked by Consumer Reports. In electric vehicles, they are far behind Tesla, whose highest-output plant and main export base is in Shanghai. Change in labor productivity since 2009 Source: Labor Dept. Warehouses and hospitals can pass the cost of higher wages and reduced hours to customers without being undercut by foreign competitors. Manufacturers don’t have that luxury. That’s why Detroit is recoiling at the UAW’s demands. While their output per employee is among the highest of 11 global manufacturers ranked by consultants AlixPartners, so are their costs per vehicle. The lowest cost: China’s. Labor presents problems other than just cost, such as the shortage of skilled workers. “They find desirable candidates, they hire them, they train them, they don’t retain them,” said Jim Schmidt, an automotive expert at consultants Oliver Wyman. “A lot of the younger workforce doesn’t want to do that type of work.” For some, absenteeism is another problem. “You need a lot of additional labor to backfill for absenteeism,” Schmidt said. “That can lead to large effects on productivity, quality and culture.” The U.S.’s manufacturing problems go much further than autos. Since its top-selling 737 was grounded by crashes in 2018 and 2019, production problems have left Boeing far behind Europe’s Airbus, which delivered three times as many aircraft last year and twice as many this year. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner has been plagued by quality defects. Since the pandemic, Boeing has experienced “a crisis of loyalty among its workforce” with high turnover compounding supply chain problems, said Michel Merluzeau of AIR, an aerospace advisory firm. In semiconductors, U.S. companies still dominate design, while steadily ceding production to Asia. Intel is the last major U.S. firm that both designs and makes chips, but its manufacturing capabilities have fallen far behind Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Today, none of the most advanced chips are made in the U.S. This is a national security threat which the Trump and Biden administrations have sought to correct by persuading TSMC, in part through subsidies authorized by the Chips and Science Act, to build two fabs, or semiconductor fabrication plants, in Arizona. Whether those fabs will be as productive as those in Taiwan depends crucially on management and labor. Burn Lin, a former vice president of research and development at TSMC who is now dean of the college of semiconductor research at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, said it isn’t enough to have the most sophisticated tools. He said employees must know how to interpret thousands of measurements that the tools generate, and monitor the tool just the right number of times: too often wastes time, too infrequently introduces defects. Getting this right often depends on culture, training and learning-by-doing, which can’t be instantly transplanted. TSMC has had a fab in Washington state since the 1990s, and its yields are still lower than at the equivalent fabs in Taiwan, Lin said. A TSMC spokeswoman said yields are comparable. Even constructing a fab’s clean room involves pouring the concrete and welding the pipes in just such a way to avoid tiny imprecisions that ultimately reduce yields, Lin said. It’s why TSMC is seeking to bring several hundred workers from Taiwan to Arizona to aid in the construction. Local trade unions have objected, saying this contradicts the Chips Act’s goal of creating local employment. Unions need to accept they’re not yet up to the job. “Everyone loses the skills they don’t practice,” Kevin Xu wrote recently on his China-focused blog, Interconnected. Xu, who once worked with unions to get former President Barack Obama elected, says unions need to be told “that they are not the best, but they can be if they stay humble (and) soak up all the know-how and skills from workers elsewhere.” Write to Greg Ip at [email protected]
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American Labor’s Real Problem: It Isn’t Productive Enough https://archive.ph/ORMsA
Factory workers want more pay and less hours, but that’s at odds with how U.S. manufacturers have lost ground By Greg Ip Sept. 20, 2023 5:30 am ET
Thousands of UAW workers went on strike at General Motors, Stellantis and Ford Motor last Friday. PHOTO: SYLVIA JARRUS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL For the United Auto Workers, it makes perfect sense to demand more pay and better work-life balance from Detroit’s three automakers. After all, workers throughout this historically tight labor market are getting exactly that.
But what makes sense to striking factory workers makes no sense for manufacturing as a whole. Pay is ultimately tied to productivity: the quantity and quality of products a company’s workforce churns out. And here, American manufacturing companies and workers are in trouble. The issue isn’t with labor-intensive products such as clothing and furniture, which largely moved offshore long ago. Rather, it’s in the most advanced products: electric cars and batteries, power-generation equipment, commercial aircraft and semiconductors.
President Biden might be celebrating a manufacturing renaissance based on new factories, but the share prices of former manufacturing icons Ford Motor, Intel, Boeing and General Electric suggest skepticism is warranted about the durability of this renaissance: All are at a fraction of all-time share-price highs.
UAW and Automakers Resume Contract Talks as Strike Continues Play video: UAW and Automakers Resume Contract Talks as Strike Continues
The United Auto Workers union and Detroit’s auto companies returned to contract talks Monday. About 12,700 workers entered their fourth day of a strike, with wage increases being a focal point. Photo: Paul Sancya/Associated Press
Yes, American companies still lead the world in design and innovation, but the resulting products increasingly are made abroad, especially in Asia. Biden, like former President Donald Trump before him, wants to reverse this, through tariffs, subsidies and other government interventions. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and especially China certainly intervened plenty to help their manufacturers.
But attributing manufacturing performance to government policies alone is dangerous; it underplays how far Asian manufacturers have come in cost and quality and how far their American counterparts have slipped.
Since 2009, manufacturing output per hour in the U.S. has grown just 0.2% a year, well below the economy as a whole and peer economies in Europe and Asia, except Japan.
Manufacturing productivity growth 2009-2022 (annual average) Source: U.S. Labor Dept. (U.S.); OECD (U.K., Germany, France, Italy); CEIC Data (Taiwan, South Korea, Japan)
In motor-vehicle manufacturing, the picture is especially bad: From 2012 through last year, productivity plummeted 32%, though some of this was no doubt due to pandemic disruptions.
To say American workers aren’t productive enough isn’t to say it’s their fault; after all, productivity depends on a multitude of factors beyond the workers, including management decisions, the supply chain, public infrastructure and regulation. For example, American manufacturers use far fewer robots than their competitors, in particular in Taiwan, South Korea and China, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank.
Nonetheless, workers’ fates are inextricably tied to how these factors in combination perform, and for the UAW, they have performed badly. The Detroit Three—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, owner of Chrysler—have been losing market share for years, to imports, and to nonunion U.S. plants. They account for just two of the 10 most dependable brands ranked by J.D. Power and just one of the 10 best cars picked by Consumer Reports. In electric vehicles, they are far behind Tesla, whose highest-output plant and main export base is in Shanghai.
Change in labor productivity since 2009
Source: Labor Dept.
Warehouses and hospitals can pass the cost of higher wages and reduced hours to customers without being undercut by foreign competitors. Manufacturers don’t have that luxury. That’s why Detroit is recoiling at the UAW’s demands. While their output per employee is among the highest of 11 global manufacturers ranked by consultants AlixPartners, so are their costs per vehicle. The lowest cost: China’s.
Labor presents problems other than just cost, such as the shortage of skilled workers. “They find desirable candidates, they hire them, they train them, they don’t retain them,” said Jim Schmidt, an automotive expert at consultants Oliver Wyman. “A lot of the younger workforce doesn’t want to do that type of work.” For some, absenteeism is another problem.
“You need a lot of additional labor to backfill for absenteeism,” Schmidt said. “That can lead to large effects on productivity, quality and culture.”
The U.S.’s manufacturing problems go much further than autos. Since its top-selling 737 was grounded by crashes in 2018 and 2019, production problems have left Boeing far behind Europe’s Airbus, which delivered three times as many aircraft last year and twice as many this year. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner has been plagued by quality defects. Since the pandemic, Boeing has experienced “a crisis of loyalty among its workforce” with high turnover compounding supply chain problems, said Michel Merluzeau of AIR, an aerospace advisory firm.
In semiconductors, U.S. companies still dominate design, while steadily ceding production to Asia. Intel is the last major U.S. firm that both designs and makes chips, but its manufacturing capabilities have fallen far behind Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Today, none of the most advanced chips are made in the U.S. This is a national security threat which the Trump and Biden administrations have sought to correct by persuading TSMC, in part through subsidies authorized by the Chips and Science Act, to build two fabs, or semiconductor fabrication plants, in Arizona.
Whether those fabs will be as productive as those in Taiwan depends crucially on management and labor. Burn Lin, a former vice president of research and development at TSMC who is now dean of the college of semiconductor research at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, said it isn’t enough to have the most sophisticated tools. He said employees must know how to interpret thousands of measurements that the tools generate, and monitor the tool just the right number of times: too often wastes time, too infrequently introduces defects.
Getting this right often depends on culture, training and learning-by-doing, which can’t be instantly transplanted. TSMC has had a fab in Washington state since the 1990s, and its yields are still lower than at the equivalent fabs in Taiwan, Lin said. A TSMC spokeswoman said yields are comparable.
Even constructing a fab’s clean room involves pouring the concrete and welding the pipes in just such a way to avoid tiny imprecisions that ultimately reduce yields, Lin said. It’s why TSMC is seeking to bring several hundred workers from Taiwan to Arizona to aid in the construction. Local trade unions have objected, saying this contradicts the Chips Act’s goal of creating local employment.
Unions need to accept they’re not yet up to the job. “Everyone loses the skills they don’t practice,” Kevin Xu wrote recently on his China-focused blog, Interconnected. Xu, who once worked with unions to get former President Barack Obama elected, says unions need to be told “that they are not the best, but they can be if they stay humble (and) soak up all the know-how and skills from workers elsewhere.” Write to Greg Ip at [email protected]
马克思也说生产力是决定因素。生产工具，生产效率都是生产力中重要的指标。