yeah i was a welder during covid and i watched a generation of men die or retire. there's virtually no boomer manufacturers left, and the old farts pushing numbers around in the offices never knew how to run the damn factories very well in the first place. Gen X'rs are even worse administrators because all they know is turn up the pressure on laborers, freeze wages and cut bonuses, and hire an infinite stream of grifter business consultants to lie to the stockholders.
young men are bad workers because they're young. they don't know shit and haven't had time to learn things like 'if you show up late, get drunk on the clock, and fight your coworkers, you get fired'. if the work is exhausting and the pay is worse than mcdonalds, your factory hires an endless stream of shitty young bucks who leave once they get a little skill or get fired for being terrible. then you institute grueling mandatory overtime to make up for constant labor shortages and your old men start failing...
anyway. modern american manufacturing has been a shitshow for decades and a flaming shitshow since covid, and ramping production up will require a reckoning with labor realities that the business class in this country simply can't do. i would like to be optimistic about unionization, but it's pretty likely this administration is going to hand a blank check and unlimited military power to anyone who promises to get their striking men back to 'work'.
