He's also not allowed to take any shortcuts from the book procedure, which there frequently are a few available (use a long wobble extension bar and a universal joint and you can get in without taking off all of the stuff above that bolt, whatever). On the other hand, this is the warranty rate (meaning new cars, largely less rust, etc). Independent/non-dealer mechanics will typically charge more time than the warranty time estimate from the manufacturer to account for things like rusty vehicles with harder to remove bolts and such, though this is usually in the rate book they subscribe to from whatever information source they pay for (warranty + 20% or so).
The issue is that the estimated time for a job is probably a high estimate for a brand new car and probably a low estimate for a several year old car, and the risk of that is on the dealership. The dealership then pays mechanics an hourly wage ($20+, fairly high for well certified master mechanics) and assumes that the hours listed on the job from the manufacturer are accurate, leaving the mechanic to take the risk if it goes over. Generally, the dealership loses on this proposition too, since they lose out on business/bay/electric/heat/etc for the lost time, so they don't like warranty work. They can upcharge/charge for more time/etc on a job for a customer, not for warranty repair due to contractual obligations to the OEM. This is particularly bad for Ford, since they currently lead the industry in recalls and warranty spend, meaning that their dealership networks are getting a lot more of that kind of work with limited profit and no ability to turn it down.
The specific example was a leak that was the shorting out of electric window motors due to rainwater leaking through the window. It was better for him to fix it by cutting up a plastic container and attaching it over the motor & getting hourly for it than it was for GM to tell the dealership "Here's the part, you get $8 to install it when the customer is subject to the TSB"
Can confirm this. Just Traded in my Escape for a Toyota. I was tired of spending time and money on repairs on a mid range car with less than 65k miles.
Maybe this is just survivorship bias of the used car market. When you see a vehicle with 180k miles that still runs great and looks to have been well taken care of, you're not seeing the dozens of others that were completely abused or neglected or let warranty items slip. There is a certain amount of filtering that has already gone on for a vehicle with that many miles on it that helps you avoid the real lemons or models with serious design flaws.
I sort of took the opposite route of most people. I got access to software developer money fairly early so was buying new (but practical) vehicles. I wasted so much money on new cars and still had to deal with warranty stuff and minor inconveniences and a shitty owner who doesn't take care of their vehicles. As I got older I've started buying the cheapest functional vehicle I could find that still had good maintenance history and zero accidents. I have had excellent results now that I'm doing the basics of care and maintenance. Part of me still wants the new toys. I'd love to have HUD speed limit and current speed projected for example. Vented and cooled seats would be amazing! I think the Ionic 5 N is the most tempted I've been by a new vehicle in a long time. But I haven't had a car note in over a decade and my insurance is dirt cheap on these very reliable but older vehicles.
That's why I got a Tacoma with a plain V6 and no turbo's to worry about :)
What's the mechanic's risk? Are they only paid on the pre-estimated labor time?
It's almost like a hairdresser as well, as they usually need to buy many of their own tools.
It's employer's problem, employer never wants to pay workers less than minumum wage per hour, and loading them with work is manager's job.
But I doubt mechanics want minumum wage, especially since it's not keeping up with inflation.
Of course many are ok being exposed to that risk, depends on the jobs. Also there's tips that help employers avoiding the unpaid wages. However, worker must report the tips received, and if they received less tips to cover the minimum wage, then employer must pay employee the difference (so the total pay would be at least min wage).
I saw that restaurant owners pay at least min wage even to illegal workers who don't even have SSNs. I assumed that unpaid wages is more serious than hiring illegally.
I don't think that is a very high risk for the "employer". There's a reason that things like this go on for so long: https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...
Those billions are just the reported amounts.
That's more or less it.
Getting paid the book rate is an advantage to the mechanic because then they still get the full rate if they're more efficient at their job, which is an advantage to everybody. As long as the book rate is reasonable. And if it isn't then they don't take the job, which isn't a problem for the mechanics, it's a problem for Ford.
A mechanic getting $20/hr is crazy. Shops charge the customer $100+ per hour for labor. Of course they have overhead, but many people don't realize that mechanics buy their own tools.
You can earn $20 flipping burgers.
Maybe in Ohio.
I'm not sure that your comment is even directionally correct. TFA is clickbait for blue collar pseudo-car-guys. The example given in the article paints the mechanic as the hero, losing money on every job. In reality book time is insanely exaggerated in the median, and the problem is likely more that mechanics don't like earning a dime for every dollar the boss makes.
Many mechanics (seems that is what the article example is) get paid on book time, not hourly. That is what the guy in the article is complaining about. That their book rate is both too aggressive, and far less than the "customer book time" / rate. The reason mechanics are often paid this way is so that they stay efficient. Warranty jobs are especially aggressive on the mechanic book rate, because cars under warranty are newer with few unexpected problems like rusty parts, stripped bolts, age related issues, etc.
$20 is also on the low end for a good tech, you're correct.
$20/hour is starting pay around here at McDonalds, In-N-Out Burger, etc.
cheaper than a degree
>breaking his back and knuckles, and exposed to carcinogens (used motor oil, grease, etc).
They work indoors and don't exactly work in an environment where things get burnt or aerosolized. It's no office job but it's not exactly ditch digging.
Is there any proposal for some alternate way determining it?
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9cGKql0Wk1A/TrAJTrDoxxI/AAAAAAAAA...
(for the record, I did not have this policy when they were toddlers, only as tweens; I'm not a monster)
I don't. Someone is lying.
I know how Ford sets book time. Their methodology, while perhaps biased towards optimistic estimates, is not ever going to put cab R&R at under an hour.
Charitably, someone is mistaken. But given that these numbers are core to the argument being made, I find it odd that the claims were not vetted at all. It takes almost no effort to find example R&R times for various Ford pickups, and they're all measured in hours. It's not hard, typically 6-10 bolts depending on the model. But even with bulk electrical connectors, no rust, the right tools, and experience, the process takes more than an hour.
An hourly rate punishes mechanics who work fast, don't you think?
The one thing I've heard consistently from people in that business is "You won't last long if you can't beat the book," something experienced mechanics do on a regular basis.
Cars used to be simpler to work on because a) they inherently were simpler and b) the engine bay used to have a lot of room to work in. Both of these things are not coming back.
No, it's because they are designed to be assembled from complete sub-assemblies. Maintenance is not assumed to be done on the sub-assemblies while they are in the final product. Under warranty, workshops are intended to replace entire sub-assemblies with new/rebuilt parts.
It's effectively a deliberate decision from the 80s that enabled faster assembly while warranties were shorter. For cars that are out of warranty, it doesn't matter either way.
The problem in the article occurs when Ford tries to pay someone to repair faults that were not planned to happen during the warranty time. Impossible, because it's completely uneconomical.
An advantage to the manufacturer, that is. For the consumer, it leads to never ending car payments for life, or surprise bills that approach the cost of a replacement vehicle.
My old protege even had an access port in the fender well added specifically to remove the crank bolt with an extension. If it were an Audi the FSM would point you to the engine removal process as step 1.
And once an OEM has committed to that sort of design it spirals.
"chuck the timing chains on the back, who cares, the engine gets pulled for everything regardless".
Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line. This is why there are some cars that require removing the wheel well to change the oil filter and other that have things completely out-of-order or require absurd tools to service. My grandfather was a 30 year Chrysler dealer mechanic who had a dozen or so custom tools for very specific purposes.
Source: Dad had an A/C & electrical mechanic shop next to a Porsche specialist shop.
Exactly. It's basically fight club math. Spend $10 on a click-fit connector that can't be disassembled but that a $60/hr (though they only see a fraction of that) UAW laborer can plug in in half the time can't easily short-insert that can be visually checked.
The fact that it costs $200 the 1/10000 times it fails under warranty doesn't matter with those numbers. And you don't even care about the 100/100 times it fails at 2-3x the warranty period.
Of course, you're burning credibility doing this. But credibility doesn't have an obvious mapping to a number and stonk go up, KPI go up, bonus get paid, nobody cares.
BMW can be kinda a pain (its under a liner in the trunk, making you work at weird angles (and part emptying your trunk) but the benefit is your battery isn’t exposed to the elements and probably lasts longer for that reason.
If anyone here owns a car with that system I recommend taking it to your trusted mechanic and discussing with them to do additional preventive maintenance on it.
What cars use those?
They aren't even trying to hide the whole planned-obsolescence thing at this point. Average age of cars on the road is approaching 13 years now, so someone who buys a Duramax-based vehicle will end up with a metal and plastic brick that costs more to maintain than it's worth, just because of the timing belt alone.
Source: I own one of these engines and I dread having to pay ~3k for this maintenance in 3 years. I like the engine, just not this maintenance ticket item.
Shouldn't it be the business that's shouldering the variability in income due to warranties, since they're the ones that sold the cars with them?
It seems similar to a hypothetical restaurant selling memberships with food, then paying workers less when customers buy food with the membership discount.
They get away with passing the risk because they're already apex parasites who have successfully inserted themselves between carmakers and customers, and lobby like crazy everywhere to protect their position.
Nothing there has changed for decades except the world around it.
This probably matters a lot depending on what 'long time ago' means.
Like when you hear old timers say "When I was a kid I bought X for Y" where Y is something like 10th the cost it is now. The push for profits has squeezed every section of the economy and it sounds like (dealer) mechanics are not escaping.
Neither of those cases looks like fair business dealings
Mechanic gets used to working at non-warranty rates, so any warranty works feels like being cheated.
Does it all balance out in the end? Maybe. But, that's not what mechanics "feel" like happens. And they're paid little enough (generally) that the two books annoys them. And the working conditions are bad enough (both physically, but also "mentally" - many shops are hostile workplaces, or close to it, with poor benefits, long-ish hours, etc). So, they have a lot to bitch about, generally.
As always the worker shortage is a “there’s a shortage of skilled workers who refuse to get screwed on pay”
There are a few basic things you have to not do in order to work on an EV, basically the same rules as for airbag systems but with physically larger components.
No modern car is electrically simple, but they all do a pretty good job telling you where you ought to be looking.
Current day electric cars are ripe for abuse from manufacturers (planned obsolescence or generic out of warranty obsolescence) and I would be surprised if any of them are still running for over 25+ years. Even though today you see a lot of cars from the 2000s and before. Especially since the market is very fragmented between models and manufacturers.
Basically any modern day electric car is worse in terms of repair-ability then any Iphone in my opinion.
Electric car. Horn keeps failing. $15 part, $900 to do the work. Why? Because to get to the horn, the entire front end of the car has to be disassembled, including the hood, bumper, fenders, you name it.
My fuel car’s horn assembly is easily accessed through the engine bay with a single bolt to remove it.
Efficiencies in one area seem to have led to extraordinarily difficult repair abilities elsewhere.
I won’t even go into how the air filters are replaced — but it starts with removing the dashboard…
That's just bad design having nothing to do with EVs. It takes me about 30 seconds to replace cabin filter in a Hyundai Ioniq 5. The horns aren't quite as easy, but certainly do not require removal of the car's front end.
Really shows how little they care about the needful for the things they own directly, then extrapolate that out to all the consulting they do. Complete shit.
1. The development and use of "rate books" is de facto price fixing. labor is a cost, and it has a price. Ban them by law.
2. Take the computers away from the engineers. There should be no ability to drag and drop assemblies to reshape them. No ability to make parts that are computed to barely meet requirements.
3. Patent licensing goes to a small flat fee per item per use. How about $1. A modern car can have upwards of 10,000 active patents for all components. All "Design Copyrights" are voided. A good design isnt created, it is recognized.
4. End nearly all "mandatory technologies" and features. Straight from Hayek et al, Incredible Bread Machine on wheels.
t. a Greasy Dirty Technician
People universally seem to dislike the size increase in vehicles, but this was due largely to magical requirements for fuel efficiency standards. The obvious result was putting smaller engines in larger cars and adding a turbo.
On the complexity side of things, cramming the safety gear into the car while also getting maximal efficiency and keeping costs low meant some rather terrible design choices from a repairability perspective.
All that said, I do love the safety requirements. I got hit by a Ford F150 in a Miata and walked away perfectly fine.
I'm not convinced CAFE is the way to go for fuel efficiency. The obvious thing to do is put some kind of levy on the expected total emissions of the vehicle over its lifetime, regardless of size, which would encourage people to buy cars no larger than their needs dictate. The current system seems inefficient.
Say a dealership would normally charge a customer $200 an hour for a job, of which the technician will make about $50 an hour. But if the same work is done under warranty, i.e., the manufacturer is paying, the dealership will get only $100 an hour. The dealership, in turn, will reduce the technician's pay to less than $50. Thus, the manufacturer is squeezing the dealership, which is squeezing the tech.
and if we assume that an AI written article costs a fraction of a regular article, then AI articles will be profitable more easily.
we can still change that if most of us decide to flag such articles, although, instead of a generic flag i'd like an AI flag or tag (similarly to how we tag older articles with the year). then everyone can decide on their own if it is worth their time.
The lack of mechanics was mentioned and I recall him saying that they're building up apprenticeship programs and the US should take more pride in blue collar work.
0- https://www.theverge.com/podcast/784875/ford-ceo-jim-farley-...
An automotive assembly line consists of many "footprints" chained together. Each footprint is scheduled to have the same amount of work (in seconds). That work rate is also called the line rate, often expressed in jobs per hour. So 70 jph could also be expressed as 51.4 seconds per footprint.
Working backwards from the time you drive the finished vehicle off the end of the line, a truck assembly plant works like this:
v Engine line -------------
Final Line <-- Chassis (frame) -------------
^ Trim Line (body)--------Paint Shop <------ Body Shop <--- Stamped Metal
graph TD
subgraph Chassis Shop
Fr[Frame Line] -->EM
EM[Engine Marriage] -->C
C[Chassis Line] --> BM
BM[Body Marriage] -->F
F[Final Line]
end
subgraph Engine
E[Engine Line] --> EM
end
subgraph Body Assembly
B[Body Shop] --> P[Paint Shop]
P --> T[Trim Shop]
T --> BM
end
So setting the engine on the frame must not take longer than 51.4 seconds, and setting the body on the frame also must not take longer than 51.4 seconds. (Along with all of the other ~~1,000 assembly footprints)
As a matter of simple evolution, no design that takes longer will be produced, because it does not survive the first round of selection: Assembly.
Designs that survive Assembly may eventually need Maintenance, but by then the genes have already been passed on.
Now you may say that Engineers are smart enough to fix both problems, but I don't believe in Intelligent Design.
Snark aside - maintenance falls under "residual value", and "residual value" may be a luxury that the automaker cannot afford.
*** To be clear, I am using 51.4 seconds as a stand-in exemplar for many other requirements in the assembly process.
Show me the outcome, and I will describe the incentives ~ Inverse Munger
Automotive design engineers have to satisfy MANY criteria, the following items entail LISTs of requirements, not a single req.
- the part must function (includes failure modes)
- the part must be manufacturable (make the part itself)
- the part must be assembl-able (it has to fit with the parts around it)
- ... be lightweight, environmentally friendly, comply with government requirements
-
- then, to actually exist:
- the part will be prototyped in a pre-production environment
- a component plant will be set up to manufacture that part
- the manufactured part will be tested to ensure that it still meets the design criteria
Now, once you have all the parts you need to make a vehicle, you can design the vehicle so that all those parts work together.
If you find out that you have to change the design of a part while you are designing the vehicle, this pushes back your project completion date. This makes the spreadsheets upset, and the spreadsheets take it out on your stock price.
----
Ok so "why don't they just" make the design better for the next model year?
Because those engineers have been assigned to another project! Also, design changes incur costs, which pushes out the program pay-off period.
You amortize Research and Design costs over the actual vehicles produced. Those vehicles have to be competitive in the market - price per value.
The Value Proposition for maintain-ability/repair-ability is not readily apparent at time of purchase.
This is why "residual value" is a luxury. No one gets to pick all of their own success criteria.
~~~ Again, this is all just like my opinion.
Pay is part of it, but for most skilled professions there's big bottlenecks on the training for the skills.
Or look at police officers in places like San Francisco. The pay is actually fantastic but the process of getting hired is hellish and takes a year or something ridiculous.
Or doctors, there's a massive shortage because there aren't enough residency spots, something controlled by the AMA. Pay is amazing (hours suck) and there are people clamoring to do it, but the bottleneck is structural, not because of pay.
This was the whole issue with allowing guilds in the first place... If you only allow a guild to do a job (legally) and the guild also controls how many members they train and accept... The end result is a labor shortage.
Because it's better for the existing members of the guild.
If they train a large number of new members... they spend time and money on training, and they've increased their competition during bidding which drives down rates.
So instead you train the bare minimum for replacements. This keeps your members' rates high and competition low.
---
Any time the "pay is great" but the "process to get it sucks!"... you're seeing this in action. It's not that the process really needs to suck, it's that the process roadblocks are there to maintain high pay for the existing trained members.
If there's one thing monopolies don't like... it's competition. And legally enforced certifications are wonderful monopoly creators if you don't manage them carefully.
Where are the free market advocates that aren't just phonies?
They liked competition and markets, delivered strong economic growth, and brought the deficit down, but they fucked up by not funneling some of those efficiency gains into education and training, and toward building a robust social safety net to help the economically displaced.
Think of a prize race. The people organizing the race and the audience want a highly competitive race. But the racers, if they are in it for the prize, would love to have little to no competition.
Artificial restrictions on who can do a thing is not good and it is violence behind, whether it is government or not.
Anarcho-capitalists are the true expression of the ideology of free markets.
(Would you want someone performing surgery on you who "passed a test" but didn't have any formal education or training experience?)
If there is a shortage of something, I would expect these trade companies to backfill with apprentices who will then grow into their roles.
If there's too high a risk that someone won't be worth the investment, then that seems entirely financial to me.
But I don't know if that meaning is shared by anyone else in the world! Thanks for asking for clarification, I'm interested in how you'd communicate that idea.
Making less than $105k per year in SF is considered low income.
And they get a kickass pension which is worth a lot
As it should be. I’m tired of dumb roughnecks attending a 6-week course and then getting the ability to legally beat people up. It should be difficult to become a police officer, we should hold them to a high standard, especially if we’re gonna pay them so much.
This got solved in tech 20 years ago. You don't look at credentials and instead design a very arduous interviewing process that selects for both high IQ and people who are willing to study/work at it.
Then you provide lots of training. 20 years ago at Google (or Apple etc) there were tons of well educated non CS hires who were given good training and became exceptional software engineers.
Their "solution" rides on an unfathomably large tsunami of money. Which is great for them (and by extension, my bank account while I was there), but how do we accomplish that when there isn't one?
I worked for a small (~300 engineers) well run org in Verizon before I went to Google, and I was surprised at how well their training was, even with smaller budgets, and a tier below compensation wise and interviewing rigor.
This org supported being deliberate about hires, getting people who were experts and liked coaching/training along with those who were newbies with aptitude and desire. There was good documentation, good shared culture, and lots of safeguards like linting, excessive testing, example projects, if not quite the full fledged codelabs google has.
But part of it, both for Verizon and Google, was signaling that "good people work here and are well rewarded" (comparatively).
e.g. http://www.calapprenticeship.org/programs/electrician_appren...
You need a diploma, a smattering of algebra, a driver's license, and the physical ability to do the work. Everything else you will be taught on the job, while being paid.
And rightfully so, the cops here are fantastic.
We do have lower level “enforcement officers” though, but they also take 2.4 to 3 years. Just not a bachelors
I reckon the San Francisco PD salaries are not really all that "fantastic".
For instance, take something with a small marginal benefit like a dedicated person at a supermarket to bag groceries. It's a nice to have but the value to the employer is probably less than a $15 minimum wage. So you could say there is a shortage of grocery baggers since there is no one willing to do it at a market clearing price.
Doesn't mean we should do anything about it. There will always be some extra activity that would take place at a lower price, but it's worth while to notice that.
1) Labor costs go up with inflation
2) Rent goes up
3) New vacuum prices go down
At some point in the past, the downward line of vacuum price crossed over the upward line of repair cost. That's when this profession cratered.
Cars may have a while until that price point hits. But the quoted mechanic's suggestion that engineers optimize for simpler repairs instead of simpler production may be something similar. If simpler production makes the price of a new car $X cheaper, but increases the labor cost of repairs over the car's lifetime by $Y, there could be a time when X > Y.
This would have been in the early 2010s.
The reporter asked the owner why TV repair was dying: were TVs getting too complicated? Help too hard to find or too expensive? Nope, the owner said it was 100% parts availability. The vast majority of business coming through the door he'd have to turn away because manufacturers didn't want him repairing their equipment.
There may sometimes be a tradeoff for manufacturability vs repairability but even when there is not -- holding everything else equal -- manufacturers will choose the less repairable option because they perceive it to be in their interest to do so.
PS is probably harder nowadays since it might be more integrated but not 10+ years ago.
I have a more recent personal experience. My parents refrigerator went out. The repair man came out and diagnosed it as a bad inverter board and he'd get the part and come back in a few days. Great! The next day he calls my dad and tells him the part isn't available from the manufacturer so he can't actually fix it.
So I helped my dad go on an internet search and we eventually found an aftermarket (counterfeit?) board and installed it ourselves. My parents were thrilled they didn't have to buy a new refrigerator, but the repair guy got paid for the diagnosis but didn't make any money for the repair. I don't know if that's a long term sustainable business.
...generally I've seen weekly/monthly "fix-it" workshops as a kindof open-house / membership drive.
Probably best to 1) have people sign safety waivers, especially if they're not members 2) have people sign a "we can offer to help you try, but your widget might end up worse than before" waiver 3) run it as a volunteer outreach event with a focus on getting membership rather than a transactional "fix my ____ for free" outcome
I used the map and found the two nearest I quite far. plenty where I used to live, and a lot in other parts of the UK. Good to see.
It can be argued that all taxes and subsidies are "artificial distortions" of market value, but capitalism strongly encourages externalisation of costs -- "the cost of making X" is often severely underestimated by "the cost of running a machine to dig X out of the ground".
Cars have become more reliable and relatively cheaper then they used to be, but they are a lot more expensive so have a long way to go until that point is reached.
I took an old monitor that started failing to a local makerspace (which has a very popular monthly repair cafe), and it took some physical force to crack the case open. Once inside it was relatively easy to get the board out and find the leaking capacitors. Not exactly high-tech parts.
It was fun for me and for the volunteer, but I can't imagine anyone trying to do this for a living -- it would take a lot of time, and charging people for what the labor's worth would probably come close to the price of a new monitor.
The article cites a mechanic commenting on Ford CEO's remarks on lack of mechanics by referring to how Ford fails to pay rates for warranty repairs that justify the volume of work required to pull them off.
This suggests the root cause is the automaker's refusal to pay for warranty work at a market rate.
The article raises some points on how Ford both designed cars that are too expensive to repair and fails to pay mechanics to make their product line attractive for any maintenance business. This doesn't sound like a market efficiency issue.
The key difference is whether rentism plays a role or not.
It's one thing to claim that no one will pay a mechanic if it's too expensive. It's an entirely different thing to claim that some employers are abusing their position to pressure wages to stay low to maximize their profit margin at the expense of their employees.
There's a good litmus test: is there a massive wave of car shop bankruptcies due to lack of business? Or are car shop owners complaining they can't get enough employees to keep up with demand?
In your example there would still be people willing to do it, but the government doesn't allow it?
I'm not going to pay someone to punch me in the face but I wouldn't call that a shortage.
Seems like theres either a demand for something or there isnt.
And the amount of demand sets the rate of pay.
The invisible hand.
You can argue about the need for the minimum wage laws. You can argue about the morality of paying a living wage. But that's a different argument.
Try this with: housing, nvidia GPUs, toilet paper (when there's a pandemic)
People that can't achieve home ownership right now want houses to be cheaper.
People that already got theirs don't. Yeah, supply is a problem but it's more than that. Housing cannot both be an investment and broadly affordable, those two goals are in conflict.
We need to change the way we treat housing so that it cannot be used to both store and generate wealth.
You can argue the same for labor as well. Everything from off-shore competition to strained government budgets are excuses for why employers "don't have the option to just pay more".
The point is, shortages being a price phenomenon is not all that actionable. You can't avoid digging in to the details.
Honestly, between how soft-science macroeconomcis is, combined with the fact that this planet does not contain a single person willing to argue about it in good faith, makes it simply impossible to have real conversations around it, especially on the internet.
A shortage of an asset is a reflection of inventory levels. A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
They're different for good reasons.
So the housing crisis in just an "inventory" issue? Maybe it's just that people aren't willing to pay enough for a dwelling in desirable coastal cities?
>A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
How's this different than for goods? You're just substituting "time" for "production". Moreover
Lack of demand for labor and skill can produce an asset shortage, but in an economy where supply and demand float, the theory is that shortages reflect supply-demand failures, and the degree to which supply of labor is invoked to solve shortages for goods depends on the elasticity of demand and the elasticity of supply.
There might be an exception for natural resources that are exceptionally easy to exploit even without labour, like sunlight or fresh air.
Someone here posted that the balance was better in the west in the past because the Soviet Union was sitting there on the sidelines like a boogy many to capitalists waiting if they pushed people too far.
The car companies have basically set up a monopsony with cartels, squeezed the mechanics out, and are now complaining that they squeezed them out too much.
Oh, yeah, it's definitely them getting underpaid—but in a way that I wasn't expecting and was surprised to learn about.
In the case of doctors and electricians, you have structural problems in both, but also a true shortage of individuals in electrician work (could be in the medical field too, but I can't speak to that).
* companies complain about lack of trained workers
* more people start training
* after a few years companies complain about too many workers and don’t hire them
* people stop training
* companies complain about lack of trained workers
I was part of this in the 90s in mechanical engineering. When I started studying the job market was great. When I finished there were no jobs. Luckily I could jump to programming.
I think we are seeing the same with CS now. Too many people jumped into it.
Trying to move everyone up the value chain leaves a vacuum in the pipeline
e.g.
"We’re investing in trade schools and scholarships to recruit technicians for vehicle repair as well as our factories."
"But this is a society problem. The one that bothers me the most is cultural. We, as a culture, think that everyone has to go to an Ivy League school to be valuable in our society, yet we all know that our parents and grandparents made our country wonderful because of these kinds of jobs. There’s incredible dignity in emergency services, and people can have wonderful careers. But our society doesn’t celebrate those people like they do the latest AI engineer."
He fails to mention that AI engineers probably get 4x the pay with a job that is less physically demanding.
And eg
> There’s incredible dignity in emergency services, and people can have wonderful careers.
Not really. Ask anyone who does it; you'll hear minimum wage or not much above, and piles of transport of fat people. ie huge risks to the joint health for the people stuck moving them.
And of course, dignity ain't cash. This The whole thing is an extended whinge that rounds to I don't want to pay more.
Plus the implicit idea that society is responsible for preparing employees for Ford, not Ford.
Because the choice is/was - make $20/hr busting my ass with body breaking work and barely scrape by, or get a CS degree and live comfortably because no other career offers the pay required.
The cultural issue is - why aren't other careers paid as well? (Aka, why don't we value them). Someone risking bodily injury in a trade arguably should be paid more than most desk jobs, but they aren't.
Much like discussion here on HN about how we need an IC promotion path that doesn't lead to management, society needs equal opportunities for high paying careers across a variety of fields, not just white collar or tech work.
That said, building socioeconomics such that individual payrate is extremely critical and life changing is a societal problem.
This has been going on for 500+ years since the very dawn of capitalism.