Are factory jobs worth reviving in the UK today?

[Wofflewaffle]

I listened to The Rest is Money podcast today. One of the discussions was about manufacturing and the massive decline in manufacturing jobs in the UK due to globalisation. The guest suggested - kind of - that this was a good thing, because job satisfaction / wages in manufacturing jobs is generally very low, so they aren’t really the kind of jobs we’d want to increase in the UK. The presenter, who’s from the North, hit back at this saying that her first job was in a factory, that it was a great job with lots of camaraderie and she hated hearing these jobs being dismissed as ‘low skilled’ .

What do you think? Anyone here worked in a factory? Would you encourage your kids to do so? I’m guessing that re-industrialisation (as per Burnham’s plans) would involve more jobs in factories?

No idea about the economics and whether it's a good idea in that sense but I do suspect that we've got a lot of unemployed people that might be able to cope better with factory work than service industry work.

Yep, factory work is better than unemployment benefit and would suit a lot of people .

Germany has a lot of manufacturing.

it’s very energy intensive and these days energy costs real money. German industries are losing employees and prices are going up.

the U.K. is a high cost place to make things compared to China or Vietnam. We do still make things but it tends to be high value added.

Hasn't time moved on? Peoples expectations and the cost of housing have changed the work landscape substantially.

Would organisations be happy to make less money, would they sell more expensive goods (think Primark Vs British made products).

Would people be happy to work "on the line" for their working lives for min wage or not not much above it. Are there even basic jobs in the numbers that there used to be. Even in new industry eg data farms people need qualifications.

I grew up in a town that used to be dominated by factory work, everyone I knew who did it (I went into nursing instead), always seemed quite happy and made friends for life.

I think the loss of small local industry was a tragedy for this country, and other countries in Europe. I heard a programme on the radio the other week about Northampton and the shoe industry. There were many skilled trades involved in making shoes, and all the shoes we bought were made in Northampton. Everyone had work, and the best employers had social clubs, sports clubs, and other amenities, places like Bournville provided housing for their workers, although there were sometimes some strict rules which applied. Likewise in Dagenham, everyone worked at Ford in one capacity or another. It all went because of globalisation, so now we can buy as many cheap crappy shoes as we like.

We will never get it back because the set up costs would be prohibitive and, as PPs have said energy costs are the highest on the planet, and labour costs are more expensive too. Plus the direction of the current government in terms of taxation is an added disincentive for business investment.

If Burnham thinks he is going to preside over a new age of British manufacturing he's delusional.

it’s very energy intensive and these days energy costs real money. German industries are losing employees and prices are going up.

@Octavia64 why are German industries losing employees? Because people don’t want to work in factories or because increased automation is making workers redundant?

A lot of factory work did used to be skilled, but automation and standardisation has led to the breaking down of many independent crafts and processes into repetitive, bite-sized tasks, meaning that a lot of factory work nowadays is low-skilled and monotonous. DH’s grandfather, great uncles, dad, uncles all worked in the Detroit auto plants, and when they started there was a lot of skilled work - welding, tooling, machining, pinstriping, leatherworking - but which evolved into just assembly lines. We aren’t going to turn back the clock on automation, and it’s a big part of why factory staff turnover tends to be very high, because it isn’t just hard work, but boring work and those two things together can be very difficult to handle.

There was a recent AMA from an MNer who is currently working in a chicken processing factory - give it a read, it was interesting and she gave great answers. She said that there were long-serving staff, but that for many others it’s just a stop gap.

Quality manufacturing is worth investing in, but due to the high costs of operating in the U.K. they are unlikely to be entry level/via apprenticeship production line work of the past, instead precision engineering, pharmaceuticals, chemical industry, tech etc are the sectors and highly mechanised lines too (robotics is a good industry to be in) and many require degrees etc.

small scale manufacturing businesses do exist but tend to be in specialised sectors eg my dd worked for a company that made aeroplane replacement parts to order

I've worked in various factories (mostly sewing) all my life. All of them apart from my current employer have gone. There are very few sewing factories now. Mine is quite an obscure job but there just isn't the work available

"Her first job" says it all doesn't it. The speaker clearly didn't stay there!
Skilled manufacturing is different to what many would consider a factory job. Loads of EU countries have high skill/clean room/pharma manufacturing and the training and good jobs which come with it. But the UK lost that ages ago and who knows if companies in this sector would find the UK appealing.

I don’t think the question is relevant because we can’t magically create factory jobs, even if we wanted to

I put the tops on mascara bottles in a factory during school holidays. Motivated me to work hard at my A levels! There is a difference between unskilled and skilled manufacturing. The unskilled work I did was very repetitive but could be good for people with learning disabilities or another form of difficulty to give them a sense of achievement, independence etc but I'm not convinced that companies would do it as so much cheaper in third world countries with limited employee rights.

They relied on cheap Russian gas/oil which since the Ukraine war isn’t around any more.

https://amp.dw.com/en/german-economy-chemical-industry-crisis-energy-oil-gas-iran-war-russia-ukraine/a-77166282

It would be way better to have people in manufacturing jobs than mass unemployment.

It’s really interesting to read that. I live in France and looking at the post-school options for young people there is a whole range of courses that are very much in the highly-skilled-vocational category and are very much the sectors that you highlight: pharmaceuticals, crop / agriscience, high tech manufacturing, medical research, green energy etc. I’m not sure these pathways exist for young people in the UK in the same way. They are three-year courses, and (in the European system) worth the same as a three year degree and include a lot of internships and work experience.

I may be wrong but I think the unskilled, repetitive factory jobs had a place in that they allowed a whole lot of people to earn a living - people who are now on disability or some other benefit, or who’ve just fallen out of society and need to be helped to live a ‘normal’ life. People who do not necessarily have the social skills to succeed in a service economy, but they could earn a living and be part of a community. They rarely have this option now.

Plenty of high-end engineering & manufacturing around.

But the uncomfortable truth is that much of what is in the shops has been manufactured elsewhere in the world much more cheaply than we can make it here. The raw materials, manufacturing, wages, packaging and all the transport costs - including container shipping to get it here - still cost less than if we made it ourselves.

Manufacturing is 7.2% of employment.

there seems to be some disagreement on this figure depending on whether you include suppliers and subcontractors etc in which case it is somewhere between 2.6 and 4.6 million jobs.

https://www.ciip.group.cam.ac.uk/innovation/structure-and-performance-of-the-uk-economy-25/

Out of 34 million jobs in total.

By contrast agriculture is half a million on farms going up to 4 million if you include tractor salesmen, lorry drivers etc.

Yes, in another podcast I heard a shipping / trade expert say that even when Trump put 150% or whatever huge tariffs on Chinese goods, it was still cheaper for US businesses to buy the Chinese product than switch to US.

Plenty of high-end engineering & manufacturing around.

@orangehandles what are the routes into these for UK young people? Do they have to do a degree? In France, these courses are virtually free (as university generally is) - maybe €170 pa in total - and lots of work experience built in.

I grew up in the north west near a British aerospace factory. They took people on at 16 and often sponsored them through a degree. Lots of the people I grew up with have free engineering degree and have worked at Aerospace their whole life.

sponsoring students through degrees is moderately common and these days there are degree apprenticeships where you apply to the company and they pay for your degree.

about 50% of young people have started a degree by the time they are 25 (fewer go straight from 18, many work a bit first).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-49841620

I live in a town with a number of factories, they’re probably some of the biggest employers in the area, but locals won’t do the work. There are several people in my partners family who prefer to stay unemployed and claim benefits than work in these factories. There is a high percentage of Portuguese and Eastern European workers filling the roles instead.

I used to work in manufacturing, albeit in an office job not in the factory. The company manufactured a product for which sales were declining due to technology replacing that product, and they did try to expand their product range, but found that they just couldn’t compete price-wise. You can walk into a shop and buy the same product made in China for less than they can make it for. The company is still going with their original product but on a vastly reduced scale, and I’m not sure that they will be there much longer.

Finding workers was interesting. The factory is located in an affluent suburb of a large city (it wasn’t so affluent or so large when the business originally established itself in the 1970s). So yes, it’s difficult to find people willing to work for minimum wage (which the unskilled jobs are - obviously not all jobs are unskilled). And the rigid nature of factory hours means that it’s not really a suitable job for a student. But I’m sure it would be much easier to find workers in a different area of the country, one where there was high unemployment and/or a lower cost of living.