Lots of travel lately. After I got back from Chicago last Saturday evening, I was on the road again on Sunday afternoon. Destination: Florida. This Sunday I am going to travel back to Shanghai, and spend some time there.
Florida trip is a bit nostalgia one as I got to see a real manufacturing plant, a window/door manufacturer. I said nostalgia because my first job fresh out of college was a job in manufacturing plant in Shanghai. This week when I heard the noise from the factory floor and saw the machines and workers on the floor, it reminded me of those days. Of course these days one big news got all the media attention is the US car makers bailout. The US manufacturing sector has been shrinking for a quite while even before current recession, due to many reasons: globalization, rising labor cost, etc. After all, a factory job usually is not well-paid. On the other hand, the work usually involves sweat and hard work. This also reminds me when I was a little kid, my parents told us (me and my bros) to stay hard so that we can get away from being the agriculture work. Same thing has happened in the US, fewer and fewer people like to do the physical labor, more and more people want to make fast money. One reason for the boom and bust of financial/housing sectors in last decade.
But the manufacturing sector is and will be an important sector of modern economy, no matter how advanced the technology are. We got to live in a house, have refrigirator, AC, washing machine,…all of which take human’s hand to make, although a lot of the manufacturing processed have been automated by machines.