Looks interesting. As a US manufacturer/designer I will be keeping an eye on this closely.
Currently, all assembly is done in house (in the US) but bare PCBs typically are still made in CN.
We used to produce everything overseas and just do the QA/test in the US but during the chip shortage I ended up setting up the production line to attempt to eliminate any possible shortages/tariffs.
It is a difficult struggle manufacturing commercial products in the US (doubly so with an openhardware project) since the final cost is the major blocker but I decided it was worth it for many reasons. Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage. Not sure the fix there. I see you are planning to lean heavily on automation/AI for this, will be watching to see how it all progresses.
There are still some major blockers in the US. Commercial/Industrial real estate being a big one. Costs are not going down...even if employee count is minimized.
> Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage.
Being mindful of wages is great, but eventually you have to accept that creating a job at a less than ideal wage is better than not creating any job at all. If the pay is not enough then you’ll get the signal through being unable to hire because workers are taking better paying jobs.
An unintuitive feature of the job market is that creating more low paying jobs actually puts upward pressure on wages. Ideally the low end of the job market should be saturated with job opportunities, which creates a situation where employers have to compete with each other to raise wages to find and retain employees, which means pay goes up for everyone.
So don’t let worries about not being able to pay as much as you’d like get in the way of paying anyone at all. The alternative (less jobs, more outsourcing) is worse in every way.
> Being mindful of wages is great, but eventually you have to accept that creating a job at a less than ideal wage is better than not creating any job at all.
For the employee, maybe. For the employer, it depends on how much time/money you have to put into training and what turnover is. Paying non-living wages leads to high(er) turnover because people will leave for anything better.
Right. That’s exactly what pushes wages up. Employers have to find the wage that retains employees while still being profitable.
Money is not unlimited though so “just pay everyone a living wage” isn’t a real solution. If you can’t afford to pay ideal “living wage” (which is an undefined target that keeps moving depending on who you ask) then your options are to either not create the job at all, or outsource the work.
So therefore, creating a job at any wage is better for your economy than not creating the job at all.
The problem is almost entirely that housing is too expensive.
"Living wage" is an awful term because it intrinsically holds employers responsible for real estate costs, which are strongly correlated with higher pay (read: as employees get paid more, housing costs rise to match it).
$20 an hour is not awful pay when you can rent for $600/mo. So the actual fix is to just build more housing, and it will bring back the viability of all these disappearing jobs.
Employers are free to use their political capital to push against bad behaviour by landlords and NIMBYs, but they traditionally rally behind politics that favors both of those groups.
Employers used to just build housing for their employees. While in some cases it lead to questionably practices, it almost seems the lesser evil today.
I will reply to this post to clarify (although I will be responding to several).
"Living wage" in my area is $40/hr. That is just to live, not thrive or gain.
Rent prices have gone insane [1], which in turn have drove up COGS. Since COGS have gone up the real estate investors have raised their prices on rents/housing to make up for the increase. The feedback loop has gone on too long...I am concerned the only option is collapse and for a lot of investors to lose money. This will feedback into the system even more...it will not benefit either the renter or the investor.
As they say..."the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".
I run a very small company that is largely bootstrapped. I fix all my own machines, do my own setup, move my own equipment. Personally, I work on every step from design through packaging (janitor>CEO). There is not enough money to pay a living wage for others...so I end up doing everything myself. 70hr weeks are not uncommon. (I also cook my own meals, fix my own car and bake my own bread...otherwise I would not make it)
If you have not been a renter for the last 10 years you may not have noticed. Building more is not helping since the only things being built are done so they can set them to the new "normal" price. It is to the point where they consider an "affordable home" as $400k (in my area they literally named this development as "Miracle on Britton"). Meanwhile the average renter makes <$40k/year.
I have not been outsourcing more due to this. Just working harder myself...but even so I barely get by. 5 years ago I gave up the hope of ever buying in this area [2], currently I am just working to stay here long enough to take care of family. If I did not have that I would be long gone.
Doing what I can to bring back manufacturing to the area, but I am a small fish working mostly in Opensource Hardware. If the project starts making money again very likely it will be cloned to the point where there will be no way to make profit (already happened once).
One nice aspect of automation is that we are able to pay people well due to the leverage. I'm proud of the fact we've been able to create a lot of good well paying high tech jobs in an area that really didn't have many.
It’s incredible that you set up an in-house PCBA pipeline. I’m curious about what that looks like, and what you are building/manufacturing, if you don’t mind sharing!
I run some used Manncorp/Autotronik equipment. Pnp, oven, bunch of hand tools and such for rework (Metcal irons). If I didn't have this I would likely build a line using an openpnp based machine.
Making boards for the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project. [1]
> Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage. Not sure the fix there.
The fix is you will just have to buy American and pay higher prices for higher "living wages". There's no way around it besides taxes or tariffs on foreign goods to equalize the wage/price difference (which does have some down sides).
I buy American and western-made products as much as possible, and I pay higher prices (assuming high quality) for those higher wages. If you want low cost, you can't by definition support "living wages".
There's no "oh if only the CEO makes less" way around it either. Labor is simply more expensive in the west and will remain so and you can vote with your wallet, as I do, or you can pay people less than living wages.
How many people are willing to pay more for America/Western-made products? How many are able to correctly know which companies are honest, and which are finding loopholes (e.g. bringing in underpaid temporary workers from abroad, finding the bare minimum for a product to be qualified as "Made in X", writing "Designed in America").
And how many people will be willing to pay a premium when the locally made products are worse quality than foreign products? It's happening right now with Chinese consumer goods (e.g. robotic vacuum cleaners), EVs, etc. Eventually there's a high possibility you won't be able to buy anything in the product category you want.
One of those pans is made in France (western) the other is made here in the US. The quality of the US pans are a bit better which is part of why they command the higher prices. But you can also buy a pan from Wal-Mart for 1/10 or 1/5th the cost. But that's up to you. You can support higher wages or you don't have to if you don't want to.
> And how many people will be willing to pay a premium when the locally made products are worse quality than foreign products?
Why are you assuming the American and locally made products are worse than foreign products? Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.
> Eventually there's a high possibility you won't be able to buy anything in the product category you want.
Well for a lot of these we can just do without, but those are the kinds of things you have to figure out if you want "living wages". Wages are higher in the west so we will automate things to keep some prices low/lower and we'll just pay higher costs to support the living wages. Or we won't and then we won't have living wages. You can do things like try to raise the minimum wage or w/e but then you're just making American/western products less competitive with the cheaper foreign products. Then you'll have to implement tariffs and agree with Trump there in order to offset the wage differences.
The way around it is not having to pay people wages at all which I hope American manufacturers are trying to do as much as possible. They already have totally dark factories in China and if we want to bring manufacturing back we will have to do it as well.
If the wage difference is what is stopping you, then you aren't really trying to compete. There will always be a shithole country with dirt-cheap wages where companies can get stuff made with virtually-unlimited manual labor. Unless you are going to turn the US into a country with third-world living standards, you won't be able to compete with that, so don't even bother trying. Still want to compete on price rather than quality, speed, or services? Automate everything and make wages irrelevant.
China already figured this out, mind you. Their wages have been exploding as the country has developed, and due to their horrible one-child policy they are facing a giant population cliff. They have been pushing very hard to switch their factories from cheap labor to automation, and those dirt-cheap Chinese EVs our Western politicians are working so hard to block in order to keep the horribly outdated Western car manufacturers alive are the direct result of that.
Currently, all assembly is done in house (in the US) but bare PCBs typically are still made in CN. We used to produce everything overseas and just do the QA/test in the US but during the chip shortage I ended up setting up the production line to attempt to eliminate any possible shortages/tariffs.
It is a difficult struggle manufacturing commercial products in the US (doubly so with an openhardware project) since the final cost is the major blocker but I decided it was worth it for many reasons. Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage. Not sure the fix there. I see you are planning to lean heavily on automation/AI for this, will be watching to see how it all progresses.
There are still some major blockers in the US. Commercial/Industrial real estate being a big one. Costs are not going down...even if employee count is minimized.
I wish nothing but the best for the project.