What automation, AI, and other tech mean for welding careers

We continue our conversation with Dr. Anna Waldman-Brown, a researcher with the MIT Urban Studies and Planning at the Industrial Performance Center, about the welder skills gap vs. wage gap and the impact of technology on welding careers.

In Part 2 we focus on automation and AI risk, whether or not human life is improving alongside technology improvements, ethical economics, manufacturing turnover comparisons, welder education systems, and so much more.

Waldman-Brown is also a member of MIT’s Work of the Future Task Force and recently accepted a position with the Made in America initiative within the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Check out more from Anna Waldman-Brown:

• WIRED: Automation Isn’t the Biggest Threat to US Factory Jobs
• Work of the Future: Redeployment or Robocalypse? Workers and Automation in Ohio Manufacturing SMEs
• Medium: Why AI probably won’t take all the jobs (and what to worry about instead)

Part 2 of their conversation covers:

• Automation and AI risk
• ChatGPT and AI education
• Why expert welders are still needed
• Is human life improving alongside technology?
• Worker cooperatives and profit sharing
• Ethical economics
• Manufacturing turnover in U.S. vs. Germany
• American education system
• Cost of welder education
• Value of apprenticeship model
• Standardization and licensure for welders
• Social responsibility of manufacturing firms

TRANSCRIPT

Anna Waldman-Brown: If you look at, there's some economists who tried to come up with what tasks are automatable and therefore how many jobs are going to be automatable in the near future. There have also been some surveys asking people in those jobs, "How automatable do you think your job is?" And there's a huge disconnect between what the experts say and what the actual people who do that job will say. I was looking at the... What's it say... for welders the other day, which says that the economist said there's a 90% automation risk level and polling says there's a 59% automation risk at most.

Josh Welton: Yeah, that's a big schism.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, and the other thing is a lot of that, even assuming that the economists are right, which they're totally not, those non automateable jobs are going to be really highly concentrated in particular types of firms. And these are the firms that already haven't been able to automate for a wide variety of reasons. So it's the people doing specialty military machinery or here's a good example of this is a sheath that goes inside a gas turbine, that this one was welded by hand but will soon be welded by a robot. And this is a huge industrial robot, not even collaborative doing laser welding, but there'll be a camera that a skilled welder can watch and see whenever something goes off because this material varies by 5% from one of these fancy cobalt something or other meshes to the next fancy mesh.

Anna Waldman-Brown: If there's a slight difference in material, this thing needs to fit perfectly and seal and keep the gas inside a crazy turbine and you're going to need someone to know if that part gets slightly off. This is going to have a welder coming by, expert welder will come by every couple dozen parts and watch little video feed and make sure things are working out all right. Because they said that maybe the gas, depending on how much gas there is left in the tank for the laser, it may vary by a couple degrees and a couple degrees is going to be enough because this precision is going to need to be on thousands of an inch.

Josh Welton: Tolerances are super tight.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah.

Josh Welton: Yeah, that's a good point is a lot of what things that can be automated, especially critical things, you still need somebody with a skilled eye to oversee those things and make adjustments when necessary or make improvements where possible. You hit, at least to this point right now, a machine's not going to look at it and be like, "I know I can do this process a little bit more efficiently or a little bit better."

Anna Waldman-Brown: No, not at all.

Josh Welton: We're a ways away from that and I think when we get to that point, I always crack up when people are like, "Ah, we want that much money. We're going to replace all the burger flippers with computers." And it's like you think when we get to that point, we're not replacing your architecture job with a computer or... When we get to that point, they're just going to be doing everything and you're all lawyers are going to be out. We're all going to be... It's going to be Wall-E and we're going to be in a spaceship drinking milkshakes all day. So I think it is funny how there's a certain elitism where everyone thinks that what they're doing is nobody else can do what I'm doing.

Anna Waldman-Brown: You guys seen the new OpenAI chat, ChatGPT?

Josh Welton: Yes.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, it's great. Anyways, I could even just share my screen. We can do one right now.

Josh Welton: I've been messing around with my brother got me into doing AI art, which I think is super problematic, but it's really fun to play with.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yes, agree on both of those. It's wonderful and problematic.

Josh Welton: Oh, Darla's trying to sign up for-

Darla Welton: Oh, I don't know what I just did.

Josh Welton: ... ChatGPT.

Anna Waldman-Brown: What do we want to say?

Josh Welton: You're the expert.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Jobs are most susceptible...

Josh Welton: I read somebody on Twitter that said something along the lines of the AI is really good at forming an answer or a structure that people will like to read. So there's a lot of bosses that'll look at it that don't have the technical knowledge. It'll be like, "Yes, that's perfect," just because it has the cadence of what the right answer should sound like.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Mm-hmm.

Anna Waldman-Brown: No, it's just telling me I can't do my knowledge work. It's funny, it goes right to assembly line workers too, which is the perception because you start looking at this stuff, it's so much easier to, with this type of thing, automate any kind of the chatbots. That was sort of an early version of automation, which frankly sucks for a lot of people both on the user and the worker side, but it's really easy for something like you need to change your password, you need to cash a check, you need to do something that's fairly routine and is not likely to vary from one of those tasks to the next.

Josh Welton: It's been done a million times before and it's going to be done a million times from now and it falls within a certain parameter.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah. Like what welding robots did in the 1980s when they were first installed in automotive shops. It's the boring things that frankly humans shouldn't really be doing anyways.

Josh Welton: That's one of the coolest things that I think about the cobots is that... I think the last time we talked, I talked about maybe the future of manufacturing, we start getting into cybernetics and implants and things along those lines, but this can kind of bridge that gap where I know people that have become, they adapt. I have friends, one friend in particular who's a quadriplegic and he's still taught himself how to TIG weld. But if you have a cobot, all of a sudden you've got this full range of movement available to you. You've got an arm that it's almost like a third hand that you can use that becomes an extension of what you're doing. And that's one of the things that I loved when we were at Fabtech and James was showing us the cobot and Miller's booth and it was just like, it can be an extension of you.

Josh Welton: It's not going to necessarily, at least at this point and imminently it's not replacing you. It's enhancing what you can do. And a lot of that is, I've had four major arm surgeries, so all of a sudden I have something that can take... Almost like Tony Stark with Jarvis, the early version in Ironman one was kind of clumsy and banging all over the place, but it was an extra set of hands for him. And-

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, definitely.

Josh Welton: ... that is something that's super appealing to me that I think makes a lot of sense in that space. And what I'm afraid of is with... And this is something you might be able to talk to a little bit more about, the difference between cultures is we've become more efficient as a country in manufacturing, but all the benefits of the efficiency have gone upriver. None of it has stayed with the employees. We're still doing the same, we're getting paid what we got paid 40 years ago, even though our output has greatly increased and the powers of the beer are like, well, it greatly increased because of all this automation, but we're still doing all of that... I don't know, there seems to be, there's this disconnect between efficiency and compensation I guess. And that's my fear is that we're going to become even more efficient, but we're still going to be fighting for scraps at the table.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, it's a big question about the question of who owns the means of production that Marx and Engels ask back in the day? And the answer to that you don't need... There are also some robot nerds who'll talk about, what's the term? Like fully automated luxury communism where-

Josh Welton: I love that term.

Darla Welton: I've not heard that.

Anna Waldman-Brown: So that's basically-

Josh Welton: Machine Marxism.

Anna Waldman-Brown: ... Karl Marx doesn't get into any details, but that's what he's describing is the outcome, which of course you end up with a lot of dictators along the way and therefore you'll end up with the same types of concentration of capital. But there's a lot of interesting enthusiasm and thoughts around worker cooperatives that are popping up now, especially when you start thinking about more and more automation and productivity increases or even things like profit sharing. You mentioned this is something that Lincoln Electric has been doing for a long time that they're really proud of. And even some firms that we talked to will say, "Sure, we'll bring in a robot, but people get worried about it." We already have profit sharing in place. And of course they're probably being forced to do this because the labor market right now is all of these workers coming out of COVID and realizing, "Wait, how come the government could pay us more when we were just sitting on our butts all day than my actual job-"

Josh Welton: And people took that as, "Well, why are you getting all this money for doing nothing?" It's like, "Well, how can they afford..." It just shows that we were getting way underpaid before-

Anna Waldman-Brown: Way underpaid, yeah.

Josh Welton: ... Well you're making more money sitting at home that says more about the job you had that was paying than it does about the money that you're getting right now to sit at home.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Totally.

Josh Welton: Yeah, I totally... And that's one of the things, and I don't know, I mean I don't necessarily think that capitalism is evil, but it's almost inevitable when I was out working out in Utah, there was a grocery store out there called WinCo and it was employee owned. I don't know how that exactly worked, but it felt better shopping there, it felt better going there. You have a vested interest. And I know here the big three when the companies are making money, the employees are getting big profit sharing checks, but that's a union negotiated thing and that's not widespread in the country. And it feels like if anything was going to change, if anything was going to improve, it would be happening right now.

Josh Welton: Yet I don't know if we see that, but it seems like right now... And this is another, I'm not smart enough to synthesize all this, but five months ago everyone was saying, "We don't have enough workers. We can't find anybody to work." And fast-forward to today and it's like another 5,000 people got laid off from this company and it's this force. And somebody recently even said that our economy is based on people being poor. We need poor people to make this work. And it's really frustrating because right now is the time where it feels like we should be making the biggest push towards ethical economics and it feels like we're going the other direction.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, I think there's so many challenges with changing. I think I am tentatively optimistic about stuff having gone to talk to a bunch of manufacturers. Frankly, they can't get good people unless they pay them more. And you look at the turnover of workers leaving their firms is four times higher in the US for manufacturing than it is in Germany.

Josh Welton: Yeah, that's huge.

Anna Waldman-Brown: And if firms can keep people that really makes sense to their bottom line as well. And there's nothing about... What is capitalism? It's like free market systems. There's nothing about a free market system that diminishes the ability of that free market to negotiate if workers are being paid, what they're actually owed. And if you can say that unions might come in and disrupt, make people be paid more or whatever. But there is also something very fundamental about economists across the spectrum, Kari Polanyi is one of the more famous semi liberal economists who will talk about this sort of seesaw motion between the market. When the market becomes too powerful, I mean, we see this in the states. Firms will start buying Congress people and essentially bribing them through lobbying to do exactly what they want. And this is popular across both Democrats and Republicans. Everyone falls into the pocket of really these big businesses which end up wielding a lot of power, which is actually destroying the market in a lot of ways.

Anna Waldman-Brown: There's talk about, Polanyi has this sort of seesaw motion where the market starts eating everybody and then people turn towards, "Oh, crap, we need the government to come save us." So he was writing this in the context of the rise of the Nazis in Germany where his view was following this economic crisis. You ended up having people running towards a much stronger government system and really voting in favoring this authoritarian view of diminishing free speech in order to control the market. In sort of his view that the sweet spot, it'll just keep swinging back and forth and back and forth.

Josh Welton: The pendulum never stops in the middle.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, exactly.

Josh Welton: It's always swinging. Yeah. I am not going to go down that. Well, it's always interesting to me, the factors that created Nazi Germany were so coming out of the first World War and the economics of that, the embarrassment on a world stage, there was such a very... It was a perfect storm of craziness that created that. But on another sense we saw that coming out of look at how creating an industry based on militarization brought us out of economic slumps. And it has such a big impact and it's so dangerous, but it's almost like this solve for the economy. Well, we should build more tanks and everything's going to be better, and if we don't, then we're at risk, but we're also making more money.

Anna Waldman-Brown: That's what saved us from the Great Depression was going into World War I.

Josh Welton: Yeah. And even coming out of World War II, there was this pent-up because we had used all our resources for the military, now all of a sudden it's like, "Wow, we can use rubber and steel and what kind of crazy shit can we make now? And you had the late forties, fifties, early sixties where you had this crazy age of innovation. People were just happy to make stuff. And at that point...

Anna Waldman-Brown: Inovative manufacturing.

Josh Welton: ... We were at the beginning of higher edu... Not the beginning, but higher education wasn't what it is now. And you got all these people coming back with money from the government to spend on college education. And then colleges looked at that almost like, "Well now we have..." They almost turned it into a trap. I'm getting off subject. I'm sorry, I totally started...

Anna Waldman-Brown: The GI Bill was great.

Darla Welton: The GI Bill, yes.

Josh Welton: Exactly.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah. And then after that, I mean I see this here at MIT, basically we could set tuition at whatever we want, but there ends up being this sort of feedback loop of, "Oh, everyone's bringing in a couple more fancy sports coaches and a couple more administrators, and we're going to build this brand new building and it's going to look great from the outside. So it's going to be an architectural marvel and Harvard down the street is doing the same thing." So then tuition just keeps rising and rising. And there's this race to the top, which doesn't matter for the top universities because they're sitting on piles of money which goes towards financial aid. So something like 90, think it's like 95, 97% of MIT students are on some portion of financial aid. But that's the extreme minority of universities that are privileged enough to be sitting on these dollar piles.

Anna Waldman-Brown: And meanwhile, all of these other universities are like, "Oh wait, these guys are bringing in a new sports field or a new architectural marvel, we need to do something like that too." And suddenly college costs 70,000 bucks a year across the board. And if you're not going to one of those minorities of schools that have lots of money put aside, you're going to be going into debt for it. And something that was striking to see, I was looking through the education of welders, brazers and sodderers according to the BLS. And the number is 23.4% of welders start college and don't get a degree.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Not that... Some of the smartest people I know dropped out of college. So no judgment on that. But the fact that more than one in five people in this profession felt like they needed to go to college. And then they end up with a whole bunch of debt and no certificate to show for it is like, why is that the norm across... And it's not just that profession, and this isn't going to happen in Germany because you're having... And I don't think that we should have kids decide at 15 in this country, that would squash a lot of American innovation. But truly there's some sort of balance where you're saying, "Look, let's introduce you to these types of professions early on." And the other critical thing is let's have money put aside to help kids figure out what these jobs look like and to get skilled.

Anna Waldman-Brown: You go to these German apprenticeship websites, all these firms are like, "Oh, you're not going to make a lot of money, but you'll be making..." I don't know, it's like $20,000 a year as an apprentice. Whereas the equivalent vocational schools in the US will say, "Oh, you're not going to go into that much debt. It's only 10 to 20,000 a year in debt-"

Josh Welton: And you're going to make a ton of money.

Anna Waldman-Brown: You're going to make a ton of money later on. Whereas if you have zero money, the question is are you going to go into debt or are you... Then in Germany, they're all going to be making a little bit of money and then a lot more money. And they're career trajectories that are laid out very clearly initially. And I don't think you need... You see this with manufacturers being like, "We can't find good welders." It's like, well, as you've been talking about Josh, let's have good job trajectories so you can get your kids excited about welders. And then also have careers that they can follow where they can achieve seniority both within their companies or if they want to switch companies, they'll have something to show for themselves and how normalized we've made this, "Oh, everyone should go to college." And then if you drop out on college, "Shame on you." And that's one in five welders or probably I haven't looked at other skilled trades people.

Josh Welton: And there's a mental tool too because you feel like, "Well, crap, everyone else is doing this and I either couldn't do it." Whether your mind wasn't in the right place or financially or time-wise or whatever. And it's like, "Well, crap." And there's almost like this scarlet letter. And one of the things that for us is super important, and maybe this is where we can bridge the gap, is trying to get middle school, specifically middle school kids and then going into junior high, going into high school, at least acclimated with the types of skilled trades jobs that are out there.

Josh Welton: So then when you're 12, 13, 14, you can be like, "Wow, I really dig this. I want to pursue this and concentrate on this." Maybe not put all my eggs in that basket, but I can at least focus on this. Or on the other end, "Wow, I really don't like this, I need to focus on something else. I need to focus on this other thing that is not welding or machining." Or it's just like I come across so many people who are, I don't want to say midlife crisis, but they're like, "Crap, I didn't even know this other thing was out there that I could do."

Josh Welton: And on the other hand, I see a lot of people who went into the trades who later on realized, "I'm really adept at doing this other thing. I really didn't need that college education to do this. I'm going to switch over." I see a lot of welders becoming chefs because they're so frustrated with the trades and this glass ceiling that you have that they want to do something creative, they want to do something with their hands where they're like, "What can I do that is kind of reinvigorating? That's just something new that I can make a living at doing. And there isn't this ceiling that I'm going to bump my head on." And I don't know why... I say chefs just because I know four or five people who have done that. But it's a lot of different creative careers that people go into. And I don't know, it goes both ways.

Josh Welton: There's people who probably are stuck in a cubicle who wish that they would've been exposed to welding, and then there's a lot of welders who probably wish they would've been exposed to some other type of work early on. We just don't do this. We give this blanket bland, everyone has to fit in a round hole, whether you're a square peg or a triangle or whatever. And at the end of it, when you're 18 or 19, then maybe you can, if you know what you want to do, you can specialize in it. But at that point it's, for some people it's too early. For some people it's too late.

Josh Welton: I wish we could do more, I don't know if bespoke education is the right term, but just the more we can tailor... And maybe that's somewhere where AI comes in, where maybe instruction can be augmented. And even in my career early on, people told me I should start a YouTube channel and I'm like, "No, because I learned the traditional way. So that's how I felt people should learn." And now I see all these welders that came up and they got their basic education from online and they're really good at what they do. And maybe the next step is sort of an augmented training, augmented education, and people can fine tune it more for what they want or for what they're interested in. I don't know, I'm just...

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, definitely. I think when you look at where these collaborative robots are being so useful, particularly in American firms, is those job specific skills. This kid from Maine, she shows up being a pretty inexperienced welder. She's got nine months of intensive bootcamp. And I think bootcamps are also... It's a very american concept of let's have some little modularized crash course introduction to something that you can do at any age. And the software engineering has done this really well.

Anna Waldman-Brown: I'm excited to see this popping up more, particularly in collaboration with firms who can start doing apprenticeships, can have... Because what the apprenticeship is also is a way to try out this job in a low stakes environment. So you'll know early on, no skin off the firm's back, not particularly difficult for you if you want to switch because you haven't accepted a full job and there are lots of other apprenticeships around. They've become more formalized lately in Germany. But the original idea is let's try something out. I feel like that's something that's much more palatable to Americans than, "You must decide at the age of 15, which high school you're going into." And then that determines your entire life career path.

Josh Welton: I feel like there needs to be... To get to that point, we have to have enough firms offering that though, because if it's just scattered here and there, then the company still has too much of a vested interest in you staying in that apprenticeship and you still have that more like that trapped like, "Well, I can't just go do something else because this company is what's offering this, so I'm going to have to stick with this." So it's like how do we bridge that gap between apprenticeships being super rare and them being ubiquitous? How do we get to that point is... And I guess it is step-by-step. It's like anything else, it is not going to happen all at once.

Darla Welton: And what's interesting, which I mean we've touched on it a little bit. In Germany, having these specific, what's the name of the apprenticeship? The construction mechanicer?

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, construction mechanic.

Darla Welton: Yeah. That apprenticeship is more well-defined, whereas across the board where here in the US it's kind of like each company, each organization for itself-

Anna Waldman-Brown: "Wild West"

Darla Welton: ... Right. You have an organization like the AWS, which has their certs and different things, but even in Josh's, like him working at General Dynamics, he gets certified in something, but if it goes to another company, you have to get re-certified. It doesn't count, which seems almost kind of silly. So where do you acquire transferable certifications? Where I have a degree, which it means the same thing here as it does there, whereas... There's no licensure, there's no standard.

Josh Welton: Like in Canada, you get your red seal or there's a certain... I've talked with this with a few of my friends in the welding industry and it's like how do we get... We need a more standardized, almost legally binding kind of thing. I mean I am not going to get into my feelings on the AWS at the moment, but they're one organization that there's no legally binding, there's nothing saying that... And part of the thing is we have, for every operation, you need a new welding procedure. So that's one of the reasons where if I get certified in a certain type of welding, I might have a 6G pipe welding cert, but if I go to work in an oil field because it's so critical, a lot of times they're going to have you certify, depending on what it is, you might have to certify every day. You might have to certify just when you show up. But there's no standard... There's an attempt at standardization, but really all it is kind of a money grab.

Anna Waldman-Brown: When you look at small firms, they don't care.

Josh Welton: Yeah.

Anna Waldman-Brown: They're like, "Yeah, just show up in weld in a straight line, you'll be great. Then we'll teach you TIG."

Josh Welton: Even as a millwright, you might get different training in one company, then you're going to get in another company. There's no sort of this... And we hate governmental overreach, but at the same time, without regulation, it is the wild west and a lot of... Everyone wants to be a libertarian until it comes time to actually get something done the right way. And then it's like, "Well, why did you do it this way?" "Because I can do it however I want to do it," but in reality it doesn't really work like that. And I mean, we like our individualism, but at the same time... I don't know. I have a hard time... And maybe it's a big picture kind of thing. It's hard to see how you get somewhere from where you are. And really it's just baby steps, kind of like how it's gone the opposite direction, how Germany's sort of sliding sort of how we do things. We're trying to slide that way.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Are we going to formalize? Because basically what we're really good at is the informal and the innovative, but in order to get the system to work as sort of that pendulum, again. You have everything free market and it turns out there are a couple market failures, how are you going to patch up those gaps?

Josh Welton: We have all these different standards. We have ASME, we have AWS, we have Milspec, we have all these different... And then industries like to think that they know best or that how they do something is how it should be done. So they create their own set of standards-

Anna Waldman-Brown: Oh, totally. It's no different from right now, I got a new laptop the other year, and this is a USBC. The reason it's a USBC is because I'm pretty sure it was the European Union which said there's too many different types of smartphone chargers out there. Everything must be USBC going forward. And what happens is companies don't want to make a separate thing for Europe as for the US, as for South America, whatever. Once, I think it took them a really long time to settle in USBC, but eventually that standard even trickles down. And now I have an Apple, my lab mate has a PC, we can share this charger for the first time ever.

Josh Welton: Which is amazing. It makes so much sense and I understand why they didn't do it, but it's like this line between freedom and practicality, really. Economy of scale. I don't know. Again, companies want to do things a certain way because then they can sell more chargers and they can sell more of this or you're forced into using their product. But it's such a waste, it's completely inefficient. It's a waste of resources, it's a waste of money.

Anna Waldman-Brown: It's hard for the kids, who now need to get some sort of certification to get a decent job somewhere.

Josh Welton: And the technology now is, it's required. It's the same thing with trying to get internet to poor communities or off the grid areas. And it's like now this has become a tool. It was this kind of cool invention, this fringe thing. Now, everyone has to have it or you're just going to fall behind. So how do you legislate that sort of thing. Yeah, it's definitely tricky.

Anna Waldman-Brown: And I think this is the moment for that too, between industrial spending from the government for the first time may or may not be going into another Cold War, which is always great for innovation in America. But at the same time, there's this labor crisis and people are realizing you don't want to work for crappy pay. I'm not sure how long this will continue because at some point people will need jobs, but one of the longer term things that we've done even starting 10, 15 years ago is starting to restrict lower skill immigration. We're missing about a million, maybe more immigrants now as compared to the prior couple decades. And particularly folks in Massachusetts will say, "Oh, we just can't get these cheap immigrants anymore who are willing to work really hard and send their money back to their kids in Laos or Mexico or Eastern Europe or wherever."

Anna Waldman-Brown: So if you want those jobs to be attractive to the second generation and the kids born in America, we need to improve those jobs or we need to bring in more low paid immigrants and then figure that system out. But I don't think... Hopefully the idea is start creating better jobs because we totally have the technology and the capabilities to do that.

Josh Welton: Businesses hate the idea of labor not being a fixed price. They look at it year over year. Maybe they want to keep up with inflation. Not always, not usually, but they'll look at every other way to spend money, to save money before they want to put it into the workforce basically. And I don't know how you get them to change that maybe... Right now is a big part of that, just like, well, you're not going to get anybody unless you change that. You would think that the benefit would be...

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, I think this is what we hope with higher tech jobs too, when you start bringing a robot in, maybe this robot's a lot easier to program, but also you start bringing in more advanced systems, you'll need people who are more familiar with those systems. And I think particularly for welding, just because there's so many different types and materials and skill levels, I think a lot of this, "Oh, there's been a welder shortage forever," is that lack of willingness to both train people and keep them around who know the right types of skills.

Anna Waldman-Brown: And if you want people to invest in skills that are very niche to that company... Then if you're talking about the aerospace, these aerospace welders, they'll do TIG and they'll have to learn, I guess laser welding is now a new technology that's a lot easier to learn, it sounds like. But there are a whole bunch of safety considerations that are going to come with that, that are much more difficult to figure out and make safe than just protect yourself from the arc flash. I think there are a lot of skills that have been ignored. Where if we want to really get our manufacturing base up and running, we're going to need to appreciate those a lot more.

Josh Welton: Completely agree.

Darla Welton: Absolutely. I actually love the wrap up to your Wired article where you say that, but to meet the demands of the future, we need policies that help manager or see workers not as cost to be minimized and discarded, but as assets to be strengthened over time. I think that's...

Josh Welton: It's perfect.

Darla Welton: That's exactly it in a nutshell, our entire conversation.

Josh Welton: We just cut everything off though. Nailed it.

Darla Welton: But that's really, that right there I think is the hope for the future. And it's what's going to keep people excited about these jobs for the future too, is knowing that you're an asset, not just a budget line.

Josh Welton: Just the human equation. I always like to say, I work to live, I don't live to work. Even though I love what I do and I love my work, but you're going to dedicate... And that's another thing that is neither here nor there. I mean it is here and there, but how many hours we work in this country and how we feel like it's a token of pride... And I do this myself like, "Oh, I work seven twelves, I work a hundred hours a week," whatever this is. It's not healthy. And especially, it's not healthy when you love doing it and I love doing it, and I'll keep doing it even if it's not healthy. But imagine you're stuck in something you don't like doing and you're just working 84 hours a week because you need it to survive or you need it to maintain this level and the emotional toll it takes to focus.

Josh Welton: When I was at Chrysler, I spent more time with the people that I worked with than I did with my family. I spent almost all my waking time working there, and I loved what I did, but I'd much rather spend that time with my family. And when a company treats you as you are just a serial number that takes that toll that much higher because you realize that you're just going there to collect a check and they don't really care anything about what you're doing.

Josh Welton: And I've seen that so much at my level, whether it's been at Steelcase or Chrysler at General Dynamics, all these big companies. And it's nothing against those companies in particular. It's this corporate mindset that, "You're replaceable and we can probably replace you for somebody making less money, and we're going to try to do that if possible. And if the union wasn't here, we already would've done it." And just this idea that... It sounds so cheesy, but it would be so nice if they just cared about the person. And a lot of that comes into, and it's very simple, but pay and benefits is a huge part of that. And if they're not willing to give you a decent living, then they certainly don't care about any other part of what you're doing.

Josh Welton: Yeah, I completely agree. There's a social responsibility. There was actually Bill Ford Jr years ago... And it's kind of like when the automotive industry has downturns and they have... When I left Chrysler, I took a buyout and it was fair compensation and it's union negotiated, but Bill Ford Jr. made a comment one time, and it might've, it's just been for PR, but kind of like who he is I feel like he has a bigger heart than a lot of people in those industries. Not that I know him. I just have this kind of this feeling. And he said, when they talked about Ford workers getting this six figure buyout, he's like, "I didn't fight that at all because I feel like there's a social responsibility because all of a sudden this community is going to be without these thousands of people with their income earning, the community is going to suffer, their families are going to suffer."

Josh Welton: And then that takes a social toll, and then obviously there's the economic toll. But I know when I was at Steelcase and they went through this thing where they went from being a family owned company to being a publicly traded company, and they just cut... They did it by seniority and people with up to 17 to 20 year seniority were just done. And everyone's like, "Well, they should just learn to do something else." It's like, "They've been doing this job since they were 18, now they're in their mid-forties, and you want them just to learn to do something else." It devastated the community. People were fighting for pizza delivery jobs and it's-

Anna Waldman-Brown: You see this across the Midwest and parts of the south too.

Josh Welton: Toledo, Cleveland, all those areas in Ohio. Pittsburgh, all these manufacturing hubs have dealt with the same thing. Look at the steel industry in Pennsylvania, they stole their pensions and people aren't recovering from that. And these towns that were once thriving communities... What was the movie out of the, was it into the fire or it was Christian Bale and Casey Affleck, and it was basically, this town was just devastated because the mills cut way back. So people were just fighting each other for jobs, and then literally they turned to crime and they turned to fight clubs and things like that just because there was nothing. And then the drug use escalates.

Josh Welton: I see a lot of manufacturing workers got caught up because they're literally giving their body, they're giving their health to this industry, and then they break down. Then you go into these communities and they're not becoming drug addicts because they just want to do drugs. They're literally, their body is breaking down. They need these things, and then all of a sudden that turns into them not having a job, whether it's from that or just the economy collapses. And now you've got situations like you have in Flint or these areas that are just completely devastated by the loss of jobs-

Anna Waldman-Brown: Where they should be having real workers' compensation that treats their... Yeah.

Josh Welton: We you look at it like, "Oh, that's a handout," or that's that-

Anna Waldman-Brown: The Sackler is making lots of money on getting people addicted and formulating the most addictive opioids.

Josh Welton: Yeah.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Right.

Josh Welton: Yeah. I don't know. It feels like there's not a social responsibility in... Our economy right now is too much based on profits and making more money year over year as opposed to something that's sustainable, that keeps everyone happy. And it feels like we're so far away from that right now. But I don't know, maybe it's...

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, and I think you see this... There's one of my professors was looking at, it's like eighties and nineties policies for urban development and how it really focuses on the cities that are perceived to be up and coming. So where you think you're going to get the biggest bang for your buck, which it turns out is none of these towns and regions that have lost their manufacturing, it's the places like just outside Silicon Valley. Oh, maybe we can convince some really rich tech companies to move here. Or Boston. It's not New York City, but there's tons of up and coming massive universities-

Josh Welton: Austin, Texas.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Right, exactly. It's the places that would probably already succeed. And I think we do this in our educational system as well. There's so much more federal money going towards public universities rather than to the trade schools and the 70 ish, 60 to 70% of Americans who don't get four-year degrees. There's this idea that let's take the people or the regions or the individuals who are about to succeed and then really pump all of our resources in there, and then we're going to forget whoever's stuck on the bottom or whoever doesn't have the resources.

Josh Welton: We stuck everything out of them that we could get, and now it's time to move on to better places.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, and there's a challenge, I think as well with the bigger firms, the customers to a lot of these small and medium factories that I've been visiting, where if you have 70% of your production going to one big automotive firm, and they're saying, "Oh, either you meet the prices that we're getting in China or we're just going to drop you." Then you don't really have the wiggle room as a small manufacturer with 50 or 100 folks to start paying people better. Across the board, you end up with this whole depression of wages of benefits for both the workers and the smaller firms.

Anna Waldman-Brown: I don't think very much came out of it, but I like the idea of the what top whatever Fortune 500 companies got together a couple years ago and decided, "Oh, we can't keep going with this shareholder model. We need to start moving to a stakeholder model." And this meaning, the workers and the customers, sustainability concerns rather than the whoever are wealthy shareholders and executives of our company and the banks and the venture capitalists who have been funding us, whomever. Again, it's that kind of pendulum where we let the free market go wild, and now let's reign it back in a little bit and see what bits we can patch up to try and make a better society.

Josh Welton: For sure. I don't know how they are now. I think I mentioned this last time we talked that actually it was the machine that changed the world, the book that-

Anna Waldman-Brown: Roos and Womack.

Josh Welton: Yeah. And one of the things that they talked about was here when the automotive industry dipped, we all asked the suppliers to take it on the chin. And then they asked their... So you go from tier one telling tier to take you down the chin. They tell tier three to suck it or get better. Whereas in the Japanese system, it was very much a symbiotic relationship with the suppliers. I don't know if that's still the case, but I thought that was interesting when I read that, because then-

Anna Waldman-Brown: Similar to the German model as well.

Josh Welton: Yeah. And it makes a lot... I mean, to me, it makes more sense from an ethical, economical system to share. And that's one of the things, I know Ford, back in the day, he tried to sort of subvert the invisible hand of the economy by making everything himself, but what he found out was when the economy collapsed, he was stuck with everything. So then they tried to spread it all out, but instead of sharing everything, it's down the river, it's down the road. "Okay, well we have to make this number, so you're going to make it for this, or we're just not going to buy from you anymore," just like you were saying.

Josh Welton: Yeah, it feels like there should be some sort of in between. I don't know what the solution is, but I see that all the time. And I feel like when it's most egregious, there's definitely some pushback. And then I think some people are smart enough to see that that's not the way to do things. But overall, it's still, it's kind of a... I don't know, dog-eat-dog world where we're just pushing the toll down the line to the end where at some point somebody's not going to be able to pay it, and that's their problem, not my problem.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Right. Yeah. And as you were mentioning before, you have China with not just lower wages, but the government is subsidizing robots for pretty much anyone who wants them. And there's subsidies on the material side of getting stuff across China and to port. It's actually more expensive for American shippers to get, in many cases, to get something from say, the port of Oakland to halfway across the US than it is to get whatever widgets you've got in your shipping container from Shenzhen to California.

Josh Welton: And there's not the... I mean, we think that we don't care about the human worker here. There's a whole nother level of... And I remember when I was in the automotive industry, we had a meeting one time, and this guy, one of the executives was talking about the reason we were starting to get engine blocks from, I think it was Brazil instead of Kokomo, was because of the cost. Basically he got frustrated, it was like a town hall meeting, and some of the workers were complaining about losing these jobs and these costs. And he's like, "Well, if you didn't make this much money, it wouldn't be an issue." And I kind of raised my hand in the back and the whole factory was there, so it was kind of hilarious, but I was like, "I've looked at what you were paying for those blocks from Kokomo and what you're paying for those blocks from Brazil, and we could work for free, and we're still not competing with their prices because of OSHA, because of different regulations that we have to by."

Anna Waldman-Brown: Material costs.

Josh Welton: Yeah. We couldn't compete based on cost. And he basically, he's like meeting's over, and then that was it. I felt like a drop the mic moment, but kind of just got the door slammed on. But yeah, I don't know. There's some stuff that... And that comes back to competing on a global economy. We're not really competing on a level playing field. I don't know, there's a lot of factors that go into it that it's like, "What can we control?"

Anna Waldman-Brown: Also, the things that we're good at is not low cost mass manufacturing,

Josh Welton: But to your point, we still try to compete on that. Whereas in Germany, like we talked before, they compete on quality.

Anna Waldman-Brown: And they compete on making, there's a lot more original equipment manufacturers, which are these small and medium firms, the hotdog smoker machine. And I think part of the message is probably getting it out to innovators. We come up with new ideas all the time across America, let's bring the story home that there are firms locally who can make that stuff that we want and that you don't need to go abroad to start having your stuff made.

Josh Welton: Yeah. I think-

Anna Waldman-Brown: I think there's... Yeah, since the, "Oh, who cares if we're making silicon chips or potato chips," back in the nineties, I think there's a real, hopefully starting to get more recognition that actually it does matter a lot. And when we have ideas, we can start having those be made here.

Josh Welton: Just as a country as a whole, there's an importance to be able to create things and innovate things and build things yourself. And then you can control the environment that your people live in, work in, and you can create a higher level of living for the people with... I'm not a nationalist by any means, but I do think that there's something critical about being able to build your own stuff. It is important.

Anna Waldman-Brown: That's how you innovate too. You can't come up with new ideas if you don't know how to build them-

Josh Welton: Yeah, and there's this-

Anna Waldman-Brown: And you can't make it scale if you don't know how to build them at scale.

Josh Welton: ... there was a separation for, as we did this offshoring, this huge offshoring push. There becomes this disconnect between the people... Did you watch the documentary on the Boeing Supermax disaster?

Anna Waldman-Brown: Oh, no.

Josh Welton: Oh, my gosh.

Anna Waldman-Brown: I followed it closely though.

Josh Welton: Oh, I still don't... This guy gets paid $70 million to kill 350 people and lay off thousands of workers, and then he gets paid $68 million or whatever is to just walk away. That's a whole nother... But one of the things that they consciously did was, when was it Douglas MacArthur? I can't think of... When one of the big aircraft manufacturers bought Boeing, they physically separated the engineers from the manufacturing. So they moved engineering from Seattle to Chicago, so they couldn't have their hands on the process and slow it down.

Josh Welton: And I think that's happened on a larger scale with a lot of our manufacturing, where we are really good at engineering and designing things and then sending it off to wherever and it comes back and we have a million of these things come back before we realized, "Well, we could have fixed this or we could have made this better. We could have done this better." And I think that's an argument for reshoring is just the economics of having something physically looking at it and being like, "Okay, that's cool. That works." But there's also there, like you said, to be able to innovate at a pace that matters, you have to be able to make the things where you are. But that documentary, I can't remember what the name of the documentary is, but it's fascinating.

Anna Waldman-Brown: I just found it.

Josh Welton: It's infuriating too.

Anna Waldman-Brown: One Mile at a Time.

Josh Welton: Is that it?

Anna Waldman-Brown: Is that it?

Darla Welton: What did you say?

Anna Waldman-Brown: It's One Mile at a Time.

Josh Welton: I don't know if that's it or not.

Darla Welton: Is that it? I just don't remember the name.

Josh Welton: Let's see here. Oh, now I'm getting How to Survive Supermax Prisons. That's not it.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Oh, Downfall. Sorry.

Josh Welton: Yes.

Darla Welton: Downfall.

Josh Welton: That's it. Yeah.

Anna Waldman-Brown: I don't know why they called it something else. Yeah.

Josh Welton: Now I totally want to go into talking about that, but it's not here, there, you just watch it.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Thinking of awesome documentaries, American Factory.

Josh Welton: Yep.

Darla Welton: Yes.

Josh Welton: Watch that. Another one that's infuriating in a lot of ways.

Darla Welton: Is that the one the Obamas produced?

Josh Welton: Yes. The Glass Plant in Ohio, the one from a GM plant to a Chinese owned plant. And it's really fascinating to see the cultural clashes, but the one guy who goes to China and basically turns into their enforcer, comes back and is like, "Ah," he ratting everyone out.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, right.

Josh Welton: But yeah, that's a community that went from people making with benefits, 35, 40, $50 an hour, to now you're making $12 an hour with no benefits, and that community was devastated. And there's a social cost to the things that these companies are doing, and they tend not to want to bear any of that.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yes, definitely. Yeah. And speaking of benefits, another big difference in Germany is there's subsidized healthcare that's actually good.

Josh Welton: That traps me where I'm at. We both have medical issues that... She's on one medication that if we had to pay out of pocket, it would be $270,000 a year.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Wow. It would probably be affordable in Canada.

Josh Welton: It's possible, but I can't leave my job, even if I wanted to go out and start my own business, I just can't. I can't afford to do that. That's a cost. And then you have all these people... Our system is set up to trap people. One of the reasons that GM had to be bailed out was because they were the largest private healthcare provider in the world at the time in 2008, 2009 when the collapse happened. So can you imagine if they went bankrupt? All of a sudden you've got however many people who have no health benefits, have nothing.

Anna Waldman-Brown: That's insane.

Josh Welton: So at that point, it was like... Well, kind of the two big to fail moniker, but literally, if that would've failed everything down the line, it would've had devastating consequences. And I don't know what the solution is, because government healthcare is kind of sketchy too, but at the same time, what we're doing right now is not good either.

Anna Waldman-Brown: It only works for these big firms.

Josh Welton: Exactly.

Anna Waldman-Brown: And the small firms, so just looking at a survey like three quarters of small Ohio manufacturers were saying that they're concerned about rising healthcare costs because suddenly that makes workers much more expensive. And if you go by the saying, you want to increase the cost of the things you don't want, we want carbon taxes. You don't want to increase the cost of workers, because you want more workers. This is essentially an additional tax on workers. And a lot of it from the little I understand about healthcare is that it's not so much a free market as just letting these healthcare providers charge whatever they want for necessary medications.

Josh Welton: I remember seeing there was a-

Anna Waldman-Brown: There's no market, right? Because everyone's got exclusive IP rights-

Josh Welton: They fixed it.

Anna Waldman-Brown: ... so they can discharge whatever they want, and they have a monopoly on it, and there's no one around to provide competition or tell them that's not okay.

Josh Welton: Yeah, there's a great podcast... Oh, what's it called? But it is basically a... Swindled. Swindled is the name of the podcast, and their dive into Johnson and Johnson. It's just like, wait, what? They spent how many billions of dollars on lawsuits just so they could... They'll freely pay these lawsuits because in between these lawsuits, they're making hundreds of billions of dollars and it's at the expense of our health basically. That's another topic, but it's all intertwined it. It's a cost. It's a cost of doing business. And I know when I was at Chrysler and every four years, the UAW contract would come up and management and the media would try to, "Well, they make this much money because of their benefits." And we're the bad people for wanting healthcare and for wanting these things. And then the people that don't have those things are hyper jealous of it. So they're like, "I don't get it, so you shouldn't deserve it." And it becomes this, we just keep trying to drag each other down instead of trying to pull each other up. And it can be rather frustrating.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah. And I'm sure there are solutions. I don't know enough about healthcare to propose anything, but at least lowering the costs of services.

Josh Welton: It's a little outside of my area of expertise as well, so I should probably stop talking about it.

Anna Waldman-Brown: It's again, pitting the smaller businesses and the workers against these big guys who set up the system in their favor.

Josh Welton: Yeah, very much so.

Darla Welton: Absolutely.

Josh Welton: To the detriment of both American workers and American manufacturing across the board.

Darla Welton: Absolutely. I feel like we could talk to Anna forever.

Josh Welton: Yeah, we should probably...

Anna Waldman-Brown: That's fine.

Josh Welton: ... Probably get dinner or something.

Darla Welton: Yeah. I'm imagining that this is going to be-

Josh Welton: I love talking to you. I could keep going forever.

Darla Welton: This is definitely going to be a two-parter.

Josh Welton: I appreciate your support so much because it's really easy to talk inside of this kind of this, it's not even really an echo chamber, but it's this little niche area. And it meant the world to me that you reached out and I was like, "Okay, I am not just talking into the wind, and this is making sense to somebody. It's not just all in my head." Which I was pretty sure it wasn't, but at some point you're like, "Well, everyone's telling you you're an idiot," maybe you are. I don't know. So it's definitely much appreciated on my end.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, my professors have been saying this since at least the early eighties, that you can't talk about a skill shortage if you're not paying people enough. And there are clearly a lot of problems that just aren't. I mean, finally, I think now we're starting to see some discussions post COVID.

Josh Welton: Yeah, absolutely.

Anna Waldman-Brown: But it's so cool to see this, and I'm a big fan of both your work and The Fabricator in general.

Josh Welton: Thank you so much.

Anna Waldman-Brown: It's a great source for what the industry is thinking about and what the debates are actually on the ground.

Josh Welton: Absolutely.

Anna Waldman-Brown: We're so high up. We're just hanging out here with our really fancy robots, which won't be put into production for another couple decades.

Josh Welton: It's still super cool that you're boots on the ground, getting into factories, talking to people, and not just in the US but across the world. That's a really unique perspective that not a lot of people have, and that's super cool. I really appreciate what you do and seeing that kind of work.

Darla Welton: It's fun to have our worlds collide.

Anna Waldman-Brown: This has been fantastic.

Darla Welton: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm sure this won't be our last conversation with you, and we're definitely going to make sure that all of our audience is aware of your work and your research, and we're going to have lots of links to articles and the work that you're putting out.

Josh Welton: And anytime you need a sounding board or anything, feel free to reach out. Absolutely.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, I would love to. Thanks. We can chat about my welding education paper.

Josh Welton: For sure.

Darla Welton: Yeah.

Anna Waldman-Brown: That'd be awesome. Make sure I'm not just totally running off into the weeds somewhere.

Josh Welton: Well, you see that a lot. You see people who write on things, but they never want to get their hands dirty, so to speak. And then when they put something out, it's like, in theory that sounds really good, but in reality that's not really what's happening. So it's really cool to see people who are interested in the actuality of things that are happening.

Darla Welton: Anna, have you done any welding?

Anna Waldman-Brown: I have done a little bit of welding.

Josh Welton: You should come do a welding workshop.

Darla Welton: I was going to say, if you are in the Detroit area or if you go to Toledo or something, we're only about 40 minutes from Toledo.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Oh, awesome.

Darla Welton: Yeah, it would be a lot of fun to have you come up and-

Anna Waldman-Brown: I would love to.

Darla Welton: ... throw on some hoods and do some welding. I mean, we don't have any crazy laser welders or anything, but...

Anna Waldman-Brown: That's all right, those are apparently really easy to use anyways.

Darla Welton: It was.

Josh Welton: She did it.

Darla Welton: I used one. Yeah, not this year, but last year at Fabtech, I tried out the laser welder. It was actually kind of weird, but it was cool. It's cool that technology exists and I'm sure we'll see some really cool new innovations and things come out of that. But anyways, we would love to host you in our welding shop.

Josh Welton: Definitely.

Anna Waldman-Brown: And likewise, if you're ever in the Boston area.

Darla Welton: We need to make that trip for sure.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Oh, fantastic. Yeah, let me know. I'll show you around the robot labs and stuff.

Josh Welton: Oh, yeah.

Darla Welton: Oh, that would be amazing. That would be amazing.

Anna Waldman-Brown: We have a guest room.

Josh Welton: Awesome.

Darla Welton: Really?

Anna Waldman-Brown: Yeah, the bed's a little small for two people, but it's...

Josh Welton: Whatever.

Anna Waldman-Brown: ... It's not infeasible.

Darla Welton: We've slept in a really small bed awkwardly before.

Josh Welton: Last year we stayed in Roswell in a missile silo, so we were each in separate beds-

Anna Waldman-Brown: That's right.

Josh Welton: ... because they were like these really tiny beds.

Darla Welton: So we had to Lucy and Desi the thing. Yeah, it was just two really small beds on opposite sides of the room.

Josh Welton: But we were in Roswell in a missile silo, so that made up for everything else.

Anna Waldman-Brown: With all the aliens, I'm sure.

Darla Welton: Yeah.

Josh Welton: Yeah.

Darla Welton: It was pretty awesome. Yeah. They were the Atlas F Cold War era missile silos that were defunct the moment that they were functional and completely defunct and the government spent 30 million on them and then sold them to the public for 1,700 a piece.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Nice.

Darla Welton: Yeah, but it was pretty wild sleeping where the massive nuclear warhead once was housed. All right, well awesome. Thank you so much for your time, giving us a couple hours tonight, Anna. Really appreciate it.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Take care, Darla. Thanks Josh.

Josh Welton: Bye.

Anna Waldman-Brown: Bye.

Darla Welton: Thank you for checking out part two of our interview with Anna Waldman-Brown. If you haven't already listened to part one of this interview, you'll definitely want to go back and tune in. As always, we'd love for you to join in the conversation, so please send us your comments and questions and we will get back to you. Thanks again to Anna and thanks to you for watching.