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.
[–] Aurornis 1 day ago
[–] WarmWash 1 day ago
"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.
[–] RobotToaster 1 day ago
[–] ac29 1 day ago
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.
[–] Aurornis 1 day ago
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.
[–] Ccecil 1 day ago
"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).
[1] https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/coeur-d-... [2] https://www.zillow.com/home-values/136166/coeur-dalene-id/
[–] solyin 1 day ago
[–] yhjc2692 3 days ago
[–] Ccecil 3 days ago
Making boards for the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project. [1]
Mostly small SMT stuff on there. 0402, BGA, etc.
[–] ericmay 1 day ago
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.
[–] joefourier 1 day ago
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.
[–] ericmay 1 day ago
No clue, but there are millions. Just depends on the product.
Here are two examples. One made in France, the other in America:
[1] https://www.debuyer-usa.com
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.
[–] ElProlactin 21 hours ago
Origin is complicated and what gets printed on a label rarely tells the full story. You can have products that are assembled somewhere using components that are made somewhere else, products that contain raw materials from somewhere else, etc.
The assumption that "Made in America" results in higher wages for American workers is not always well-founded.
There's also the issue of fraud. Not every label is legitimate. Lying about one or two components in particular products can result in significantly higher margins, so there are a lot of incentives for dishonesty at multiple levels of many supply chains, and even the most well-meaning manufacturers can fall victim to it.
[–] ericmay 16 hours ago
Sure, but a product made entirely overseas results in 0 wages (for the manufacturing of the product) for American workers. Any company, to varying degrees of just how raw/local the product is made, which builds, assembles, manufacturers, grows, whatever a product here in the US has to hire and pay Americans an American wage. Naturally that may not be a "livable" wage (which is a loaded term but w/e) but it's still a wage that goes to Americans more than it goes to non-Americans.
We should avoid scumbag companies, American or otherwise, and we should do research into just how much a product is made in the US, but as a general rule there's no way around (until automation or something) paying more for American products and that's what you'll have to do to support American workers and American jobs.
Worker Unions have been telling us this for decades.
In the case of supply chain issues, yea, shit happens. But the supply chain issues also occur in the downstream foreign market you're buying the product from. So you can buy an American product and if it has parts that come from, say, China and you see a supply chain concern you'd have to be more concerned about the Chinese-made/assembled product because you have even less supply chain oversight.
[–] ElProlactin 16 hours ago
> Sure, but a product made entirely overseas results in 0 wages (for the manufacturing of the product) for American workers.
American brands like Apple capture the vast majority of the value of their products even when the manufacturing is done elsewhere. Final assembly, which is the type of work that is done in countries like China, Vietnam and India, makes up less than 5% of the retail price of most electronics products.
I've lived in the developing world for many years and currently live in a developing country in Asia that's experiencing one of the biggest manufacturing booms in the world. You can probably guess the country.
The problem with wanting to do all the manufacturing at home is that not all manufacturing wages are the type of wages you'd want in a developed, high-income economy. Low-skilled, labor-intensive assembly work is not a foundation for continued prosperity in a developed, high-income economy. And Westerners (Americans) don't want all the bad stuff that typically comes with it, including the pollution.
[–] ericmay 16 hours ago
True, but in that case the important part is still buying from an American company, even if the product is wholly assembled elsewhere. I didn't mean to imply you can and will only buy American made products from start to finish. Even in the case of Apple you're supporting very high American wages and the products cost more. Some manufacturing/assembly has been moved to the US.
> The problem with wanting to do all the manufacturing at home is that not all manufacturing wages are the type of wages you'd want in a developed, high-income economy. Low-skilled, labor-intensive assembly work is not a foundation for continued prosperity in a developed, high-income economy. And Westerners (Americans) don't want all the bad stuff that typically comes with it, including the pollution.
I agree with you, though I think items like clothing can be made much more costly but higher quality and with local manufacturing (like in Europe for some companies) but if we go back to the original point it was about supporting "living wages".
My point was just that where American (or western depending on your own beliefs) companies exist and make a given products (a skillet/frying pan was just an example where I knew there were a few American manufacturers), and let's assume it's not fraud or rebranding or something, you should pay more for those products if you want to support "living wages". Otherwise you can buy "the thing from China [1]" but you can't do that and also support "living wages" because from an assembly/manufacturing worker perspective there is no wage to be had because they aren't doing the job. To your point also of course you can argue that the company that's HQ'd in the US, doing the design work, with manufacturing in China also receives a lot of the profits or can capture the majority of the value of the product, but those folks are already paid corporate wages which are higher than a "living wage".
I'd also mention I suppose that not everyone can just work in an office and have people in other countries work in assembly lines.
[1] China makes incredible stuff, I don't mean to imply everything made there is cheap or something along those lines, though of course many products that Americans are exposed to are of that nature, there's nothing necessarily wrong or immoral about it.
[–] crote 1 day ago
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.
[–] delfinom 17 hours ago
Chinese shops are very pro customer service, and the large ones I work with are amazing. American shops are god awful in comparison. Designs take weeks to get manufacturing feedback on, if they care to respond to you at all because you aren't in some imaginary box of customers that they want. In many cases if you aren't coming with them immediately with a purchase order of a million units, they just ignore you.
But yea the blockers in the US are immense for more US business growth. If anything in the next 10 years we will see more collapse of US manufacturing as baby boomers sell off their businesses. Nobody under the age of 50 can afford to start a new manufacturing business without VC funding. The cost of real estate is bonkers alone (unless you try and build out in bumfuck nowhere, in which case you now have labor shortages), and the numerous layers of certifications that buyers want you to hold for corporate checkbox ticketing is the cherry on top.
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.