Manufacturing jobs pay well, right?

The “good manufacturing job”—the kind that pays an above-average wage and has helped create the middle class in this country—is alive and kicking, right? Well, according to this report from the Economic Policy Institute, it is. According to the National Employment Law Project, it isn’t.

So who’s right? You can pin the discrepancy on ideologies or agendas of the organizations that put out these reports, but that really doesn’t answer the question. Studies from the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association International (FMA) tie wages to specific skills, and even in these cases, wages vary widely. True, a code welder or press brake operator can enjoy healthy wages, but the low end of the scale is pretty low, while the high end of the scale can surpass the salary of some doctors and lawyers.

So what’s happening here? NELP points to increased reliance on temporary workers, and that’s telling. I’ve talked with various fabricators over the years who have relied on temporary help to get them through the busy times. They don’t necessarily like it—it’s hard to build a good culture when your workforce changes with the seasons—but they don’t see a way to avoid it. Demand is variable, and they just can’t afford a larger permanent staff.

In reality, this trend of “flexing” the workforce to matching the demand goes beyond manufacturing. Planet Money’s Adam Davidson apparently is writing a book on this subject. Hundreds of years ago, before and at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, workers were hired and fired at will. As demand levels changed, so did your headcount. The modern corporation changed this. It gave people titles and job descriptions, and it gave companies organizational structures that detailed who reports to whom. In one sense, this structure increased efficiency. In another sense, the structure created a buffer against the forever-changing demand for products and services.

A person who specialized in one job became very efficient, and if you let that person go when demand decline, it would cost you more to hire and train a person when demand returned. In fact, you probably couldn’t train another person fast enough to meet that increased demand effectively. This wasn’t true for all workers, but it was certainly true for people in skilled positions.

Today, globalization has made the competitive playing field for skilled talent equality global. An engineer, sales, data entry—anyone can be replaced by someone else at an outside firm, either across the street or on the other side of the planet. Having a headcount that’s flexible sounds great for shareholders, but it’s not necessarily a pleasant environment. As Davidson asked on the podcast, is society going back to those early days of capitalism, when the workforce changed with customer demand?

I feel that we’re in an age where employers value not only their skill, but also their passion, engagement, ideas, and the way they communicate those ideas. People who are engaged and act to change things for the better go beyond their job title. Hard skills—be it welding, bending, or anything else—can be taught, which means that people with those skills can be replaced. But work ethic, reliability, and engagement aren’t so easily replicated.

Is this why wages vary so much in manufacturing, or why, in a broader sense, some in this economy seem to be highly rewarded, while others fail to see any significant wage increases from year to year? I really don’t know. My bet is that pure market forces are at play, too. And some companies, well, aren’t the best to work for. But I would like to think that employee engagement is one tiny piece of the puzzle.