I Would Never Work In A Factory

I heard somebody try to argue that factory jobs are good jobs. They may be good for society, but they are not good for an individual.

One thing that she said was that she knows people who have retired from assembly line work at some ridiculously young age. I find this hard to believe; to retire at, say, age 40 on factory assembly line wages would to be to retire very uncomfortably. Let us play with a few numbers here. Let us assume a wage of $12.50 per hour for 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year. That is a rather meager annual earnings of $26,000. It is hard enough to live off $26,000 a year, let alone to save for retirement.

How much would a person need to save for retirement at age 40 if he expects to live to be 80 years old and to maintain a lifestyle of spending about $20,000 a year (some of that money that was earned must go towards savings in the first place)? That is 40 years of life beyond retirement, so that would mean that the retiree would have to have saved $800,000 for retirement.

Let us further assume that he had started working at the factory wage when he was 18 years old. That would have given him 22 years to save $800,000. That means that he would have to had save over $36,363 a year for those 22 years, which is quite impossible considering that is more than he even made per year.

You won’t get rich by being an assembly line worker. Even if you do well for your job, there is a ceiling, there is a limit to how much you can possibly earn. So long as you are only a factory worker you will never break through.

Leaving aside the financial woes, there is a bigger problem with factory work. In the tradition of Henry Ford, factories produce interchangeable parts. Not only the parts for machines are interchangeable, though. The very people who assemble those parts on the factory line are themselves interchangeable.

Once a part is worn out in a machine, it can be replaced quite easily. The same is true for the factory worker. He is expendable and replaceable. The factory worker is, himself, just another cog in the machine. And he quite likely will get worn out. The tedium should wear him out. The boredom should wear him out. Or perhaps a repetitive motion injury will wear him out.

I would never sell my individuality for little pay. I would never work in a factory.