I am new here but just want to offer my two cents...
AV tinker er, thanks for inserting a dispassionate, rationale bit of opinion to the discussion. A lot of emotions come to the surface in this kind of discussion (understandably), but when that happens the facts get muddied.
There is a paradigm shift going on in American manufacturing. Not all manufacturing is low-tech, guy-inserts-tab-A-into-slot-B. I work in the medical device industry and the technicians that work for us make decent, if not luxurious, wages; say 50-60k+/yr. It's not high-skilled labor, but it's not low-skill either; I'd call it mid-skill. That's the way industry is moving. But the U.S. labor force is not set up like that. We have high-skill engineers/scientists and lower skilled assembly-type workers, but little middle ground. The CEO of Apple, when recently asked about all the i-whatevers being made in China, said it is because there is a large population of mid-skilled workers who are highly adaptable to change, and we don't have that in the U.S (well, not in the numbers that traditional assembly-type jobs have enjoyed historically). Of course that is not the only factor...
That is not to say that basic assembly work isn't honorable, but those jobs are just going away in a nation where a higher percentage than ever is college educated, fewer and few things are manually assembled, and fewer and fewer people with $100k educations are willing to "put up with" manufacturing working environments. On the one hand this is sad, as we have a nation of entitlement seekers who expect high pay with low work, but it is also sad that we're losing the cultural core of folks who have basic mechanical knowledge and intuition. Ironically, it's the highest-tech items that often require the most labor intensive assembly. Implantable pacemakers and defibrillators are almost all hand assembled, for instance. But such assembly requires a very high degree of skill and as such is rewarded accordingly.
I have a B.S. in physics, a B.A. in applied mathematics, and a masters in biomedical engineering. But that doesn't mean I don't go out in the garage or in my shop and get my hands dirty every week. But more and more I see younger engineers (I'm 38) come in who don't know which end of a screwdriver (or oscilloscope) to grab. I suppose this is no different than any other major shift in technological evolution.
It happened with the invention of the moldboard plow, when fewer people were required to break up greater acreage, it happened when the automated loom replaced manual weaving and fabric production skyrocketed, it happened when crop sowing and harvesting became mechanized, it happened when any number of things that used to be hand made became machine-made. The people that did things the old way lost their jobs; the things made the new way became cheaper; the things made the old way became more expensive; the people who lost their jobs became angry (i.e. the Luddites), and the people who only knew the new way didn't learn the skills or work ethic of old-guard. But when those changes happened, an entirely new breed of worker emerged that required a new set of skills - to fix the plow, operate the loom, design the tractor, dry, store and transport unprecedented amounts of grain, etc.
The shift in technological evolution is a painful one; it also brings with it new opportunities. But there will always be a market, however niche, for products made the old-word way. You can still by baskets woven buy hand in the US, you can still buy wallpaper printed by hand, you can still buy a dining room table that is made with hand tools. And you pay through the nose for them. Snap-on isn't really all that different - it is the hand-cut dovetail cherry table, and Gearwrench is the Ikea $75 special.
As for workers' pay, it is all about supply and demand. Assembly jobs pay less because the low-skilled workforce is larger, and demand is now lower. I get paid more than an assembly line worker because there are fewer people that do what I do, and demand is higher. Any attempt to artificially inflate a low-demand, high supply wage simply cannot be sustained. I look at it like this: you get paid based on how much money you make for someone else. Why do you think pro athletes' endorsement contracts are so huge, and why Julia Roberts gets $20mil a movie?
That's brilliance in it's purist form!
