[NA] Practical tariff impact

ArrowFlyer86

ArrowFlyer86

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[Plz don't turn this into an overtly political thread :frown2:]

TLDR: Is your job/line of work impacted by tariffs? Being in finance/software I've been in a bit of an insular bubble and hadn't seen many direct impacts until this last week catching up with some people. I'm wondering if anyone else can share specific impacts they're seeing (or not seeing) in their own market or upstream/downstream in their business? Or specific areas that are getting roughed up? It's one thing to hear generic cases on the news, it's another when it's actual real people.

What I've heard from people directly impacted:
- A good friend of mine runs a small business making their own educational card and board games (he designs them himself but has them printed in China, and sells on Amazon and other platforms to US customers). His business and livelihood are, at the moment, headed off a cliff. Right now his sales are still going but that's only until his inventory runs out. Once his inventory is depleted (soon) he can't replenish it. The supplier in China is unwilling to ship until there is certainty and they can negotiate a new price, having already indicated there's no way they can eat the tariff cost. Additionally they want him on the hook dollar for dollar for any future increases that happen while products are being produced or shipped. He's done the math on his end and it's not possible to sell into the US market at more than twice the cost he's doing now. It doesn't help that to get orders delivered in time for Q4 holiday season (75%+ of his sales) he needs to place orders during May. So clock is ticking.

- I have a relative who sells coatings as a sales rep. His suppliers are in India and Canada. Primarily sells to industrial concerns that paint things like trains, warehouses, and factories. According to him his deals are dead in the water on both the demand and supply side until there's certainty. Suppliers won't ship until they understand the situation and they won't absorb costs. In some cases they can't even understand from the schedule if their products are taxed or not because of convoluted messaging and technicalities. He's had to do more work than ever to decode that for his suppliers and clients alike. His customers have same hesitation about buying and the message they're giving him is that deferred maintenance as preferable to sky high paint/primer bills. For him, it's a disaster. He's seeing a near zero chance of new sales.

- And most recently a friend's husband. He works for an auto company as a cost-engineer in the US and even though they haven't felt the impact directly (yet), they're experienced enough to already be planning for a significant decline in demand. They informed groups over the last week about upcoming right-sizing moves -- including his spot. So he's being encouraged to shop around inside the company for new roles that don't exist.

I kinda brushed a lot of the tariff talk off as just news noise -- but I'm seeing that was probably naive this time around. I'm wondering if I already know 3 people who are feeling pain not even 2 weeks in, just how widespread this is going to be.
 
Also, if there's any practical aviation supply examples, I'd be interested in hearing about those as well...
 
Steel and aluminum prices are quite volatile and vendor quotes only good for a day or so if that. We're still busy so I just have to price things accordingly and make customers aware of the price volatility. In the end I just pass the price downstream and tack on my normal percentage.

Whats interesting is aluminum prices haven't been as bad as steel. Its usually the other way around.

In this part of the country, very little of our material comes from offshore. A vast majority of my stuff comes from Nucor. Yet the price increase and volatility remain. Nucor is the largest buyer of scrap steel and they run roughshod over US Steel.

US steel needs to die. They failed to keep up with the times. Tariffs are just propping them up.
 
Aviation industry here. Both repair and manufacturing side of business are good. Orders haven't diminished, but didn't pickup either. A lot of raw material and paint vendors sent us poorly worded notices, basically saying "we have no idea what's going on, but very likely prices will go up". We do a lot of work for Canadian companies, so far business as usual.
 
I would imagine that even if no new tariffs end up happening in the end that there will still be major effects due to the uncertainly and whiplash. It's hard for any company to plan any major purchases right now, so they likely simply won't be made if it's possible to avoid them, and that will have downstream effects for years.
 
I am unemployed 100% because the 2018/2019 Chinese tariffs put my 47 year old Texas born company out of business.

Up until 2018, we were doing about 85 Million a year in revenue but our profits were between 5 and 8 million. Small company so plenty of money for salaries and bonuses.

I believe in 2018, "The Administration" implemented 10% tariffs on China.
Then in 2019, he added an additional 15% tariff on top of that.

We were a furniture company that started in 1976. All of our stuff came from China.
Immediately, the factories raised the prices of finished goods to us by 20% to offset the tariffs.
After the tariff was implemented, we were forecasted to have to spend about 12 million more for the same amount of product.
With profits of 5-8 million, the math is pretty easy. The only way for us to offset the cost was to increase our prices 20% on the end consumer.
We called it the "Race to the bottom" internally.
Business stalled nearly instantly. Warehouses full of millions of dollars of inventory and nobody would buy any of it at the new price.

This is irrelevant but Covid hit and for us it was a miracle. People had no choice but to buy home office furniture even though our prices were higher.
Once the demand for home furniture went back to normal, we started to fail.
Our products simply weren't worth the additional price increase to our buyers.
All of our primary competitors went out of business about the same time we did.

Our biggest competitor failed because they couldn't pay overseas suppliers.
www.retaildive.com

Furniture-maker Noble House falls into bankruptcy, owes overseas suppliers millions

The company, which sells to some of the largest U.S. retailers, suffered from rising costs and disruptions in its supply chain.
www.retaildive.com www.retaildive.com

Our second biggest was "acquired" because they had the same problem.
www.furnituretoday.com

Alto Systems subsidiary acquires Handy Living - Furniture Today

The supplier of hardware components to furniture manufacturers sold its Handy Living furniture division to HL Home Furnishings
www.furnituretoday.com www.furnituretoday.com

"Acquired" in the definition above is the same thing that happened to my company.
On April 1st of last year, my company's doors were virtually locked, 51 people lost their jobs and a company came in and bought $54 million of our remaining stock for $10 million so we could pay part of our bank debt.
That is what "Acquired" means.

China tariffs put a lot of furniture companies out of business. we fought for exemptions for some of our products and got bits and pieces of help from the government but it wasn't enough.

I sat on a zoom call with a group of people crying and saying 'I am going to miss you" who had been working together for 20+ years. I got to tell them they no longer had access and where to send their laptops.

YES. These tariffs will 100% impact / close American companies. Anyone who hears, believes, says it is a tariff on a foreign entity and they are the ones who pay are misinformed.
 
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Some companies already raised prices and said it was due to the tariffs, clearly a lie and a guess, but they used this risk as a reason to raise prices. It was just a couple percent.
 
On the oil and gas manufacturing side, we've only been hit by a tariff once so far, and it was purely due to timing. Raw materials (granular composites) coming from Canada shipped during that 3-day period when Trump put the tariffs on Canada and we got slapped with about $30K worth of tariff costs. We don't really source much of anything from China and similar, so we won't see much impact from that unless our US/Canadian suppliers are sourcing their components from overseas.
 
No measurable impact to my world yet (credit card processing). There is impact w/ our Chinese hardware suppliers, but that impacts our competitors the same, therefore things equalize out (competitors don't have an advantage).
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
I am unemployed 100% because the 2018/2019 Chinese tariffs put my 47 year old Texas born company out of business.

Up until 2018, we were doing about 85 Million a year in revenue but our profits were between 5 and 8 million. Small company so plenty of money for salaries and bonuses.

I believe in 2018, "The Administration" implemented 10% tariffs on China.
Then in 2019, he added an additional 15% tariff on top of that.

We were a furniture company that started in 1976. All of our stuff came from China.
Immediately, the factories raised the prices of finished goods to us by 20% to offset the tariffs.
After the tariff was implemented, we were forecasted to have to spend about 12 million more for the same amount of product.
With profits of 5-8 million, the math is pretty easy. The only way for us to offset the cost was to increase our prices 20% on the end consumer.
We called it the "Race to the bottom" internally.
Business stalled nearly instantly. Warehouses full of millions of dollars of inventory and nobody would buy any of it at the new price.

This is irrelevant but Covid hit and for us it was a miracle. People had no choice but to buy home office furniture even though our prices were higher.
Once the demand for home furniture went back to normal, we started to fail.
Our products simply weren't worth the additional price increase to our buyers.
All of our primary competitors went out of business about the same time we did.

Our biggest competitor failed because they couldn't pay overseas suppliers.
www.retaildive.com

Furniture-maker Noble House falls into bankruptcy, owes overseas suppliers millions

The company, which sells to some of the largest U.S. retailers, suffered from rising costs and disruptions in its supply chain.
www.retaildive.com www.retaildive.com

Our second biggest was "acquired" because they had the same problem.
www.furnituretoday.com

Alto Systems subsidiary acquires Handy Living - Furniture Today

The supplier of hardware components to furniture manufacturers sold its Handy Living furniture division to HL Home Furnishings
www.furnituretoday.com www.furnituretoday.com

"Acquired" in the definition above is the same thing that happened to my company.
On April 1st of last year, my company's doors were virtually locked, 51 people lost their jobs and a company came in and bought $54 million of our remaining stock for $10 million so we could pay part of our bank debt.
That is what "Acquired" means.

China tariffs put a lot of furniture companies out of business. we fought for exemptions for some of our products and got bits and pieces of help from the government but it wasn't enough.

I sat on a zoom call with a group of people crying and saying 'I am going to miss you" who had been working together for 20+ years. I got to tell them they no longer had access and where to send their laptops.

YES. These tariffs will 100% impact / close American companies. Anyone who hears, believes, says it is a tariff on a foreign entity and they are the ones who pay are misinformed.
Click to expand...

30 years ago, my cousin had a thriving business in Tupelo, MS supporting furniture manufacturers there. That industry evaporated with the arrival of cheaper Chinese furniture, and all those people lost their jobs.

In theory, jobs like yours would be replaced over time by jobs with companies manufacturing furniture in America, now that Chinese furniture costs 20% more.
 
Ed Haywood said:
30 years ago, my cousin had a thriving business in Tupelo, MS supporting furniture manufacturers there. That industry evaporated with the arrival of cheaper Chinese furniture, and all those people lost their jobs.

In theory, jobs like yours would be replaced over time by jobs with companies manufacturing furniture in America, now that Chinese furniture costs 20% more.
Click to expand...

It will be way more than 20% more if manufactured here. We looked into it. The only way to manufacture in the US it to be the Mercedes of products (Think best tugs) It is so expensive to produce here that you can only survive if you cater to the upper class buyers. Our company specialized in low end furniture (Needed to be able to shipped) flat pack, home assembly stuff. That isn't something that people here will pay what it would cost to produce here. I wish things could be made here but we are too expensive as a workforce to make products that our lower middle class can afford.
 
Ed Haywood said:
In theory, jobs like yours would be replaced over time by jobs with companies manufacturing furniture in America, now that Chinese furniture costs 20% more.
Click to expand...
Anyone who believes decent wage, low skill manufacturing is coming back to the US is smoking something good. If any manufacturing comes back, and that’s a huge if, that will be the impetus for an even bigger push in automation. Off shoring was popular because you saved money on labor but could keep all the same production technology. Third world workers were biorobots. Try and bring that back to the US and rather than pay labor costs continuously, why wouldn’t companies invest in automation?
 
Ed Haywood said:
In theory, jobs like yours would be replaced over time by jobs with companies manufacturing furniture in America, now that Chinese furniture costs 20% more.
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In theory, a CEO would would have to be crazy to commit to millions or billions of capital expenditures over the next 2 - 5 years building a new factory in response to tariffs that change every 36 hours.
 
Most/all of our raw materials is non-Chinese. Many customers have required non-conflict materials, and non-Chinese mined for years. So I don't expect much. But everyone is getting the materials from the same exchanges anyway, so no advantage or disadvantage. What they did find out a few years back was that they could manipulate the whole supply/demand curve, and rather than "mine, baby, mine", they found they could make more by mining less and drove the prices up.
AKiss20 said:
Anyone who believes decent wage, low skill manufacturing is coming back to the US is smoking something good. If any manufacturing comes back, and that’s a huge if, that will be the impetus for an even bigger push in automation. Off shoring was popular because you saved money on labor but could keep all the same production technology. Third world workers were biorobots. Try and bring that back to the US and rather than pay labor costs continuously, why wouldn’t companies invest in automation?
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I should let my contract manufacturing customers know this since they have been bringing the jobs back since before the tariffs hit. Tell them they are stupid and don't know any better. I'll let everyone know how that goes. :rolleyes:

Thing is we never should have sent the jobs overseas to begin with.
 
AKiss20 said:
why wouldn’t companies invest in automation?
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They have.
I live down the street from a large stamping plant. The plant is still operating, but most of the area that used to be the very large parking lot for all the employees now has a Lowes, L.A. Fitness and a Kohls sitting on it.
 
I'm in consulting - specifically automation and supply chain systems. A lot of customers are pulling back the reigns on kicking off any new big engagements. Stuff that was already in progress is still going forward, but new large-capital type projects seem to be moving to a 'wait and see' type situation.
 
Anecdata. But ive put a house upgrade off and most of my coworkers seem to be in a holding pattern on spending. I think pax bookings our down and our aircraft deliveries will be on hold if tarrifs apply. Hiring on all fronts for us is basically stopped.
Economics was my chosen field of study and tariffs are a drain.... For many reasons. .. i dont understand the desire to go back to some mythical age. Industrial capacity is up, real wages are up, manufacturing jobs were supplanted with higher paying service and logistics jobs. We have full employment, basically massacred the world in GDP, and have a vastly higher standard of living then ever before.

The rent seeking corruption alone is reason enough for me to be against them. The chosen few win or get bailed out while the little guy loses. Farmers get a bailout while niche nerds minifig business gets shuttered.
 
Ed Haywood said:
Robots have to be built, installed, programmed, and maintained. Those are good jobs too, probably better than the ones they replaced.
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Yeah but that’s not the type of job being promised to the uneducated masses. Those jobs require education, knowledge, and skill. Also highly questionable that it would produce nearly the quantity of jobs being promised.
 
Like @jesse I'm in credit card processing as well in MI. We service primarily small retail and restaurants. I'm seeing less volume come through, this is directly based on the volume our merchants are doing, so hundreds of small businesses all over the state and a few other states. January we expect to be brutal-that month is all over the board every year, but we always see an uptick in February once tax refunds start coming out, not so much this year...

We are hiring a flooring contractor and he said the last month has been the slowest he has ever been, he said "I'm slower than I was in 08/09"...

We are tightening the belt, trying to plan for the worst and hope for the best...
 
AKiss20 said:
Yeah but that’s not the type of job being promised to the uneducated masses.
Click to expand...
Are the uneducated masses being promised jobs? Seems like jobs aren’t a problem…
falconkidding said:
We have full employment, basically massacred the world in GDP,
Click to expand...

falconkidding said:
and have a vastly higher standard of living then ever before.
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and yet, it was previously stated that people can’t afford to buy furniture, and we have threads benoaning the fact that home ownership is no longer an option for young people.

Doesn’t seem like both sides of the argument can happen simultaneously. what’s real and what’s not?
 
In my space, we’re more impacted by the CFPB drama than anything else.
 
AKiss20 said:
Yeah but that’s not the type of job being promised to the uneducated masses. Those jobs require education, knowledge, and skill.
Click to expand...
All right, let’s look at this another way..what level of education does Ford now require before they will train someone to build, install, operate, or maintain robotic equipment?
 
Big (almost mega) Banking here. I'm responding because although there is no direct link, we're on the receiving end of these market moves. We serve a lot of institutional clients. As such the amount of money we move daily is a very large number. Over the last few weeks our tech teams have been on high alert for system stability and security risks. The volumes and volatility we're seeing are well above normal and we're watching to ensure we still provide reliable service. Also, with heightened risks and volatility, we often get trouble makers trying to disrupt the financial system. The other impact I'm starting to see is that we're now on a mission to cut costs (usually we wait until Q4 when we can tell by how much we're going to be overbudget ;) ). I don't think we're going to start cutting into the bone, but the cuts we're making now will probably hamper growth next year.
 
Racerx said:
Back in welding school my first instructor made this point. A robot probably creates more and better jobs than it replaces
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I agree to some degree, but I always leave a little room in the premise for "the world needs ditch diggers, too". What I mean by that is our overall population may have shifted away from manufacturing jobs and into more service-oriented work, but not everyone has the cognitive ability to work those jobs. Mundane assembly line work or digging holes is often the extent to what many humans are capable of, and trying to train them to repair robots or write programming for them is outright off the table. So removing those jobs sometimes leaves a not-immaterial portion of your populace without a job. Best to have some balance in what we choose to automate. I don't think we're anywhere near toeing that automation threshold, but at some point in the future it will have a real impact.
 
MauleSkinner said:
Are the uneducated masses being promised jobs? Seems like jobs aren’t a problem…



and yet, it was previously stated that people can’t afford to buy furniture, and we have threads benoaning the fact that home ownership is no longer an option for young people.

Doesn’t seem like both sides of the argument can happen simultaneously. what’s real and what’s not?
Click to expand...
Home ownership rates are higher now than the 60s-70s, real wage growth is higher. (though the top tier has gained a lot more than the middle/bottom. its still a net gain)
People have been sold this bill of goods that back in the good old days people had one factory job a pension and could survive on one income. While ignoring with that income that house was 8-900 square feet on a quarter acre lot with no AC one car and vacation was a road trip to visit family. Clothes were hand me downs and pennies were pinched.

Someone can live a 1960s life on minimal income nowdays but we seem to have experienced a lifestyle inflation expectation.
Things like average house prices are up but thats also because the average house nowdays is more than double the sq footage of the 1960s
Car prices aren't that bad especially when you consider traffic deaths per capita have dropped 40% fuel economy and reliability is way up. Figure in 1960 adjusted for inflation average car was almost 28k which a new honda civic will smoke a sports(or luxury ) car from then in all metrics and get 250k miles trouble free.

Right now we have essentially full employment (hell almost 500k unfilled manufacturing jobs and a projected 2 million manufacturing employee shortage by 2033) We make more money, we have access to better and cheaper goods through the magic of comparative advantage, and we seem willing to throw that away because...

Like the comedian said everything is amazing and nobodys happy. So I'd say both sides are true. Yes housing is more expensive but the average person nowdays is also buying much more house and a cost per sq ft has essentially mirrored inflation. Combined with increased real wages and more nimbyism (min lot size min sq footage building rules) as well as increased home ownership would account for the rest of the increase.

So people will complain its unatainable but if you offer them my grandparents pittsburg 3 bed 1 bath 1100sq ft home with no AC and oil heating for an "affordable" price they'd look at you with disgust.
 
Racerx said:
Back in welding school my first instructor made this point. A robot probably creates more and better jobs than it replaces
Click to expand...

There is a story about Milton Friedman visiting China in the 70's. His hosts showed him a large crew digging a building foundation with shovels. He asked why they were not using a bulldozer and was informed the purpose was to provide more jobs. He asked why they were not using spoons then.

Railing against automation makes zero sense.
 
The first major law passed by the First Congress in 1789 dealt with tariffs and it stated that “it is necessary for the support of government, for the discharge of the debts of the United States, and the encouragement and protection of manufactures, that duties be laid on goods, wares and merchandise imported.” It also led to a disagreement between Alexander Hamilton, who saw tariffs as a revenue source, and James Madison, who believed tariffs could lead to trade reciprocity with Great Britain and other nations.

Tariffs quickly became the main source of the federal government’s revenue until the Civil War, when treasury notes and a wartime income tax supplemented the federal government’s income. After the war, tariffs reassumed their role as a chief revenue source.

However, in 1894, Congress passed the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act, which lowered tariff rates and established a permanent federal income tax. The Supreme Court struck down the federal income tax imposed by Congress as unconstitutional. In Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust (1895), the Court ruled in a closely decided 5-4 decision that the tax violated Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution as a direct tax not apportioned among the states based on their populations. After 1896, tariffs were raised to record levels.
 
SoonerAviator said:
I agree to some degree, but I always leave a little room in the premise for "the world needs ditch diggers, too". What I mean by that is our overall population may have shifted away from manufacturing jobs and into more service-oriented work, but not everyone has the cognitive ability to work those jobs. Mundane assembly line work or digging holes is often the extent to what many humans are capable of, and trying to train them to repair robots or write programming for them is outright off the table. So removing those jobs sometimes leaves a not-immaterial portion of your populace without a job. Best to have some balance in what we choose to automate. I don't think we're anywhere near toeing that automation threshold, but at some point in the future it will have a real impact.
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No doubt there's people where that's the extent.

As a fabrication shop I have guys that arent capable of some things. I have other guys able to build a staircase to the moon. But those guys are few and far between.

The last year or so I've been getting things more automated. Laying out a steel staircase and railings by hand is time consuming and not everyone can do it. Now instead of laying everything out on a 12" channel. I draw everything up in cad and cut and scribe everything on a piece plate to be cut on the CNC plasma. All cut to proper angle. All riser locations scribed on. Just form 2 flanges on the bend lines.

From there I just bought a laser projector. Projects whatever contour directly onto the bench. Things get done quicker and more accurately. That smart guy can now run the CNC machines. While a less skilled guy builds it. Same labor on my end for more production. Some guy somewhere had to build the CNC and projector.

The next purchase will be a rotary cnc to cut and profile pipe, angle, and square tube.

Not really robotics. But automation. Somebody still has to load the machines.
 
Racerx said:
No doubt there's people where that's the extent.

As a fabrication shop I have guys that arent capable of some things. I have other guys able to build a staircase to the moon. But those guys are few and far between.

The last year or so I've been getting things more automated. Laying out a steel staircase and railings by hand is time consuming and not everyone can do it. Now instead of laying everything out on a 12" channel. I draw everything up in cad and cut and scribe everything on a piece plate to be cut on the CNC plasma. All cut to proper angle. All riser locations scribed on. Just form 2 flanges on the bend lines.

From there I just bought a laser projector. Projects whatever contour directly onto the bench. Things get done quicker and more accurately. That smart guy can now run the CNC machines. While a less skilled guy builds it. Same labor on my end for more production. Some guy somewhere had to build the CNC and projector.

The next purchase will be a rotary cnc to cut and profile pipe, angle, and square tube.

Not really robotics. But automation. Somebody still has to load the machines.
Click to expand...
We've got facilities using robotic arms for loading/unloading CNC machines, CNC laser cutting/perforating machines that only require someone to load pipe at one end and it cuts/perforates, and stacks it up on the other where previously using plasma cutters was the norm. However, we've also got employees who sit at small stations and hand-deburr small rubber/composite components all day long because there's too much variability in the manufacturing process to engineer out the imperfections (can also be read: too expensive to get to that tolerance level).

Those robotic arms work great, but when they don't it gets REALLY expensive to get them fixed, lol. Sometimes the repair bill once or twice a year equals the savings in having a few direct employees that it replaces. It's amazing when the automation works though, as it reduces workplace injuries and makes output very predictable. We did have one of the parts (a roughly 10lbs casting) slip from the robotic grip and it chunked the part 2 aisles over and smashed a CNC machine panel, so the robots may occasionally start an uprising!
 
SoonerAviator said:
I agree to some degree, but I always leave a little room in the premise for "the world needs ditch diggers, too". What I mean by that is our overall population may have shifted away from manufacturing jobs and into more service-oriented work, but not everyone has the cognitive ability to work those jobs.
Click to expand...
Gotta say - I respect the heck out of this perspective.

I'll admit, there was a less mature time in my life (not long ago) where I was like "well F that, just pull yourself up by the bootstraps and do better". Enough time has passed and formative experiences accrued to realize that it's just not in the cards for some people.

It's not even necessarily a negative for them. They are just not wired for complex tasks that's require ambiguity, complexity or more decision making. But ********, give them a list of phone numbers to call, a shovel to dig, or unglamorous tasks to do and they'll prove that work ethic isn't the problem. I'm not comfortable leaving those people in the dust in the holy grail search for GDP, profit or savings.
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
Gotta say - I respect the heck out of this perspective.

I'll admit, there was a less mature time in my life (not long ago) where I was like "well F that, just pull yourself up by the bootstraps and do better". Enough time has passed and formative experiences accrued to realize that it's just not in the cards for some people.

It's not even necessarily a negative for them. They are just not wired for complex tasks that's require ambiguity, complexity or more decision making. But ********, give them a list of phone numbers to call, a shovel to dig, or unglamorous tasks to do and they'll prove that work ethic isn't the problem. I'm not comfortable leaving those people in the dust in the holy grail search for GDP, profit or savings.
Click to expand...
I was that same way. Still am when something gets absolutely butchered. But, those same guys come to work. Stay off the phone. And generally do the jobs nobody wants to do.

Now when I hire younger guys I tell them, you might not be the smartest, or most skilled. I'm sure as hell not. But one thing nobody can take away from you is a work ethic. If you have one, I'll respect the hell out of you. Dammit if it's not 20 minutes later they're in the bathroom for 30 minutes. Presumably playing on the phone.

Every employee is a tool. Every tool has things it does better than others. Sometimes you need that 20# sledge, and its nice to have when you need it.
 
Racerx said:
I was that same way. Still am when something gets absolutely butchered. But, those same guys come to work. Stay off the phone. And generally do the jobs nobody wants to do.

Now when I hire younger guys I tell them, you might not be the smartest, or most skilled. I'm sure as hell not. But one thing nobody can take away from you is a work ethic. If you have one, I'll respect the hell out of you. Dammit if it's not 20 minutes later they're in the bathroom for 30 minutes. Presumably playing on the phone.

Every employee is a tool. Every tool has things it does better than others. Sometimes you need that 20# sledge, and its nice to have when you need it.
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There is of course a minimum competence level for a given task. I'm not sure for your machine shop/fabrication perspective, but for mine if someone totally butchers a job, it's usually by choice rather than a defensible claim of ignorance (or it's weaponized incompetence).

But if you show up, do what's asked of you to the best of your ability, and you do it with below some (reasonable) threshold of complaining, then it's pretty hard to fail in life.

Edit: "by choice" usually means "to save time and cut corners"... Laziness.
 
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