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Notes -
A pretty long time ago ('07) I've read a mfg company manager that finding a working class person who can come to work on time, pass a drug test is quite hard in the US. Because probably everyone from them who can do these things is already employed. Or worse, in college.
Murray made a case in his Coming Apart book that the working classes have been badly hit by the last 50 years. People with worse cognition aren't as flexible and need a more functional culture.
In many cases this is because they don't want to pay the going rate for good employees. They get fooled because with a lowball rate they can consistently get an employee who is good enough for a short while, and then the employee goes back on the sauce or gets in a barfight or some other such thing.
For machinists, as with the specific company here, specifically it's also just extremely unpleasant work -- loud, repetitive, lots of metal shavings and cutting fluid, just the wrong mix of boring and extremely dangerous, sometimes in really subtle ways.
For a while the pay made up for it when machinists could pull the sort of wages that 'skilled trades' like HVAC or assembly could (though even then, it wasn't popular), but right now the industry is pretty badly squeezed; if you aren't aggressively chasing pay and jumping up from operator roles, you're probably gonna be closer to a McDonald's worker than a specialized-skill one. And in turn, leaving the operator or setup roles to a true machinist seat requires a very broad set of problem-solving skills that... well, it isn't the same as IQ, and it's definitely not the same as college-readiness, but it's the sort of skillset where you have a lot of other options. Boosting pay would be the normal solution, but (excluding spheres where Made In America is mandatory) there's just not that much slack in the market, nor space for improved employee productivity.
There's a certain type of person that excels at it, because it's indoor work, not always on your feet, and kinda nice from a feeling productive bit, but there's not a ton of that type of person that wouldn't be better doing something else.
((Though I'd caveat the skills problem is more complicated. It's not just that the lower wage workers are nuts, though some are, but that we've spent nearly forty years putting massive selection pressures against conscientious people learning a lot of the physical skills necessary for these classes of jobs. I've seen engineering college graduates that don't know how to use Allen wrenches properly, or know the names for Phillips-head versus Torx, or how to use a proper set of wirestrippers. Not everyone who does has facial tattoos, to borrow a turn of phrase, but it's a serious dichotomy.))
Why.. metal shavings and cutting fluid are contained inside the CNC machines, you only encounter that while cleaning them, no ?
Cleaning completed parts is a not-trivial part of what operators do, and while they should be just a quick brush-and-dunk in degreaser by the end of an operation, 'should' is the operative word. Keeping your machine(s) clean and clear ends up taking a lot more time than you'd think. Deburring and material prep adds yet more, operations like tapping. It's not a literal swimming in grunge sorta problem, but especially if you're sensitive to it -- and I know more than one person that finds common aluminum cutting fluid to smell like bile when hot -- or the first time you put pressure down with bare skin on a surface that looked clean of chips, it gets really annoying.
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