Posted on 08/24/2011 10:45:19 AM PDT by Dick Holmes
“Does ANYONE in FR Land know of ANY example of ANY Union having a positive impact on the USA Economy in this century ?”
Sure. How about the MHG...never mind, not them. Or the ONMO...no, come to think of it, they struck and wound up driving out the steel industry. Or maybe the XXY - naa, it would up that cars made by free workers are 10 times better and much cheaper and easier to build.
...oh well, I tried.
“Back in the late 70s, right after I earned my MBA and got back into engineering, I tried unsuccessfully to convince my company, a battery manufacturer, that we needed to vertically integrate by making our own battery cans and sleeves, but the bean-counters had the company president convinced it was cheaper in the short-term to keep a half a dozen other companies in business instead.”
ahh, vertical integration - did you know that the raw material materials coming into the Ford River Rouge plant (in Michigan) were iron ore pellets and sand...and the products coming out were automobiles (the sand was used for their glass). They employed over 100,000 people there.
Like you say, once the B-School graduates got in, it went horizontal...
I agree, Let the market determine the wage floor by revoking all minimum wage laws!
To all : Thanks. I see little evidence to justify their existence. I believe that they should be registered as a lobby for each union.
We could use a post to that effect.
What say all of you?
Think you're wrong here. HP is getting out of the laptop business for the right reasons:
First, PCs are not a core competency of HP. HP bought Compaq Computer less than 10 years ago, at a time when Compaq was not even dominant. It will have turned out to be a bad investment so HP will be divesting what was a bad investment for them.
Second, PCs, especially laptops, are endangered. Notebooks and tablets will quickly consume the laptop market because they are lighter, "cooler," equally powerful, with far better operating systems. Also, cloud computing and virtualization will mean the end of most desktop computers, in business at least.
For many years, PCs have been money-losing propositions. Most companies stay in the business for other reasons -- profits off bundled software, etc.
When HP bought Compaq they morphed from being an innovative company to being just another bottom-feeding PC company. With the PC divestiture they will perhaps regain their former status.
Actually, I think labor unions should simply be ABOLISHED - we have all the labor laws needed now to protect workers.
And if not abolished, they need to be kept TOTALLY out of politics - and if they won’t do that, then abolish them (again).
Tablets will become the mainstream system. I know a lot of writers who have gone to Ipads with bluetooth keyboards as their primary machines. A Core i7 with 8 gigs ram and a terrabyte hard drive is massive overkill for web surfing and word processing. These days, it may be overkill for many formerly high-end purposes.
Higher end computers will remain, but they will become more or less niche products. I’m a photographer and video guy, but I’ve gone from a 12 month purchase cycle to an 18 month cycle to a nearly 5-year cycle as computers have become more powerful. I still have stacks of external hard drives full of photo and video projects, but a Core 2 Duo or G5 is still sufficient for most things.
I just replaced a 5 year old laptop due to wear rather than lack of processing power and my 2004 PowerMac G5 is still going strong.
Computer companies are facing a new reality, since folks are less likely to replace machines until they actually break.
I do get worried, in general, about decisions made for sound business reasons, that result in further deindustrializing the USA and making us less able to compete. What did you think of the Forbes articles?
Dick, it's a conundrum for sure. The US economy grows when products get cheaper, but building cheap products in China means that manufacturing abandons the US.
One comment I have is along the lines of Tom Friedman's concept of today's flat earth. There will never be a time when Americans purchase products that are uniquely American. The cost-effectiveness of commercial and industrial travel means that products from one part of the world will constantly travel to another part of the world.
This was inevitable, of course. The USA is a first-world nation with first-world wages; China is a third-world (probably second-world by now) nation with a tremendous industrial capacity.
This is not a new problem. We like to romanticize that North Carolina and New England were once the textile centers of America, but before industrialization, the railroad, and the like, each American town had its own textile center. Those very towns bemoaned the "outsourcing" of textile manufacturing and production in the mid-1800s to NC and NE, no doubt. The movement of the textile industries of the 20th century to Asia is just a variant on the same theme.
One lesson to the USA is that we must stay ahead economically, technically, and as innovators. Apple's iPad is a brilliant example. Lots of very talented, highly-paid engineers working in the USA; let the Chinese have the manufacturing. Let's trust train our sons and daughters to be engineers, not turn 18 and look for a union job on a manufacturing floor. Also, the information economy requires no manufacturing but is very good business and pays handsome wages. Let's not relinquish our American advantages in these and other markets.
Another lesson is that as the world has gotten flatter, in a mere 30 years (remember when "made in Taiwan" or "made in Japan" was a joke? I'm middle-aged and those were laughable in the 1970s), the living standards of the Chinese and Indians have risen. [I heard from one source that Chinese wages have risen, in real terms, by a factor of 10x. Soon they will not have huge cost advantages anymore.] In another 30 years I'll wager that their huge advantages in labor cost will be virtually gone, and manufacturing (cold fusion modules, ultra-light hydrogen rechargeable batteries, who knows) will start in the USA and never leave.
I believe that this trend toward outsourcing is temporary, on a cosmic scale. Perhaps our grandchildren will witness the return of manufacturing to the USA.
But for our lifetime at least, we can expect that anything we purchase that is made in quantities of tens of thousands will most likely be made overseas.
The overriding lesson to us is to not depend on manufacturing for employment as Americans. I have three children, all someday to be college bound, and all being pushed to never be blue collar, and to understand the distinction between white collar and blue collar. I say this not out of arrogance but out of practicality. Any American who allows his 18-year old to be satisfied with a blue collar union job is not doing the child a favor.
Another lesson is that job security, as our fathers and grandfathers knew it, are history. No one signs on with a company at age 22 and retires 43 years later. Think about it -- such longevity never made sense anyway. When the bean counters make decisions to shave cost here, close a plant there, it means some dislocation and job changes for employees. So be it. Just stay educated and on top of your industry and get other employment. I'm an engineer, a Chemical Engineer, and I have worked very few years as a Chem E. Ditto for technical colleagues, today, who have degrees in Physics, Math, biological sciences, etc. We've all been nimble, moved with the market and the economy, and stayed current enough to get past job interviews.
Hope I made myself clear; I ask your forgiveness in advance if I have irritated any personal sore spots.
Tom
There's another lesson from Apple -- that bean counters don't always dominate. For years, Apple has shipped a more expensive laptop; and even today's iPad costs more than a low-end HP laptop. Yet, iPad sales continue to explode. Why? Because Apple is a very clever, bold company which optimizes the blend between technology, performance, sales price, and marketing. And their products WORK by and large before entering the market. So consumers are willing to pay more.
Again, the lesson here is not what you expect -- train CEOs to become innovative and bold and tell their bean counters to go to h-ll (as I'm sure Steve Jobs did countless times) when they complain about cost, price, and market comparisons with other products.
Last point -- we should stop training Chinese and Indian engineers and scientists at our technical and business grad schools. Let them learn on their own and reserve all slots for Americans.
*YAWN*
I've been hearing the same crap from overeducated nincompoops most of my life.
From IBM claiming in the 50s that the world market for their biggest computers was 5 (Five,) to the ridicule of the personal computer (who needs one of those? What are they going to do with it?)
The latest innovation is cloud computing.
Wow.
No local hard drive to worry about. No software purchaes -ever.
Your data will never be lost!
Right. At what price?
Why, a monthly charge FOREVER!
Stop paying the monthlies?
Lose all you electronic records forever.
Such a deal!
Now it's the tablet thingies.
Yeah.
That's going to take the place of my 30-inch widescreen monitor where I can actually read and see several applications at once.
True, I can't put it in my pocket, but when I leave my house I actually have a life. I run all my equipment. None of it runs me.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. You made a lot of excellent points. Your confidence is inspiring. I can only hope that companies like Apple will become the rule, not the exception. And that there are enough good jobs for our citizens in the near term, to avoid an ugly, destructive mood among the voters who feel left out of the game.
Although I am a deep conservative I actually do have some sympathy for the blue collar types who cannot keep a good job because of transitions in their industry. That said, I also want to slap them silly for being so juvenile in their response to the rightward trend in state politics.
So a 25-year union fellow has watched his union, over the years, sling its political weight around and get more and more benefits for him -- better health care, better job protection, even (now that the dude is over 50) free Viagra!
So finally the taxpayers in his state revolt and throw out Dems, and Republicans do the common sense initiatives that throttle back wildly increasing expenses. Mr Union-man doesn't shrug and live with the fact that all pendulums swing in both directions -- he flips out, maybe becomes violent, acts like the world is coming to an end.
Get a life. Grow up. Do you think your parents would be proud of your behavior? Did you think that you had a lifetime guarantee of prosperity and coddling by the state government? [Spoken while slapping him silly.]
I used to work for a company that did that.
Darned near destroyed the company, and nearly shut-down the Boeing 777 assembly line, to boot.
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