thank you...“Restore MADE IN USA or kiss our economy goodbye.”
People are fond of saying this as if we could flip a switch or change a law or trade agreement and it would happen. The government at many levels is the reason these jobs have left. The city, county, state or federal EPA inspector can spot a suspicious puddle on your manufacturing floor and order your plant closed. Just complying with the thousands of pages of their regulations costs millions of dollars. Then there’s OSHA and a host of other regulatory agencies whose real purpose is to shut your plant down. (Not on paper, but this is where the anti-corporate zealots work.) On top of that there are countless labor regulations any one of which could cost you multi-million dollar fines. And, of course the federal government will pay all the legal fees so people of color (is it okay to say that?) can sue you because they feel discriminated against. So, why did companies flee here by the million? Not because of cheap labor. For most, that was the smallest reason. But it’s always the one focused on by the media. They fled because the business environment has gone total-California.
To bring back business you’d literally have to fire all the regulatory agencies.
I’ve written about this before. An 18 year of girl from one of the EPA’s (not sure which one) came to inspect. She asked questions indicating she’d probably never been in a plant before. She seemed totally paranoid that we (a small quantity generator) were trying to pull a fast one. It seems she had it in her head that all of us evil corporations were contaminating the water and breeding Godzilla’s and she’d be the one held responsible for not catching and stopping us. I’ve never seen management sweat so hard.
Now, the company had its own legal teams and they’d be really hard to shut for very long. But the fear I witnessed spoke volumes about the tiny companies who don’t have lawyers on tap and buckets of money to spend.
thank you...I HATE THE OSHA JERKS!!! I had to deal with them. (Wasn’t my personal company at the time but one that I worked for.)
There operating procedure is that you MUST be doing something wrong and you MUST be fined for it and lying about it. They sent greenhorn idiot inspectors who knw absolutely nothing about the product or the methods of manufacturing the parts that came out of out factory. They didn’t find anything. They got a two day tour, took notes asked questions, said nothing was wrong, then went about for their review meeting behind closed doors.
Weeks later a book, it must have been 200 pages, of violations and fines showed up. Stuff they never even looked at that were proven to be incorrect. It went so far as to say the polarity in some wall sockets were wrong and needed to be fixed. WHAT!!! Polarity wrong on the wall sockets when NO ONE tested a wall socket. There were some perfunctory stupid ones like missing striped tape on safety bollards just to make it seem like they paid attention.
I can only imagine how bad the EPA is.