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Makes you wonder, doesn't it? How many factories closed in the state in the three years before that, or in fact, during the entire Clinton administration? How many manufacturing jobs were lost during that time?

In the Pittsburgh region, it was not good before that either. Factories were closing. What seems to be the immediate crisis is that the last of the major factories that had professed their determination to remain "Made-in-America" have recently bolted for Mexico and China - R.D. Werner being a significant example (ladder manufacturer).

Interesting article at GoGov.com on this subject.

Pandering Buzzwords The latest buzzwords of the Democrat candidates is overseas outsourcing. The question is, how does a government prevent a company from outsourcing overseas?

The answer is, recreate a favorable business climate in the U.S. Contrary to popular myth, it is not cheap labor that finds companies locating overseas.

Many companies that set up factories overseas do not install much of the equipment that would routinely be used in a U.S. factory. The amortization schedule simply does not provide a payoff for the investment in the equipment. Instead, the machines are never used. In such instances, it is cheap labor replacing a machine - not U.S. workers.

What drives companies overseas are other costs of doing business in the U.S. such as onerous government reporting requirements, human resources policy management, and insurances to name a few. Any one of these line items of non-productive expenses can exceed the entire administrative cost of a medium sized factory located overseas.

If Kerry and Edwards [and the labor leaders] have something to say about outsourcing, let them tell us how they plan to stop the U.S. government from driving jobs overseas. As U.S. senators, they need only look in the mirror to see where the problem of lost jobs due to overseas outsourcing has been created.

"What drives companies overseas are other costs of doing business in the U.S. such as onerous government reporting requirements, human resources policy management, and insurances to name a few."

Don't forget to mention the fact that cost-of-living in America is 10X higher due to parasitical factors that have nothing to do with producing anything? (e.g. high taxes spent to support over-paid gov't. employees and "elected" servants").

So many people are on the scam in the good ol' USA (darn workers want a "living wage", they should be happy with a bowl of rice like Chinese workers) it's impossible to make a profit for those shareholders that inherited their fortune from Grandma! :o~

I had not previously heard about Werner moving manufacturing to China. Interestingly, it seems that job losses to Mexico due to NAFTA largely occurred during the Clinton years. During the time that GWB has been President, Mexico has been losing jobs to China, and it has been much more likely that US manufacturing jobs were also going to China rather than to Mexico. When jobs are lost to China, it's hard to see how you can blame NAFTA, but that's exactly what Edwards has been doing recently.