Posted on 08/23/2004 9:48:35 AM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
Motivated by the massive loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs to foreign outsourcing, a Milwaukee group is in the midst of a national campaign to convince consumers to buy American-made products.
We Employ America is using television and print advertisements to deliver its message. Locally produced advertisements already have aired on CNN.
The campaign is the brainchild of Jeff Cowie, who retired in 2002 as vice president of sales and marketing at Johnson Level & Tool Manufacturing Co., a Mequon hand-tool manufacturer. Cowie worked for 15 years at Johnson Level & Tool, the last six of which the company spent "strongly fighting off Asian imports," he said.
The first TV ads for We Employ America aired July 22 on "Lou Dobbs Tonight," a program on CNN whose host has been highly critical of American companies that outsource production and jobs.
The initial 30-second television spot features rapid-fire images of abandoned factories and downtrodden workers as a solemn-voice narrator states: "Since 2001, millions of our own have been lost overseas, never to be seen again. Where are the monuments built in their memory? You're looking at one."
We Employ America is designed to pool the resources of American manufacturers to urge consumers to purchase American-made products in order to support U.S. jobs and economic stability, even if it means paying more, Cowie said.
"You need to get the message to consumers. The only way to do that is to advertise," Cowie said. "This is the consumers' call to arms."
Cowie has been busy spreading the We Employ America message. He appeared via live feed Aug. 18 on CNBC's morning talk show, "Squawk Box."
After taking early retirement, Cowie, 51, did consulting work for Catral Doyle Creative Inc., a Milwaukee public relations firm.
Clients disappearing
Cowie and Catral Doyle Creative owner Susan Catral were preparing to call on a prospective client in April 2003 only to learn that the Milwaukee-area manufacturer, which Cowie declined to name, had decided to close its local plant and outsource all of its production.
"I got out in the car and got on my soapbox and became unglued," Cowie said.
Cowie, with support from Catral, decided he needed to do something to halt the loss of American manufacturing jobs.
"We needed to create a hard-hitting message that conveys to the consumer this crisis," he said.
The United States has lost 2.9 million manufacturing jobs, or 17 percent of total manufacturing jobs, over the past four years, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
In order to qualify for membership in We Employ America, companies must produce at least 65 percent of a given product in the United States. Membership allows companies to place a prominent "We Employ America" tag on the product. Companies that operate overseas plants aren't excluded from membership, as long as they also maintain production in the United States.
"We don't take a protectionist attitude," Cowie said. "We recognize this is a global marketplace."
Membership fees for finished-goods producers are $10,000 for companies with annual revenue of less than $100 million; $20,000 for those with yearly sales of more than $100 million.
For an additional $8,000, companies can sponsor a specific ad, which allows them to pitch their products at the end of the We Employ American television spot.
The group also offers lower-priced memberships ranging from $500 to $2,000 for suppliers that provide parts to finished goods producers. Suppliers aren't able to place a We Employ America tag on the parts they produce. However, such companies can use the tag on their letterhead, business forms, even their delivery vehicles, Cowie said.
All members are listed on the group's Web site, at www.weemployamerica.com.
Cowie and Catral have funded the group's operations to this point. Cowie declined to provide the group's start-up budget. We Employ America shares office space with Catral Doyle Creative in Milwaukee's 3rd Ward.
Only three takers
Thus far, only three companies have signed on as members: Mr. LongArm Inc., a Greenwood, Mo., manufacturer of extendable paint rollers and janitorial supplies; HD Hudson Manufacturing Co., a Chicago-based maker of garden sprayers and dusters; and Badger Metal Tech Inc., a small Menomonee Falls firm specializing in die surface treatments for new and used tooling.
We Employ America is working with several Milwaukee companies to spread its message. The initial television spot was filmed by Purple Onion, a Milwaukee video production house. The Lynne Broydrick Group is serving as the group's public relations firm and M2C Inc. is its media buyer.
Getting consumers to look beyond price is key to the We Employ America campaign, said Jerald Skoff, chief executive officer of Badger Metal Tech.
"The American public has taken the mind-set of 'buy it cheaper,' " Skoff said. "People used to brag about how much they paid for something. Now they brag about how little they pay. We're slitting our own throats."
Last year, Skoff co-founded the Wisconsin Chapter of Save American Manufacturing. Unlike We Employ America, Skoff's group has taken a strong stance on U.S. trade policies, urging the United States to withdraw from the World Trade Organization and to rescind China's status as a "most favored nation" trading partner.
Cowie is scheduled to speak at the Manufacturing & Economic Recovery Conference in Chicago Sept. 13-15.
"The crisis in manufacturing is deep and long," said Peggy Smedley, an organizer of the conference and publisher of Start, a Carol Stream, Ill., magazine designed for manufacturing executives.
"You have to become one voice to become louder," Smedley said. "The louder the voice, the more dramatic the message."
ping
I will do whatever I can to make sure I buy American made. Period and end of statement.
> ... campaign to convince consumers to buy
> American-made products ...
Several problems:
1. A great many products are simply not made in USA at all.
Just considering my PC, which I built from parts, perhaps
the only parts actually made in USA are the RAM (Idaho),
and the CPU (Texas, but might have been Germany). But
almost ALL the software, it's worth noting, is US.
All the other hardware was made in China, Ireland, Japan,
Korea, Mexico or Taiwan - and there are in most case NO
US factories making these items, even though they are
US-branded.
2. Those that appear to be US-made often aren't.
My Voyager van was made in Canada. No way to know that
until after delivery.
These sorts of campaigns are bound to fail. The only
thing that will make any real difference is changing
the underlying conditions that make the US uncompetitive
in factory manufacturing - taxes, regulations.
those wacky randriods always up to something. :)
If it's a choice between buying a bad American-made product and a good foreign-made product, yes, I would buy the foreign-made product. But I think it's patriotic to shop for American-made products when there's a reasonable choice.
When I see bumper stickers of American flags, "God Bless the U.S.A", etc. on cars, I now look to see if the car is foreign or American made.
I'm surprised to see how many of the cars are, indeed, foreign-made. One must appreciate the irony.
Of course the more businessmen that have this attitude will lead to an America that will be quite unamerican. It will lead to a European style social democracy with the social problems of Brazil when the votes of the workers that are displaced are added up with the votes of poor immigrants.
As I said before, if these trends are not stopped, businessmen like this one will be quite unhappy that they pay over 40% of their income to the FEDs, close to 15% of their taxes to to state and local agencies and they have that nasty "Health Security" payroll tax that would have been put in place in 2009. Can someone tell these guys that Social Darwinism has never worked?
see www.samnow.org
I've been a member for 2 years.
Somehow or other, the Wisconsin Senator from Planet X (Feingold) managed to catch the wave on this issue--which was roundly ignored by all the Pubbies.
Then about 6 months ago, some of the Pubbies began to come around--Jim Sensenbrenner visited Red China in January and came out shaking his head. He'll help a bit.
But as long as GWB has decided that giving PRC a free pass on its shenanigans is "in the national interest(???)", nothing will change.
And, by the way, Kerry's in exactly the same spot as Bush. Neither of them give a fart.
About 25-40% of ANY "US-made" car is made in PRChina--the sub-assemblies for most of the hydraulic systems, the brake pads, good hunks of the a/c and plastic parts...
The Big Three have forced that, explicitly, telling Tier 1 and Tier 2 vendors that they WILL have offshore plants, or there's no purchase agreement.
At long last, a few people begin to see and understand that we are destroying America with outsourcing! It is a sad commentary when there are only three members - it shows how far along the path of national suicide we have gone.
If you want on or off my offshoring ping list, please FReepmail me!
Not a bad idea if the campaign is VOLUNTARY.
But not if it is forced through legislation.
The annoying thing is that there are few if any political figures at any level, in any venue, that care about this issue. I sense a divide between the governed and those who govern that is broad and deep - perhaps every bit as great as the gulf between the French nobility and the commoners during the reign of Louis XVI.
Marie Antoinette, when informed that the people had no bread, responded "Then let them eat cake." Our present "leadership" are less intellectual than the Queen of France - they just scratch themselves in some inappropriate spot while mumbling "lower prices for consumers." They then pick their nose with the same hand.
Buying American is akin to Marxism? Please . . .
Free trade is anything but. Investigate the tarrifs levied against us by our "free trade" partners in Europe and Asia sometime. When you get bored with the repetition of that, look into the sourcing practices of the Japanese companies stateside.
Where do you draw the line should 90% and is that fair to us? of what is on the shelves be foreign made? I feel 10% only should be imported as a strong economy is based on from the earth up manufacturing.
How about outsourcing all politicians who impose tax and regulation costs on American made products but not on foreign made products.
The root cause of the desire most people have for extreme cost reduction is the following vicious cycle. During the period from the end of WW2 until the 1990s, expectations regarding "normal" material possessions, home decor and other things which generally cost a lot of money increased dramatically. In order to deal with this, people increasingly allowed themselves to sink deeper and deeper into debt. As this obviously self destructive death spiral hit a point where it threatened the global economy in 1997, the Fed embarked on its current insane policy of lowering the prime to a point where negative appreciation of assets is not out of the question. And in a remarkable and ironic twist of Communist strategy, the PRC used the obvious demand for low cost manufacturing sites, set forth by material goods sellers who needed to further appeal to debt ridden material addicts via drastic cost reductions, to seize both the means of production as well as the means of debt financing. So now, we, the Capitalist West, have lost the two things we always had (and which Lenin set forth his bile to castigate) and they are being turned against us by the Communists. The Communists are now buying what is really bad debt, since the assets of those currently "repairing" their credit via refis will never be able to cover the principle, let alone the total loan costs, within the debtors' lifetimes. Is this like a game of Go or something?
....and that's the GOOD news.
KerryBush have the same story on H1B's, L1's and illegals.
So if the job is not exported to PRChina, you'll lose it to cheaper foreign imported labor.
What a Country!!
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