Posted on 12/31/2006 6:25:30 AM PST by A. Pole
AMERICAN manufacturers no longer make subway cars. They are imported now, and the skills required to make them are disappearing in the United States. Similarly, imports are an ever-bigger source of refrigerators, household furnishings, auto and aircraft parts, machine tools and a host of everyday consumer products much in demand in America, but increasingly not made here.
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the experts shifted the emphasis from production to design and innovation. Let others produce what Americans think up.
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But over the long run, can invention and design be separated from production? That question is rarely asked today. The debate instead centers on the loss of well-paying factory jobs and on the swelling trade deficit in manufactured goods. When the linkage does come up, the answer is surprisingly affirmative: Yes, invention and production are intertwined.
"Most innovation does not come from some disembodied laboratory," said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. "In order to innovate in what you make, you have to be pretty good at making it — and we are losing that ability."
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Franklin J. Vargo, the association’s vice president for international economic affairs, sounds even more concerned than Mr. Cohen. "If manufacturing production declines in the United States," he said, "at some point we will go below critical mass and then the center of innovation will shift outside the country and that will really begin a decline in our living standards."
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"It is hard to imagine," Mr. Tonelson said, "how an international economy can remain successful if it jettisons its most technologically advanced components."
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
What about employers/owners/shareholders/management? Do they "make too much" too? Will they be replaced as the industries is relocated to cheaper/poorer countries? Of course they will, and it will serve them right!
"As for someone earning $27 an hour to do what appears to you to be "no-talent" work, what are you comparing it to? And what qualifies you to judge the matter?"
It doesn't really matter if someone is "qualified" to judge whether work performed at $27 per hour is worth it. What matters is whether that $27-per-hour worker is pricing his employer's goods out of the market.
Some one's just padding the books. /snicker
"If we design it, we still know how to make it."
My years of experience, trying to turn blueprints and specifications into reality, argue against your thesis.
Perhaps, and so were the Romans, Spanish and British before their empires started to collapse.
unions driving the cost of labor up
For the entire U.S. economy, only 12.5% of wage and salary workers were union members in 2005. So it is not just unions. How about regulations, taxation, litigation, and health care? All of these make us not competitive with the 3rd world, slave labor countries we compete against. I don't like unions and have never been in a union, but it is a lazy argument for the uniformed. Not all manufacturing is car building. That is an industry where the union and bad bargaining by management has created its demise.
How do you propose placing a tariff on intellectual property?
Who made the blueprint?
They couldn't have designed successfully it if they didn't know how it gets built.
If we collapse, it will be because of uncontrolled immigration and because we lost our way morally as a people.
Buggy whip industry in America was not replaced by the cheaper Chinese labor. It was replaced by the more efficient technology IN AMERICA, providing HIGHER paying jobs.
Cheap labor in the key inhibitor of technological progress as several historical examples show.
Its a similar story across most of the country. Lots of start up manufacturers too.
And I specifically buy all made in USA products. If 1/4 of the people griping about overseas manufacturing whould follow that mode, even more manufacturers will stay put as well.
"...the cost of production is all that matters."
That's a very good point.
If it's not unions driving the price of labor, there's also taxes and other mandates coming out of DC.
There will always be an issue with cheaper labor existing abroad - these countries generally have much lower standards of living and their people are willing to work for a drastically lower wage.
My sense is that it will take a few generations for the free market to even the playing field (e.g. standards of living here and abroad finding equilibrium). This will not help the American worker, who will suffer most in this adjustment (while 3rd world workers will benefit most).
American workers will vote for politicians who will offer to protect their incomes, which I feel will breed protecitonism.
"What about employers/owners/shareholders/management? Do they "make too much" too? Will they be replaced as the industries is relocated to cheaper/poorer countries? Of course they will, and it will serve them right!
Yes, employers and owners will be replaced by their competition if their labor costs versus those of their competitors prevent them from selling their goods.
"The problem comes when the cookie cutter MBA's try to shoe horn every industry into the management fad of the day while never even glancing up from the spread sheet."
Good one. You also have the MBA's in HR spouting the latest propaganda slogan every day. It's gotten so bad in my company that their sloganeering sounds like something from the cultural revolution. I made that comment in a report I sent to HR and they never said a word. I thought they would have least been insulted but maybe they thought it was a compliment.
Philips, like many, many European companies, has manufacturing centers in cheap-labor markets (Asia and Eastern Europe), and is increasingly outsourcing production in entire components to foreign shops. If you're going to cite Philips as an example, you're going to have to cite them as an example of how manufacturing is _not_ the be-all end-all of innovation or economic vitality.
"How about regulations, taxation, litigation, and health care? All of these make us not competitive with the 3rd world, slave labor countries we compete against. "
All good points that the author of the aritcle should have mentioned.
And there's the root of the problem.
You think you own the shop as a union member and can dictate terms for everyone else. The only reason that is, is because of unfair protection through the law.
Let's flip that around. Why shouldn't the business owner be able to fire you and your union and hire whomever they like?
"Perhaps, and so were the Romans, Spanish and British before their empires started to collapse."
With the small difference that each of those 'empires' were built upon and operating within completely different global economic systems than the one in which the United States operates today.
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