Manufacturing In The US Is Making A Historic Comeback

Business Insider ^ | 12/15/2012 | Charles Fishman

[SeekAndFind]

For much of the past decade, General Electric’s storied Appliance Park, in Louisville, Kentucky, appeared less like a monument to American manufacturing prowess than a memorial to it.

The very scale of the place seemed to underscore its irrelevance. Six factory buildings, each one the size of a large suburban shopping mall, line up neatly in a row. The parking lot in front of them measures a mile long and has its own traffic lights, built to control the chaos that once accompanied shift change. But in 2011, Appliance Park employed not even a tenth of the people it did in its heyday. The vast majority of the lot’s spaces were empty; the traffic lights looked forlorn.

In 1951, when General Electric designed the industrial park, the company’s ambition was as big as the place itself; GE didn’t build an appliance factory so much as an appliance city. Five of the six factory buildings were part of the original plan, and early on Appliance Park had a dedicated power plant, its own fire department, and the first computer ever used in a factory. The facility was so large that it got its own ZIPcode (40225). It was the headquarters for GE’s appliance division, as well as the place where just about all of the appliances were made.

By 1955, Appliance Park employed 16,000 workers. By the 1960s, the sixth building had been built, the union workforce was turning out 60,000 appliances a week, and the complex was powering the explosion of the U.S. consumer economy.

The arc that followed is familiar. Employment kept rising through the ’60s, but it peaked at 23,000 in 1973, 20 years after the facility first opened. By 1984, Appliance Park had fewer employees than it did in 1955.

[BfloGuy]

No one can compete when labor in a cheap labor nation is 10%, or even 5% or less of what it is in the US.

They can compete if the productivity of that cheap labor is "10%, or even 5%" of what it is here. It is the productivity that counts more than the hourly wage.

In some cases, American labor will not be able to compete -- in others, as shown in this article -- it can. Offshoring was a fad. It won't disappear, but there are still advantages to producing many goods in America.

At least until Obama can figure out how to erase them.

[Will88]

hey can compete if the productivity of that cheap labor is "10%, or even 5%" of what it is here. It is the productivity that counts more than the hourly wage.

Not when the same technology and manufacturing facilities can be established in the cheap labor nation as in the nation where the technology originated.

And the advanced nations with the advanced technology and less than a billion in population are seeking the cheap labor in nations with 3 to 4 billion in population.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Gotta take care of Da Peeps if you want a place at the table in Barry’s New Fascist Economy.

[mosesdapoet]

BI is BS and a front for the administration

[RipSawyer]

It is not so much that we don’t have jobs that can be done by someone with a high school education, it is instead that we don’t have HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES with a high school education. In fact numerous reports have said that we don’t have high school graduates with even an eighth grade education. In most cases we don’t have college graduates with a REAL high school education. If kindergarten through high school years were used for teaching as they used to be there would be no need for more than a very small percentage of the university classrooms that we now fill.

Check out the kind of jobs being done by these college graduates, it doesn’t look like they are doing anything that a typical high school dropout should not be able to do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XScQCaLmtAw