Posted on 07/16/2003 10:42:49 AM PDT by IonInsights
Check your "six" on this bud.
This thread primarily is aimded at the Technology Industry.
This industry was prior to the last ten years primarily staffed by Americans born, raised, and educated in the United States.
That has all changed in the past ten years (as this thread amply demonstrates).
Swing over to the "low-tech" workers - the grunts who have to put bread on their table via cold, hard sweat and labor.
THAT segment has changed exponentially greater than the technology industry in the past ten years.
I'm talking farming, steel, carpentry, roads, meat processing, textiles, restaurant, hospitality, and other manual labor-based industries.
Have you been outside lately?
Can you say Mexican?
Get those and compete!
Nope, there is still lots more that would have to be given up.
I rarely agree with Kissinger, but on this he is dead right. He might also have said that a country needs this industrial capacity to properly defend it'self. Even though we already know how to produce materiel, having sent most of our strategic production base to other countries, will allow an antagonist to create havoc with us on both an economic and social scale.
We can rebuild our industrial base, but the lead time will be the killer in any real conflict.
I have nothing against the Mexicans. I have dug trenches with them (when I had a job), and observed their habits on a number of work sites. I could speak un poco Espanol, and we got along well.
They show up every day (unlike the gringos), they work hard (unlike the gringos), they don't take breaks (unlike the gringos) and they work for $10 per hour (unlike the gringos). They have good attitudes. They are, to make it simple, good employees.
If I were an employer, I would hire them in a minute over some tatooed jailbird derelict with no driver's license.
The other way to stop it is to get the govt to stop micro managing industry, and relieve industry of the shadow/sword of the legal trades.
We really don't need more ill-considered legislation, foisted on business by those who hardly worked a real job in their lives.
Our current leadership, for the most part, wouldn't know 'capitalism' if it smacked them between the eyes.
The foks at OSHA should really be subjected to their own regulations, and then outsourced.
Boy, you had better get over your idea of 'fairness', and realize who the 'enemy' is. The offshore cheap labor, will have no such compunction when it comes to your livelyhood.
Currently the US consumer is driving the economies of these offshore corps, but what happens when US consumers no longer have the means to buy anything due to a wholesale reduction in the living standard?
I'll tell you what: bloodshed.
Yes, of course. This guy is ready to compete:
To those I pinged many of you are already on this thread. I had to be out this afternoon.
Here is the problem: American work ethics have been eroded to almost nothing - zilch! Consequently, the American worker's image has been eroded as has the dignity of "An Honest Day's Work For An Honest Day's Wages."
I have no ought against the Mexican worker either, but they are singularly the most visible and tangible evidence that the "American Dream" is a rapidly deteriorating phenomenon perhaps sooner rather than later to be relegated to the dustbin of history.
Take away morality and ethics from the fiber and core of a great society or nation and that nation's greatness will cease to be within one or two generations.
History is loaded with such glorious ruins: Rome, Greece, China.
The whole world wants to come to America. By the time they get here, there won't be much left.
We be hurtin' toads, my friend.
I joked that the only reason the boss hired me was because I had a driver's license, which, as I learned later, may have been true. The other five guys I worked with all had theirs pulled for DUI. Two of them just got out of the joint. So I drove the van.
Whether or not the other guys would show up for work or not was an open question each day. Mostly they were a bunch of drunks. One guy was "gone" for two weeks, then mysteriously showed up for work. The boss never said squat. They slept on the job. They smoked dope on the job. They stole from customers. They took two hour lunch breaks on company time.
I, on the other hand, showed up early every day, never took any breaks, never used the company truck for personal business and stayed late. I didn't miss a day of work for an entire year.
The boss never even noticed the difference between me and the other guys.
It ended when I had just made him $120,000 pure profit (this is not a joke. I know what he was paid and what my labor cost him) by wiring two mansions over a period of four months. I asked him for a $500 bonus - meager by any standards - and instead he fired me from my $15/hour job, and spent six months trying to contest my award of unemployment insurance. Appealed it all the way to the state capitol.
It seems that being a good employee labels one as a sap these days. I know I sure felt like one...
If this jobless "recovery" is all that GW can show to American workers by the 2004, the Repub's can kiss the White House goodbye!
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