To: ninenot
With respect to labor, sure, they should get paid for their work, but if there's no work, then they should be fired or laid off. They have no stake in the business, and no loyalty. They'll leave in a heartbeat for more money someplace else.
If you own your own business, you can't be fired. You have to please your customers, but if one prospective customer doesn't like what you have to offer, it's a big world, keep moving.
It's just a completely different mentality. I have you figured for a paycheck kind of guy. Everybody who bitches about jobs being offshored is a paycheck kind of guy, lower level, too. Ya'll suffer from a failure of imagination.
Because upper level types realize that cheaper labor means more money for sales, support, management, r&d. We aren't offshoring r&d, we aren't offshoring management, or sales.
In 1900, almost 40 percent of employed people worked on farms. At the end of this century, less than 2 percent of the employed population works on farms. The agricultural sector contributed around 20 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product in 1900; now that share is only about 1 percent.
I don't think we'd have even that many farmers except for USDA subsidies.
So, all the farmers left the farms and went to work in factories. And now they're going to have to do something else, because the factories are going away, too. And so it goes.
You see that as a bad thing, I see it as a good thing. You would have been one of the Luddites, back in the old days, that wanted to smash the factories because they were taking market share away from home-based manufacturing and shops.
There is a reasonable argument to be made in favor of protectionism to protect new industries that are just getting on their feet, but the US industries which are going offshore are not new industries, they're mature industries that are looking for competetive advantage. If they can't go offshore for labor, they'll go under, and the US will lose not only the blue collar labor, but the white collar labor as well. Foolish.
To: CobaltBlue
Well, I thought you might have been intelligent--before your name-calling and derogations commenced.
Another set of expectations vanished--poof!
263 posted on
03/23/2004 11:56:33 AM PST by
ninenot
(Minister of Membership, TomasTorquemadaGentlemen'sClub)
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