U.S. manufacturing jobs fading away fast

ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- Charles Seitz remembers when Rochester was a bustling manufacturing town. Now, all the 58-year-old unemployed engineer sees is a landscape of empty buildings.

''There's nothing made here anymore,'' the former Eastman Kodak employee says, his eyes welling with tears as he talks about his struggle to find a new job. ''Wealth is really created by making things. I still adhere to that.''

It's a situation that's been playing out across the country for decades but has received increased attention in recent years.

Fifty years ago, a third of U.S. employees worked in factories, making everything from clothing to lipstick to cars. Today, a little more than one-tenth of the nation's 131 million workers are employed by manufacturing firms. Four-fifths are in services.

The decline in manufacturing jobs has swiftly accelerated since the beginning of 2000. Since then, more than 1.9 million factory jobs have been cut -- about 10% of the sector's workforce. During the same period, the number of jobs outside manufacturing has risen close to 2%.

Many of the factory jobs are being cut as companies respond to a sharp rise in global competition. Unable to raise prices -- and often forced to cut them -- companies must find any way they can to reduce costs and hang onto profits.

Jobs are increasingly being moved abroad as companies take advantage of lower labor costs and position themselves to sell products to a growing -- and promising -- market abroad. Economy.com, an economic consulting firm in West Chester, Pa., estimates 1.3 million manufacturing jobs have been moved abroad since the beginning of 1992 -- the bulk coming in the last three years. Most of those jobs have gone to Mexico and East Asia.

Last month, film giant Eastman Kodak -- the largest employer in Rochester and the central focus of the community since the company was founded by George Eastman in 1888 -- announced it was shutting down an area plant and laying off the 500 employees who make single-use, sometimes called ''throw-away,'' cameras. The work will now be done in China or Mexico, two countries where the company already has operations.

''The United States got to where it is today by making things,'' he says. ''People are suffering, and communities are suffering.''

But the way things are going the guys writing your software are going to be in India or China.

You know, it's a funny thing. I keep hearing all about that, but I can't find any numbers to support it. And the three companies I have known that went that route all abandoned it.

I'm in the software business, and creating software is not now, and may never be, a grind-it-out process that can be sent to a commodity developer. Every generation of code I write has fewer lines of code and depends on understanding the needs of the users and clients better, which keeps on increasing my competitive advantage over people that are (1) 10,000 miles away, and (2) have marginal English, writing, and general communication skills.

So if you have numbers that really show a trend, I'd be interested to see them. My own experience tells me that the whole Indian/Chinese programmer thing was just a reaction to excess demand in the late nineties and is already fading as a trend.

If you get rid of your pipes and computer which are manufactured goods you won't need those services either.

We can make those things here if we need them - in fact the last PVC pipe I got said "Made in USA". And many computer parts are also made here, including the most high value part, the CPU. I live close to Dell, the biggest computer assembler on the planet. So I'm not exactly worried about those things.

I'm not implying that we don't need manufacturing. But the idea that manufacturing always has to dominate the economy the way it did in the industrial era seems silly to me. We can only use so much stuff. But I don't see any end to demand for services.

Remember that Ricardo's Theory of Comparitive Advantage says everyone needs to do what they do well, and that specializing in different economic activities benefits all parties. (Actually it's a good bit more complicated than that, but for a first cut interpretation, that will do.) We can't reap the benefits of that without global trade. If that means the PVC pipe ends up getting made in Indonesia because they are so good at it, I fail to see what's wrong with that. If they're going to sell it to us, they have to buy something from us - dollars are just paper or computer bits. And the stuff we sell (goods and services) will be the things we do better.

"The federal boys have had it real easy for the last couple of decades, and they don't seem to remember how it feels when your intended target starts shooting back.

Like I said, there won't be enough to go around. "

Are you some kind of survivalist nut case? Those sound like the words that setup Ruby Ridge and Waco. We are together in this thing -- the idea that all will collapse in anarchy is peddled by power-hungry maniacs with weak-minded followers and/or boys with toys and no concept of the responsibility aspects of freedom.

Get a grip.

You're kidding right?

Colleges across the country have had to shut their doors to new CS and MIS students. The programs are absolutely jammed. Meanwhile liberal arts profs have been left whining that nobody's majoring in their stuff anymore.

For good or for bad college just isn't what it was 30 years ago. More students work, and few have the time or interest in protesting anything. And everybody's interested in how much money they're going to make.

A brilliant foreign policy justifying pandering to the resentment of other nations and forced redistribution of American recources to those nations under one-world socialism...... I have yet to see you say anything remotely in support of capitalism. You seem to be trying to pound a socialist critique of free trade into an anti-socialist hole.

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How does your diffuse retort have any relevance to what I said?

But we're bleeding badly - a trade deficit of $500 billion a year is no small thing. How long can we sustain that?

Ironically, trade deficits are characteristic of a prosperous society, which has more buying power than those who have the trade surplus with them.
Countries with poor economic conditions and slower growth, have the lowest demand for imports.
Chinese earning $10/week simply don't have the purchasing power that creates a great demand for imports.
So it's no surprise we would not run a trade surplus with them.

The low wages paid to their workers are keeping their society poor while benefiting us with inexpensive goods.
Of course we could protect all these low-skilled jobs to keep them in the USA, and then force Americans to pay twice as much for the same goods..which means we would have less money to spend on other things, and have to lower our standard of living.
There's more than one way to look at this problem.

wcbtinman,

Didn't take long for someone to call you a "weak-minded survivalist nut case" did it? You obviously need to get a grib. Maybe a few months in a government reeducation camp will get you "thinking straight."

Unfortatedly, most Americans will believe and accept almost anything, They like their level of comfort and don't like having the boat rocked. They will give up freedom before the plasma TV monitor.

Richard W.

"Unfortatedly, most Americans will believe and accept almost anything"

Yep, right out of the Randy Weaver hymnal. This is a very true statement, but the "almost anything" is this misguided idea that the Black Helicopters are coming. There is no "government reeducation camp" nor anything even similar to it.

I could try to convince you that the government is NOT planning on becoming a Police State, but, alas, the liberals are still out there with exactly such plans. But words and statesmanship, not guns, will win the day.

It's pretty easy to call anyone who agrees with the current administrations direction as some sort of puppet (check out your buddies at the DU). I am fine with where we are going and do not share your paranoid thoughts, nor do I find my freedoms constricted by the conservative platform.

Ironically, trade deficits are characteristic of a prosperous society...

----------------------

Not really. They are more characteristic of societies able to compel other nations to take useless credit under military threat, or of once-prosperous societies now operating on unredeamable false promises and credit.

So what exactly is wrong with a service-based economy?

It doesn't create anything material, unless it creates a nation of butlers.

The whole premise of this "we have to have a big manufacturing base!" mantra seems to be that we need ever more "stuff" to power our economy. We don't! We already have more than we can use!

Yes, I noticed you tried to head off the most damaging of weaknesses of a global distributed economy. The fact is, if others make the things out country needs to operate, we can be in real trouble if they get pissed at us. This is not a joke.

What evidence do you have that human beings have evolved spiritually beyond the point where they hate, envy, lust after power and domination? You think global co-dependence will keep those characteristics in check? How many foolish things have you seen people do following the negative emotions of the human condition, even when it means their destruction?

What I need to live a better life is services. Someone who can fix my plumbing, so that I don't have to do it. Someone to write software that will help me extract information from the web. etc. etc.

But all those service operate on and using material products. If there are no material products, there need be no services, unless it be butler and cook.

Your plumbing is made up of pipes, fixtures and toilets. Software needs computers and printers.

It's pretty easy to call anyone who agrees with the current administrations direction as some sort of puppet (check out your buddies at the DU). I am fine with where we are going and do not share your paranoid thoughts, nor do I find my freedoms constricted by the conservative platform.

I'm not a republican; nor a democrat, nor a nazi, nor a communist. Your words show a lack of complex thought on your own. All you know how to do is try to label people so as to discredit them because they don't agree with your linear would. You are an outstanding example of why all patriotic taxpaying citizens must work daily to protect the constitiution and the country.

Richard W.

Repeat after me:

People can only buy stuff if they have money. They can only have money if they make stuff to sell.

I know that rote repetition is oft times frowned upon as a learning method, but in certain situations, like the multiplication tables, foreign language irregular verbs and basic concepts in economics, it appears to be the only effective method.

I posted this a few days ago on another similar thread. It's still true.
I'm always amazed at you guys who think there is no manufacturing left in this country. That thinking is what caused Pat Buchanan a shot at being president in 96. He made a speech in Columbia, SC in which he said there were no longer any electronics manufacturing jobs left in the U.S. That day Bose Electronics had a full-page ad in the "State" newspaper looking for, guess what? They employ many people here making a great radio.

Michelin Tire makes more tires in Lexington, SC than they do in France. BMW makes more cars in SC, than in Germany.
Bridgestone Tire makes more tires in Aiken, SC than they do in Japan. Mercedes makes more cars in Alabama than in
Germany. The Japanese make more cars in Tennessee than they do in Japan. Chrysler is planning a multi hundred million dollar plant for S. Ga. and I could go on and on. Yes, the large concentration of manufacturing in Detroit, Pittsburgh, etc. is gone, and yes much of the capacity is foreign owned, but the jobs are here.

If we had more manufacturing, where would we get the manpower to man it? We have approximately ten million illegal immigrants working to cover jobs now. They are no good at manufacturing or the above companies would be in there country.

You want more jobs, push for the repeal of the 16th amendment and all other federal tax. Replace it with a simple sales tax.
You will have companies fighting to get here.

"Ironically, trade deficits are characteristic of a prosperous society..."

Not really.

Yes really.
A survey of the U.S. economy since 1973 confirms that the economy has performed better in years in which the trade deficit rose than in years in which it shrank.

The smallest American merchandise trade deficit since 1982, $74 billion in 1991, occurred during the period's only recession.

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