U.S. manufacturing jobs fading away fast

Yahoo/USA Today ^ | Fri Dec 13, 7:48 AM ET | Barbara Hagenbaugh

[arete]

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 movement of jobs to other countries angers Seitz the most.

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

[RLK]

Good Grief - try and find a cordless power tool other than DeWalt not made in China. It's an impossible task.

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As per an announcement several weeks ago the Dewalt plant in Talbot County Maryland is laying off 1,500 workers and moving out of the country.

[marbren]

It doesn't have to be a disaster - gloom-and-doom is not an inevitable part of a postindustrial society. But it does call for some retooling ;)

Your hope, it seems to me, is a utopian world. As I read Bible prophecy I find that an economic collapse may be one way the AntiChrist gains power. We will only have eternal peace and joy when Jesus rules from Jerusalem. This is what the Bible says.