Posted on 12/14/2002 10:22:42 AM PST by 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.''
As empty containers are loaded onto container ships in the U.S. bound for China.
It all sounds like your opnion to me.
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Opinions, or half-supported opinions by some people on this forum are to be treated as incontestable fact. The same is true of temper tantrums.
It all sounds like your opnion to me.
Ask, and ye shall receive...
From another thread that was dissing NAFTA, I wrote:
"the unemployment rate in 1992 was 7.5%, and the most recent year for which we have full figures is 2001, for which the unemployment rate was 4.8%."
Source is US Dept of Labor. If you want higher unemployment numbers than that, just go back a bit further, say to the Carter administration.
Now for personal income. These numbers cover two periods of equivalent length - one before NAFTA, and one as NAFTA was coming into effect:
These numbers are inflation-adjusted, and represent total growth in personal income over the period:
1984-1992 - 12.2% growth in personal income per capita
1992-2000 - 14.6% growth in personal income per capita
On the effects of trade, name two major trading partners that have gone to war in the last fifty years. You'll have a tough time finding such a pair. There's a famous dictum that says that no two countries that both have a McDonalds in them has ever gone to war. That's a quick way to express the positive consequences of global trade.
Yes, other countries do making it attractive for U.S. companies to move their production overseas.
A more correct assessment, though, is that it is more a matter of businesses being chased overseas by business hating groups and government agencies, overregulation and costs over liability and workers comp insurance here in the U.S.
If conditions were right in this country, business would stay. That businesses move overseas only for cheap labor is a convenient myth. In some labor intensive industries, labor costs are an important factor. But even in labor intesive industries, the labor savings is only one componant of the many other benefits.
Almost the first thing you've said that I agree with. But I think objective observers can tell who is depending on facts and who is doing the half-supported opinions and temper tantrums.
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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.
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More like 10X or more. Kind of like what the slaves in the old South in this country made. By God, we've moved the slave quarters on the old plantations thousands of miles away where the people in the new American plantation houses can live in ease while obscuring the process.
A little off subject but the CIA has been very active in Central American for years. Knew a young lady who used a "government grant" to spend 3 months a year down there "studying" the native populations and writing reports which were dutifully turned in to the "sponsoring" agency. BTW, when asked if our government was actively involved in the politics there, she refused to talk about it.
Richard W.
It's either slavery by choice or slavery by programming. A person could actually live pretty cheaply, with some of the incredible bargains out there. The problem is really with housing. You'll know people are beginning to smarten up when you see rooms being rented out in oversized houses.
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