Destroying American Jobs (ie Kodak)

[regular.joe]

So I think we may agree on the problem, if there is a problem. If I have you correct you want more Americans to work in the goods producing industries, and there are not enough Americans qualified to work in goods producing industries?

Americans do not want to work in goods producing industries unless they have to. Americans would rather work at an AT&T store and sell the Iphone and service plan then in a factory making the phone.

You are going to have to show me the numbers on how labor at $2 per hour costs more in Mexico then labor at $10 per hour in CT.

[classicman]

Too many Americans are educated in communication, finance, law, or business schools.

[gvidas]

I've been slacking at holding up the crunchy-idealist dept, sorry.


Grace Lee Boggs on the MLK Day celebration in Detroit:

Our program began with a video montage of small groups growing their own food and building community in Detroit. This was followed by a power point presentation of excerpts from King’s speeches,. I especially welcomed this excerpt from his 1967 anti-Vietnam war speech:

‘”We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.”

Our main speaker was philosopher and community catalyst Frithjof Bergmann. Bergmann said that one of the main reasons why we are a thing-oriented rather than a person-oriented society is that most jobs in our industrial society manacle us to machines.

So we try to compensate for our dehumanization on the job by struggling for higher wages that enable us to buy bigger cars and fancier clothes. In other words, we become consumers and materialists, more concerned with our possessions than with community or our relationships with each other.

However, this job system is only a few hundred years old and it is rapidly being made obsolete by HI-Tech which eliminates jobs but also makes it possible for local groups to produce most of our real needs ( e.g. for clothing, housing and transportation) with the same ease with which it has made possible independent book and film production.

Therefore since we can now practice the system of self-reliant local production of most of our real needs, we should not be trying to bring back a job system which is not only dehumanizing but has jeopardized all life on our planet by poisoning our air and our waters.

Instead of organizing marches and demonstrations demanding jobs, as many radical and community organizations have been doing, we need to use Hi Tech to make our commiuities more self-reliant.

Emphasis added. The bolded sentences particularly resonate with me -- I work as a fabricator (electric signs) in the suburbs making some fairly soulless dreck. The days when I make a sign with a tiny bit of character to it are markedly better days.

[Lamplighter]

Originally Posted by gvidas

<snip>
Emphasis added. The bolded sentences particularly resonate with me -- I work as a fabricator (electric signs) in the suburbs making some fairly soulless dreck. The days when I make a sign with a tiny bit of character to it are markedly better days.

Two points:

1) Here in PDX, it's remarkable to me how many "professional" acquaintances
are making efforts towards local produce, re-cycling, and various degrees of self-reliance.
Sometimes it depends on the kind of work they do and whether their job allow them freedom to wander.
Sometimes it's just a hobby...but software programmers seem to do well at it

2) Would like to see pic's of your work... please

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by gvidas

I work as a fabricator (electric signs) in the suburbs making some fairly soulless dreck. The days when I make a sign with a tiny bit of character to it are markedly better days.

My buddy took his '56 Chevy Sedan Delivery (station wagon without side windows or rear seat) to a custom upholsterer to have the whole interior done. When my buddy told the guy, because of the large expanses in the rear section he could use his own imagination to add inserts or stitched patterns to break it up, the guy took $500 off the price.

[tw]

Originally Posted by regular.joe

You are going to have to show me the numbers on how labor at $2 per hour costs more in Mexico then labor at $10 per hour in CT.

Economics 101. In the real world, a worker gets paid $2 per hour when only productive enough to earn $2 per hour. 'The World is Flat' is a classic example.

A bean counter will use spread sheets to invent a massive profit. A product oriented person will learn a reality cited by Daniel Oks of the World Bank. "US wages are 5.25 times higher than Mexico's, but that Mexican workers are about one-fifth as productive ... because of much outdated machinery, clogged transportation, ineffective management, and poor education. The result: US wages are just 2.6% higher than Mexico's, on average, after factoring in productivity."

Well, Mr Gibson was only doing what stock brokers, accountants, MBAs, and other less informed people do. Exact same reason why GM cars cost more to build than Mercedes Benz when labor was not the reason. Why Eastman Kodak would see its future in a commodity quickly becoming a buggy whip industry. And why Apple must go overseas (Shenzhen, China) to find more productive workers in more productive (innovative) industries. In every case, a bean counter invents myths to avert a reality: his ignorance is the problem.

A bean counter would judge based in payroll numbers and profits. Because spread sheets do not measure what is more important - productivity. And a reason for many contentious posts ten years identified Wall Street as the problem - long before everyone recently learned that reality the hard way.

The greatest Americans and their companies judge based upon the product; what productive people do. Innovation is top of a list that determines who is #1. Innovation determines who deserves to have jobs. Dollar per hour, the mistake he made in CT, is mostly hyped by those who invent reality on a spread sheet - MBAs, stock brokers, accountants, finance people, investment bankers, etc.

Fortunately for Mr Gibson, he learned his foolishness and reversed it in only four years. He saved his company by paying employees $10 per hour in CT.

At this point, everyone should have understood why Ross Perot's "Great sucking sound" was obviously a myth based in bean counter rationalization.

[ZenGum]

I put that through the TW--> human translator. Roughly:

A worker in Mexico on $2 per hour is more expensive than one in CT on $10 per hour, because the Mexican worker is less efficient/productive by a factor of at least 5. So while the CT guy gets paid five times as much, he does more than five times as much productive work in that time.

I think.

[tw]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

I put that through the TW--> human translator. Roughly:

Sufficient for anyone who only needs one supporting fact to know something.

Meanwhile, an extremists is an expert only from a soundbyte, "A worker in Mexico on $2 per hour is more expensive than one in CT on $10 per hour".

[SamIam]

Several thoughts. When times are bad enough, Americans will do the equivalent of staying overnight at the company. Look at my coworker, terrified of losing her crummy job, staying overnight at the motel for weeks on end so the owner won't fire her. She is not alone.

As far as Americans preferring to sell I-phones than make them, I feel that is a reflection of the lack of manufacturing jobs rather than a matter of worker preference. Look at Detroit. They have no shortage of workers when the production lines get rolling again. I strongly suspect that given a higher rate of pay to manufacture I-phones, people would enthusiastically work at making them rather than selling them for a lower wage.

Most of these Detroit auto workers (and other production line workers) don't have college degrees, so what people choose to major in at university is not the main problem. As I have stated repeatedly here, the problem is the quality of K - 12 education available to our children. We give kids who are functional illiterates and don't even know the multiplication tables, a high school diploma despite these deficiencies. These kids get placed in "special classes" where they are baby sat, not taught. Thus, the pool of qualified American workers has dwindled.

But that's far from the only reason we have lost much of our manufacturing capacity. I used to live in Colorado Springs which was once dubbed "silicon mountain." HP, United Technologies, Intel and the other big chip manufacturers once had a very strong presence in that town. I knew several people who worked on their production lines. They may not have loved the repetitious nature of the work, but they did like the wages which allowed them to live a comfortable middle class life. Then out-sourcing began. I remember one friend in particular who had worked at HP and ended up working for a call center at half his old pay. He did not end up there because he was too lazy to work at HP. HP and the others abandoned him just as the rest of the electronics industry abandoned their American workers all over the country.


Everybody wants to blame the American worker. I must admit that I agree with tw - I blame the CEO's.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by tw

Sufficient for anyone who only needs one supporting fact to know something.

Meanwhile, an extremists is an expert only from a soundbyte, "A worker in Mexico on $2 per hour is more expensive than one in CT on $10 per hour".

Through the tw --> human translator: "Don't paraphrase me, bitch."



"There are just as many notes as I require. Neither more nor less!"

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

I put that through the TW--> human translator. Roughly:

A worker in Mexico on $2 per hour is more expensive than one in CT on $10 per hour, because the Mexican worker is less efficient/productive by a factor of at least 5. So while the CT guy gets paid five times as much, he does more than five times as much productive work in that time.

I think.

What's missing is, productive at what? With all the productivity factors making labor unproductive in Mexico, all those companies with massive factories just across the border for the last 20 years are out of business? No they have chosen Mexican labor correctly, if they need that particular type of labor!

If you need grunt labor for hard-to-ship items sold to the US market go to MX... smart labor involving choices go to CT... quickly adapting labor where there are no labor or environmental laws, China!

[Griff]

My buddies company, which had shifted all production to Mexico, forcing him into a daily border crossing is coming back to the States because of the violence and corruption. Just another blessing of the War on Drugs.®

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

If you need grunt labor for hard-to-ship items sold to the US market go to MX... smart labor involving choices go to CT...

What did Mr Gibson do? He made a decision based in what any MBA would do. Some mythical spread sheet numbers while ignoring what was relevant. Why did he save his company? Instead of downsizing, cost controls, blaming the employees and other lies from business schools. He stopped thinking like an MBA. He suddenly realized that the product was only important. Therefore learned employees at five times more per hour costs less money.

[Undertoad]

This American Life has highlighted the work of Mike Daisey telling the story of Foxconn and the Chinese people who work there building Apple stuff. Including preteen workers, chemicals that cause neurological damage, nets erected to catch suicide jumpers at the plant. CBS Sunday Morning included a piece on it yesterday, which you can read.

[Ibby]

Foxconn has had some issues, but they also raised wages not just for their workers but for the whole local area, when the local party boss was trying to incite further problems from the workers. It backfired when Foxconn - a Taiwan company - raised their wages, forcing the party boss's factories and his buddies' factories to raise theirs in turn.

What I'd like to see is more companies demanding better conditions in China. Mike Daisey was on Up with Chris Hayes on MSNBC both mornings this past weekend, and his pitch is that Apple should use some of their billions of rainy-day money to insist upon Foxconn reforms. I think not only would that be great for foxconn's employees, I think it would have a profound affect on the entire region.