American Industry

[Sparky-Watts]

I know exactly what you mean. I was doing some painting a few years back, bought some paint at Lowe's and grabbed a couple of those little wooden stir sticks while I was at it. On the way home, I happened to read one of the sticks......"Made in Pakistan"!?!??!?!?!?!...........A little wooden stir stick!!!!! They can make 'em there and ship 'em here cheaper than we can make them here?????? C'mon, something's SERIOUSLY wrong.

Don't forget about our unions. Sure, they were a good thing back when they started, but now they have priced themselves out of the picture. Wichita is the Air Capital of the US, with Boeing (now Spirit Aerosystems), Cessna, Raytheon (formerly Beech Air Craft company), Lear Jet, and one or two smaller companies. Back in the late 80's, Boeing workers went on strike for 4 months over a tiny (by comparison) raise. Analysts showed that after they got the raise they were striking over, it would take them 10 years of work at that small raise to make up the money they lost in the 4 months they were on strike.

Sure unions still have a place in the workforce to some extent, but they've gotten way out of hand. Why else would a guy get paid $38 an hour to wash planes for American Airlines? That's what my brother, an A&P mechanic, did for two years down in Tulsa after company-wide layoffs at AA. At one point, he was making $48 an hour to vacuum carpets in 747 and 737 aircraft. Fortunately for the rest of the US, AA cracked down on the unions after 9-11, and the union accepted a 20% paycut rather than have 1,000 more people lose their jobs.

I've been in a union before (twice), and for the $50 a month dues, they didn't do squat for me. At one job, I got a whole 3 cents raise over 5 years....not even enough to pay the dues for a month.

 

[mingez]

The reason behind these problems... Do you think it is arrogance of the Americans? ignorance perhaps? It is not.

You see, we have lifted tariffs while countries like China have heavy tariffs against American products. We don't sell to them because we can't compete with their domestic products due to heavy taxation. At the same time they flood the US markets with their products for next to nothing. This is what I meant about our so called neo-"Capitalism" and government involvement (aka meddling)

Absolutely true. I'm not debating that tariffs aren't a problem. They are.

But again, this only applies to countries that sell their product at lowered costs such as China, Pakistan, etc.

What's the excuse concerning auto-producing countries like Germany and Japan? More highly skilled labor. More expensive product. AND they are more expensive to fix (In general) should something go wrong. So why is the US market so willing to spend more on a product that is MORE expensive to fix? I agree, it isn't American ignorance as you somehow gathered I was suggesting.

I think you'll find is most people will throw around the words "Quality, Gas Economy, Long-Lasting, and Customer Service" around quite a bit when giving reasons why they buy foriegn product. This has little to do with Tariffs, because on the whole, the autos are more expensive.

There is probably less than 1 percent of the domestic market IN Japan that drives a pick up or a four wheeled drive vehicle of any kind. There just isn't a need for it, nor is there room for such autos. Those vehicles were strictly designed to tap into the North American market.

They know us their customers well enough to know they needed to produce autos that we'll need, instead of force-feeding us vehicles that THEY consider to be the perfect vehicle.

The take home message here is:
You CAN compete with lower costs, with quality and ingenuity. Whether the quaility is real or percieved is irrelevant, they've done a brilliant job in making the US and Canadian markets believe it's true, which is also part of the game in which we've failed miserably.