Ever Heard of Insourcing?

Wall Street Journal ^ | March 24, 2004 | WALTER B. WRISTON

[OESY]

For better or for worse, we all live in Marshall McLuhan's "global village" and Chicken Little runs through our living room on every hourly newscast. This does not mean that there are not real problems in the world. There are. What is relatively new is that today one politician can command coast-to-coast attention by repeating some assertion over and over -- a power not given to an absolute monarch a few years ago.

[reformedliberal]

ping

[harpu]

Excellent find, and Post. Thanks!!

[presidio9]

The USA is a net importer of jobs.

Next topic please.

[Iscool]

Makes sense to me to look at this from a different perspective...Foreign companies move here and sell to Americans...I work for a Belgium company that realized it was cheaper for them to make products here than ship them from Europe...Not to mention the shipping time...

And of course, the pricing is good enough that we have a significant portion of the market share...Unfortunately, other American companies lost the share we gained and had to lay off American workers to compensate...The profits of course, go to Belgium...

Honda sells a lot of vehicles in the US...The workers to my knowledge, make less money than the workers at GM and Ford...But the Honda vehicles are the same price range as similar American models...Profits go to Japan...

IF Honda all of a sudden moved out, there would be a void in the market...Ford and GM would pick up the market share, hire the laid off Honda workers and they would make more money to boot...

This offshoring to the US is a fallacy...

[The Duke]

The latest figures show that as German and Japanese auto makers, foreign drug companies and banks outsource to the U.S., some 6.4 million American jobs were created in 2001, up from 4.9 million in 1991.

It seems to me that "figures" are designed only for scoudrels to hide behind. I would recommend that all Americans simply take into consideration all the factors in their own immediate lives with regard to such issues as job stability, health care and security, and then decide whether or not to vote the status quo.

[genefromjersey]

(Somewhere in the future.......Wall Street Journal has decided to outsource (net gain in jobs,right ?) its newsroom, etc. to a country in the Far East,we shall not name.)

Let's monitor a future telephone conversation.

Operator: Yes,pliss ?

Publisher: I'd like to speak to the Managing Editor.

Operator: (long pause) I am sorry. I don't find a Mah Jing Ettor listed. Thank you for calling Wall Strit Journey.Heva nize day. (click)

[Wonder Warthog]

"The profits of course, go to Belgium... ...Profits go to Japan..."

Yes, they do. Do you perhaps think that no Americans have INVESTED in those Japanese or German or ..... companies??

The KEY point is that the money spent on wages and benefits DON'T go to Japan, Germany, or ......., but DO stay here.

[Agnes Heep]

Yes, but it's hard to array logic against the emotive force of human insecurity.

[lelio]

In the heartland, where the drumbeat against "exporting jobs" is the loudest, data shows that Ohio has imported 242,000 jobs; Indiana has attracted 163,000; and in Michigan some 244,000 jobs, about 6% of the workforce, are imported.

Mr Wriston and the Organization for International Investment speak with forked tongue. On the first state I went to, Indiana, it lists Thomson as a foreign company with a subsidiary in the state. That's true in that they bought RCA, but they didn't "insource/offshore" any jobs to the state. To have that count to this number is disingenuous.

Oh and I see Rolls Royce Allison is on the list. RR bought it from GM a number of years ago. Oh and Daimler Chrysler too --- they just bought out Chrysler.

I'm giving up completely on their numbers. Its beyond sloppy to list those companies as somehow "insourcing" to America.

[ninenot]

It would be nice if Wriston were to tell us WHY the foreign automakers have plants here: Ronald Reagan (in the case of the Japanese,) and even WORSE tax/reg pictures (in the case of the Europeans). Then there is the fact that US citizens still are a large market.

As to chipmakers: JIT theory/practice: get closer to your customers. Of course, there's another thing: seems that Samsung has managed to wrestle a preferred supplier arrangement away from some US firm, someplace.

[Revolting cat!]

"The latest figures show that as German and Japanese auto makers, foreign drug companies and banks outsource to the U.S., some 6.4 million American jobs were created in 2001, up from 4.9 million in 1991."

6.4 million jobs created by foreign companies in the U.S. during 2001? Well, excuse us nativists, that makes it all different. So sorry. We didn't know that German hospitals were using American radiologists for long distance diagnoses, and that Japanese software companies were employing American technical writers taking advantage of the large pool of Japanese speakers in the U.S. We do apologize for the misunderstanding. Let's do the outsource!

[Revolting cat!]

The peasants are getting restless and the ruling classes are beginning to panic. Good!

[Modernman]

The economy is a messy thing. Jobs used to move around the country, looking for a more favorable environment to do business. Now they can move around the world.

Moral of this story? No job is forever. People have to be ready to change companies, change careers and acquire new skills.