Posted on 12/22/2007 10:48:10 PM PST by nwrep
Unfortunately, executive idiocy is rampant everywhere.
But factoring in the re-work the Americans had to do for the shoddy Indian work, we found it was cheaper to have "spoiled Americans" doing the work.
Doesn't sound like the Americans at your place were spoiled Americans, if they were able to compete--you see, that's exactly my point. It sounds like management goofed there....just like those employers who think they are saving so much by using slow computers or offshored tech support but don't consider the lost time for their highly paid professionals.
One of my clients had a reverse problem, though. They have fought to keep operations American, despite a long downward slide as German and other companies have taken away their dominance. At one point, they had to send some production over to China because American plants couldn't keep up with demand or something (sorry, don't recall details). They found that their return rate on products plummeted, as there were fewer defects from the Chinese-made products than there were from their American plants.
Now, what should the company do? Pay more for shoddy manufacturing, or go overseas?
It is not uncommon for such arms sales deals to include provisions for manufacturing some portion of arms in the destination country. There is nothing funny about it. Arms sales from USSR to India, for example, in the 1980s routinely included such arrangements.
The Western companies look to the Orient and see vast new markets for their products; the governments in the East insist on being given the latest technology and trade secrets for pennies on the dollar as a "condition" of opening up their markets; and in the future, after the intellectual knowledge has been taken, the factories and other offshore assets will be either nationalized or undercut by copy-cat competitors.
The fallacy of course is that the societies of China and India have never been historically favorably to a large, enduring middle class, which is the target market of the large corporations. The question is whether the sudden influx of Western wealth will continue to be absorbed by a small coterie of robber barons, or enough of the wealth will spill over to create middle classes, or whether the increasing chasm between the haves and have-nots will lead to a second wave of Marxist revolutions: and resultant Communist countries having both a marked population advantage *and* technological parity, and economic superiority (for the time being) with an aging West.
The achilles heel of China will be its environmental disasters and the one-child policy; the achilles heel of India will be its abysmal bureacracy and fourth-world infrastructure (the roads don't suck, they Lewinsky.)
(The problems of the West are well-known on FR, and need not be described in detail here.)
And the Western CEO's who were behind it all with either be retired, or come crying to the US government for help.
I applaud India for the organic growth, as in Mittal Steel and Tata Motors, for example. But the outsourcing of key components of the US defence industry should be punishable as treason.
As one humorist put it, the entire history of the human race can be summarized by the following two questions:
1. What could possibly go wrong?!
followed shortly by... Cheers!
...oh, and Merry Christmas.
You voluntarily start working for a dime a day, bud.
Just to "compete".
Better yet, you move to India and do it there. After all, shouldn't labor be mobile just like capital?
See ya in Mumbai. PS, they don't have affirmative action for palefaces there, and dysentery treatment is still far more expensive than the average wage.
You first, Chester.
Merey Christmas to you too!
As for the robber-barrons, the wealth is spilling over, too.
Like the CEO of United Health who tried to award himself $1 billion in stock options?
Like the ousted head of the Wall Street firm who wrote off $8 billion due to subprime-backed securities, who got to walk off with a bonus of $160 million (more than most surgeons will make in their lifetime of productive service?
I'd get fired for costing my company $50,000...
Cheers!
...oh, and Merry Christmas.
Cheers!
...oh, and Merry Christmas.
Oops, make that ‘meRRy’!
1) What could possibly go wrong?
followed shortly by
2) But how was I supposed to know?
Cheers!
No thanks! I chose to make myself valuable in the USA, more valuable than can be had by offshoring.
What path are you taking? Trying to play King Canute? Voo-Doo?
Wait a minute... are you actually suggesting that, in contrast to the rest of the world, Americans are not overlawyered bottom-feeders quick to sue to cash in on the slightest corporate misdeed? Senator Edwards, we're flattered by your presence, but should you really be wasting time posting here when you've got campaigning to do in Iowa?
I wasn’t laughing at the arrangement but rather, at the insistance that I accept it as “normal”.
ok, got it. Sorry I misunderstood.
I know outsourcing is a bad word around here, but we want to tie the Indians to ourselves as closely as possible. They are going to be an industrial and military powerhouse that will eventually eclipse the Chinese, IMHO. We want to have them on our side.
We drove them into the waiting arms of the Soviets over nuclear reactors back in the 70s. We don’t want to do that again.
Can't remember, just that it was a hazardous cyano compound ("cyanide" probably wasn't right). Looking up... yep, methyl isocyanate.
Wow, I just found something out. They turned off the alarm siren so as not to worry people, thus people woke up later in a cloud of the stuff.
Actually,that’s what most nations consider it to be.If you want to sell arms to a nation with money to burn,you’ve got to be flexible.Samsung is assembling GE’s engines for the F-15 fighters that South Korea recently purchased,while US companies will provide technical assistance in developing South Korea’s 5th Gen. aircraft.The number of disputes that the US is having with the likes of Norway,Great Britain,Israel etc over the Joint Strike fighter also involves related issues of workshare & technology transfer.
There was enough blame to go around at Bhopal.
The design of the plant was not faulty. It was a carbon copy of the plant in West Virginia that is still operating, if I am not mistaken. The problem was Union Carbide thought they could just drop a working design into India and expect it to work.
One of the things that made sense to the American operators but did not to the Indian operators was the concept of redundant safties. As various safety systems failed in Bhopal, the operators were lax on making repairs. Union Carbide failed to realize this or correct the problem. The assumptions in the US design was that failures would be corrected promptly, so plant operation could continue while one or two of the redundant systems were off-line.
This turned out to be an incorrect assumption. The fault lies on both sides because the Indian operators did not buy into the American program of preventive maintenance and maintaining all systems in functional status, and the Americans did not monitor the plant closely enough or put into place programs that would have suspended operation of the plant when things got too dangerous.
It was methyl isocyanate.
Mistake, plain and simple.
India only knows quantity-
They don’t get the concept of QUALITY
Typical Freeper response: Well, if they can't get a job, they can just start a million dollar business from scratch! Working for yourself if the best thing ever!
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