Posted on 06/02/2008 5:31:43 PM PDT by Kaslin
Autos: Word that Ford will build its new fuel-efficient Fiesta "global car" in Mexico City is bad news for American auto unions. U.S. companies still want to build cars; they just don't want to build them with union labor.
This should be something that workers in Michigan and other Midwestern states with decades of automaking experience should excel at doing. Instead, Ford and other automakers are pushing more and more investment abroad — especially to Mexico.
It's tempting to blame automakers for this. Indeed, they do deserve a big chunk of the blame for poor management decisions. And by far, their worst decisions yet came when they agreed to company-destroying labor pacts with the United Auto Workers union that practically guaranteed Big Auto's demise.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
In other news, unemployed auto workers are sneaking into Mexico looking for jobs landscaping the new Ford facilities.
if they could get away with it, Ford should call it the 'Bandito'.
Can’t blame them when you look at the salaries and retirement packages the unions want. $50,000 a year Vs $8,000 a year is a lot of money when you look at a whole plant. I’m wondering what it would take to keep the plants here and what would the people work for?
And why not? Mexico is moving here.
Unions have been courting illegals for years in the US. What’ the issue with getting them in their legal country?
Let the unions die from their own stupidity.
Neither can I. I have said for a long time the blame lays on the unions that the jobs are moving out of the country
Trying to rationalize this sort of decision, in the end, only makes people look foolish. There is one reason Ford and thousands of other US companies make the decision to relocate to Mexico, China and dozens of other foreign nations: cheap labor.
Going from annual, total compensation plus benefits of $50,000 to $75,000 per employee to as little as $3,000 per year explains it all. We also hear about the $1,800 medical insurance cost per vehicle incurred in the US, just to isolate one cost of doing business in the US.
The so called free trade agreements and government policies in general have inevitably put the US worker in competition with the world’s cheapest labor. And now outsourcing to India and other places are moving even higher skilled jobs requiring substantial education: engineers, software programmers, radiologists, accounting, drafting, and many others. If job can be moved, eventually it will be unless these policies are changed.
I have proposed on here more than once that college economics professors should all be replaced and their courses taught via modern communications by highly qualified professors located in their home nations such as India and others. All in the name of delivering the goods and services at the lowest possible cost, as we are constantly told is the reason for moving so much production overseas. Efficiency, comparative advantage and all that.
If we really work at it, we can move half or more of the good paying jobs in the US, regardless of skill and education required, to eager, underemployed people in many naitons willing to do the jobs for a fraction of US pay. And that of course will really kick in the law of supply and demand and we can drastically lower the pay of most of the the jobs that can’t be moved overseas, and must be performed in the US.
We could really achieve some admirable efficiencies and cost reductions in the provision of most all goods and services.
Toyota, Honda, BMW, and other foreign companies build cars here. In fact, they are building brand new plants here. The difference is that they are non-union.
Where did FORD get their $2,000,000,000?
Which law of economics suggests that one billion Chinese and another billion Indians will be unable to create factories to build automobiles or virtually any other product at prices that American manufacturers will have to compete with?
Would you rather see successful Toyota plants in Mexico? If you could read the writing on the wall you would realize that there is NOTHING that Americans do to stop the rise in the standard of living of other people around the world. That rise will not stop until it is roughly equal to ours. The question is really; is that standard of living anything like what we have now?
Only communists and socialists believe that it is a "zero-sum" game. A job moved from the US to Mexico means that a job disappears from the US. The truth is that the increasing productivity in the US creates a job to replace the one that moves. But it isn't necessarily going to be a union auto-worker job.
Ford is a sell out of America.
“Which law of economics suggests that one billion Chinese and another billion Indians will be unable to create factories to build automobiles or virtually any other product at prices that American manufacturers will have to compete with?”:
Precisely what factories have the Chinese created on their own? They have benefited from an incredible technology transfer from the US and other nations. These nations are “zero-sum” game.
“Only communists and socialists believe that it is a “zero-sum” game.”
What predictable BS. It’s a game of putting together the land, labor, capital, technical know how and entrepreneurship to produce a product consumers wish to purchase. The technology, design, know how, entrepreneurship and most factors that have created modern products have almost all been transferred from the West to some developing nations.
Name some inventions and products that originated in China or India? And the umpteenth variation on some software application is hardly a great innovation or invention.
“{If you could read the writing on the wall you would realize that there is NOTHING that Americans do to stop the rise in the standard of living of other people around the world. That rise will not stop until it is roughly equal to ours.”
More nonsense. Stop buying products produced in China or India. Change the politics and withdraw from agreements that give them such low or untariffed access to US markets. Punish companies that outsource jobs to support products and services to be sold in the US.
Politics changed our way of doing business for most of two centuries to all these one-sided “free” trade agreements and politics can change things back.
I’m not advocating that, but your statements that Americans can do NOTHING to change things is nonsense.
----
Send treats to the troops...
Great because you did it!
www.AnySoldier.com
When I was a kid the term "Made in Japan" indicated that something was a worthless, crappy copy of an American product.
Now tell me who is selling the world's most popular hybrid automobile? Tell me who developed the world's best television sets?
You are not wrong to suggest that we have cultural advantages that have produced massive advances. But you are wrong to believe that we have a monopoly on them or that we would be well served by attempting to shut other nations out.
What nation was the leader in 1775? Do you realize that the policies attempting to hamper manufacture in the colonies played a part in creating our nation? Such policies did not act to the lasting benefit of Great Britain and they won't act in our benefit either.
Great Britain claimed a monopoly on the textile industry and wouldn't permit India to make cloth. How do you think British textile workers are doing today? If that's the path you want to go down, I don't think you will be please with where you end up.
Why would I do that?
In East Germany, before the Berlin Wall fell, there was one design of an outdoor faucet. It was used everywhere a faucet was needed, because there was just one factory making them and there was not the resources to import them.
But the jobs of the factory workers were protected by the fact that nobody could make a competing faucet.
But the price for that monopoly was that doctors and engineers were less well paid than they were in the West. So these people dreamed of migrating to the West and took every opportunity to escape. The Berlin Wall was not built to keep people from the West out. It was built to keep the people in the East IN. Only by keeping the more productive people captive can such a protectionist system survive.
Look what's happening to the Canadian healthcare system. People who have the resources to go to the US can buy whatever healthcare they want. Its only those with lesser resources that are trapped in Canada. When the Canadian system gets bad enough, they will have to build a wall to keep the people in. Or, better, they will have to abandon their socialist system and admit that government may not have the resources to provide "free" health care.
Canada gets to choose which course they take. Their future depends upon making the right choice. We here in the US have to make choices also. We do not have the resources to guarantee jobs to union auto workers.
Put a fart can exhaust on it and they could call it the 'Burrito'.
“But you are wrong to believe that we have a monopoly on them or that we would be well served by attempting to shut other nations out.”{
You’re not a very good reader. Like so many, you read something tangentially related to something you hold purist views about, then you just take off expounding upon your opinions whether or not they relate to what you’re supposedly responding to.
I made the point that China and India have been very much dependent on the West, and specifically the USA to even begin to make technological advances. Do you recall Deng’s (sp?) visit to the US during the Carter administration? That was the starting point, a starting point China had to have because the did not have the capability to quickly modernize without massive help from the West. The greatest help came in the form of US jobs and manufacturing facilities relocating to China. They are renowned for their reverse engineering, and are building a reputation as greater thieves of Western tech than even the old USSR.
These developing nations are hugely dependent upon their ability to acquire Western technology. And Japan was given a huge boost in the 1950s by legislation that assured that the American electronics industry would leave the USA.
All your theories and supposed historical lessons change non of those realities. It was a political decision to NOT aide the old USSR as we have aided China. It was a political decision to aid China with massive tech transfers and job transfers that have enabled them to advance far beyond what they could have on their own.
What you and others want to ascribe to economic theory is usually more attributable to political decisions.
“Why would I do that?”
Don’t ask me why. What you’ve written was not responsive to what I’d said to William Tell. My “stop buying products from India and China” remark was in to response to his remark that there is nothing Americans can do to stop the rising living standards in India and China. I replied that if we stopped buying their products it would have an impact on that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.