Posted on 12/15/2012 10:51:28 AM PST by SeekAndFind
For much of the past decade, General Electric’s storied Appliance Park, in Louisville, Kentucky, appeared less like a monument to American manufacturing prowess than a memorial to it.
The very scale of the place seemed to underscore its irrelevance. Six factory buildings, each one the size of a large suburban shopping mall, line up neatly in a row. The parking lot in front of them measures a mile long and has its own traffic lights, built to control the chaos that once accompanied shift change. But in 2011, Appliance Park employed not even a tenth of the people it did in its heyday. The vast majority of the lot’s spaces were empty; the traffic lights looked forlorn.
In 1951, when General Electric designed the industrial park, the company’s ambition was as big as the place itself; GE didn’t build an appliance factory so much as an appliance city. Five of the six factory buildings were part of the original plan, and early on Appliance Park had a dedicated power plant, its own fire department, and the first computer ever used in a factory. The facility was so large that it got its own ZIPcode (40225). It was the headquarters for GE’s appliance division, as well as the place where just about all of the appliances were made.
By 1955, Appliance Park employed 16,000 workers. By the 1960s, the sixth building had been built, the union workforce was turning out 60,000 appliances a week, and the complex was powering the explosion of the U.S. consumer economy.
The arc that followed is familiar. Employment kept rising through the ’60s, but it peaked at 23,000 in 1973, 20 years after the facility first opened. By 1984, Appliance Park had fewer employees than it did in 1955.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Not with all the draconian micromanaging regulations and the highest corporate tax rate on the planet standing in the way.
Business Insider is such a commie rag. With them, it’s all good with the Obama regime in power. Talk about living in an alternate universe.
I tell that stupid bleeper off multiple times a week on Facebook. He’s such a tool.
211,000,000 US population in 1973
313,000,000 US population in 2012
This is a “Good News” story? We’re making a comeback? Are we some kind of manufacturing giant today? Swarming with good manufacturing jobs, are we?
Who is the other BarryClown they have? Weisenthal or something like that?
I’ll grant that this is a step in the right direction, but you’re right, it’s not near enough.
It’s a rather large complex. I’ve driven past it numerous times. Louisville use to be known as Strike City, atlhough we haven’t seen much of that in years, alteast since I’ve lived here.
Factory JOBS? Manufacturing? How about any kind of work you can do with just a HS degree? Or work that can be done with sweat and maybe not quite so much thinking?
We ain't got none of those jobs anymore. We have a population that requires jobs like that -- some people cannot contribute much more than the sweat of their brow. And we have none of those jobs.
So what do we do with tens of millions of people who are essentially unemployable? Right now, Obama and the socialists have the only answer.
Well, there is just a *tad* more automation in manufacturing here in 2012 than there was in 1973.
This is material to the discussion.
GE appliances are terrible.
They are junk the day they leave the factory.
What in the wide world of sports are these maroons smoking? Seriously. With all the taxes and regulations coming down, what idiot (or group of them) can make such a pronouncement? As Perry Mason opined: “You’ve assumed a fact not in evidence.”
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! That is funny right there.
LLS
Final paragraph of the article. Many at FR need to read that several times to let it sink in. Some want to pretend that cheap labor was one of the last reasons for offshoring, if it was a reason at all.
But cheap labor was the reason, the first reason and overwhelmingly the most important reason for most offshoring. No one can compete when labor in a cheap labor nation is 10%, or even 5% or less of what it is in the US. And that goes for every job in the US that can be offshored or outsourced, not just for 'low skill' manufacturing jobs.
Who knows how big this trend back to the US will be, but it's the only thing that will produce enough jobs to bring about the economic growth and job growth needed to move people from unemployment and welfare back to the workforce, or to the workforce for the first time. And that is the only thing that will ever enable up to get our budget deficits and national debt under control. What Congress and Obama might do will amount to little or nothing.
The are not unemployable. There is a market wage that they can earn. It may not be a great wage but its there. Most unskilled and uneducated people in this country believe they have a birthright to a good paying job that doesn’t require much effort. If they cannot find it then there is Uncle Sugar.
We have many sweaty jobs for non-thinking people. They are in seasonal crops, drywall, roofing, ditch digging, cleaning, food preparation, and etc. Haven’t you seen all the fair skinned US citizens lining up for those jobs.
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