Posts tagged jobs
Posts tagged jobs
Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.
Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class - NYTimes.com
Well, at that time, there was no globalization, and the companies did not have to get along with extreme cheap labour abroad, extra charges for environment protection and hordes of marxists in the Labour Dept.
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class - NYTimes.com
As a matter of fact, such a story enlights not the fleibility of the factory, but rather a serious engineering, or product development mistake.
It’s not, that no US or European factories can keep up with such a sudden change. It’s that such a fundamental change in the product is normally pretty unusual and to be avoided.
And what flexibility are we talking about, when it took 8000 workers and 96 hours to produce 10 000 iPhones? This is just 1,25 unit per worker….
The jump is due to a number of factors, including American productivity growth (which has outpaced Europe as a whole), compressed wages, and higher energy costs (which make it more costly to ship products back from locations with cheaper labor, like Asia). As the FT recently reported, from 2002-10, U.S. manufacturing unit labor costs in dollar terms fell 11 percent, compared with rises of 3 percent rise in Japan and 41 percent in Germany. Companies that are now bringing jobs back home include some of America’s largest blue chip multinationals, like Ford, GE, and United Technologies.
Does this mean the end of the shrinking middle? After all, decently paid manufacturing positions were the core of the middle income jobs bracket since the 1950s; the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector is a key reason that workers in rich countries haven’t gotten a real raise since the 1970s. Democrats would like us to think so. With jobs and the economy still the major campaign issue, the Obama administration has been making hay with the numbers in various speeches and press releases. The rhetoric will likely increase if Mitt Romney gets the Republican nomination, and Obama tries to position himself as the defender of the 99% in comparison to the former Bain “quarter billionaire.”
New Numbers Show an Increase in Manufacturing Jobs in the U.S. | Business | TIME.com
Well, it seems, there is no free lunch. Probably bit less protection from work would help both employers and employees to achieve their goals. Unfortunately, such a thing does not serve the interests of the political left and the Unions.
The question is: can a new alliance between employer and employee be made - without letting anybody else to interfere?
