American Manufacturing Can No Longer Compete
OPS_admin | Jul 31, 2010 | Comments 0
Today there are fewer manufacturing employees than in 1955, and over the past 20 years 3.7 million manufacturing jobs have been lost. These figures are a grim reminder that America can no longer manufacture competitively.
How did this happen? Two causes stand out: low international wage rates in countries like China and Mexico that America will not and cannot compete with, and America’s abandonment of capital and knowledge intensive industries.
American workers can not and should not have to compete with third world wage rates. Some Chinese manufacturers are paid 33 cents an hour according to a 2005 AFLCIO report. This cents-an-hour pay in many countries around the world has caused American companies and entire industries to move abroad (see the lost industry list here). It also led Princeton economist Alan Blinder to estimate 42-56 million jobs could potentially be sent overseas.
Full Story: American Manufacturing Can No Longer Compete | Economy In Crisis.
Filed Under: Economy - Labor



The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. 





