One man's view of the Manufacturing Job Loss Problem
- From: "RAM³" <s31924.nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 23 Dec 2008 04:57:06 GMT
Excerpted from a response on rec.crafts.metalworking by Ed Huntress to
the owner/proprietor of a company that makes excellent wire brushes of
all types.
Not only do I think the US is off-track, I think that individual
companies have done a great deal to get us there. There are plenty of
things to complain about but complaining often is a substitute for paying
attention to the real problems and doing something about them.
You know, ***, I love manufacturing, which is what kept me in the
business of reporting about it for over 25 years. I had a dream job --
somebody was actually paying me to run around the country, and to some
extent the world, to visit plants and shops and see what's going on. I
felt their frustrations as my own and felt like a part of the business,
until the last 5 years or so of it, when I was assigned to report on
world trade and how the business end of it works on a national and
international scale. That's when the fog finally began to lift and I
began to see the bigger picture.
To keep it short, let me give fictional example based on fact. I'd go to
a plant, ask top managers how things were going, and they'd say "taxes
are killing us against foreign competition." So then I'd go look up the
world tax situation, and talk to some international tax people, and I'd
find out that our overall taxes in the US are the third-lowest in the
developed world (South Korea and Mexico are lower). So I'd go back and
tell this to those plant managers. They'd grumble and spin around, and
then they'd say, "yeah, but taxes on corporate profits are too high."
Again, I'd go back, find out that we actually had the *lowest* corporate
taxes until a few years ago, when our international trading partners
started on a tax race to the bottom, and that even now our *nominal*
rates were only a couple of percentage points higher than theirs. And
then I'd learn that our *actual* rates are far lower -- lower than any
other developed country. Even our nominal rates don't explain what was
happening five years ago, and our actual rates don't explain what's
happening now.
So I'd go back and tell them this, and they'd respond "our wages are too
high." I'd look that up, and find out that, yes, we're paying a hell of a
lot more than China or even South Korea, but German carmakers pay a
higher base hourly wage than we do, Europe in general pays roughly what
we do, and Japan's wages are very close. "They don't have to deal with
our OSHA regs." The equivalent in Europe is at least as high as ours.
"They don't have the EPA." No, they don't. In many cases, they have a
ministry that's even
tougher.
What the hell? On and on it goes, one strawman and scapegoat after
another. When you've asked those questions enough times, it gets
sickening. Nobody will pay attention to the facts. Nobody seems to care
what they are, anyway.
Now, I'm talking about maybe 50% of US manufacturers, or a little more.
Some of them get it, but most of them have a false and misleading idea of
what's happening in manufacturing among their international competitors.
Not technologically -- we're still at or near the top in manufacturing
technology. Our productivity is, or was until a few years ago (I haven't
looked recently) better than that of any other country, including Japan
and Germany, and it runs around 10 times better than that of China.
What sucks is our management, especially the planning and leadership
side.
It filters into operations, which always seem to have their feet in two
different centuries. And to boil down a book-length story into a single
idea, it's because we're locked into a mindset and manufacturing business
culture that grew up in the '50s and '60s and never, despite all the lip
service it gets, ever really changed. The poster boy for this is GM. They
know the tune, but their feet just won't dance. All they can do is make
excuses, while flying around in corporate jets and delivering grim
speeches with PowerPoint slides and graphs showing how it's all somebody
else's fault. When all other excuses fail, there's always the government
to blame. Or the unions. God, the unions are a gift from heaven for
beleaguered management.
US manufacturing now nourishes itself on a culture of blame. They won't
go out in the world and see what's really going on. When they do go, they
see what they want to see, and nothing else. The comical example of this
was GM's response in the late '70s to the challenge from Japan. What they
brought back was quality circles (I'll bet that went over big among union
workers in Detroit <g>) and the elimination of re-work stations. Ta-da.
We're done. Our lines now look like the lines in Japan. Our people sit in
the lunch room for an hour every Monday, eat donuts, and share their
ideas for continuous improvement. We've added chopsticks to the utensils
trays at lunchtime. Now, why aren't we getting rich?.......
.
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