Re: MauiJNP/Hershey's

Melinda Meahan - take out TRASH to reply wrote:

Judith Althouse wrote:

> IMO the outsourcing of one job, is one too many.


Unfortunately, the whole outsourcing-to-overseas issue is a complex one that the majority of people in this country are not really willing to commit 100% to doing everything they can to stop it -- which would basically mean refusing to buy anything made overseas. Too many people in the US want their cheaply-priced stuff and don't care that the quality is bad.

I'm appalled at the amount of stuff that is now out-sourced for manufacture outside of the US as cheaply as possible, and I wouldn't mind paying more if I could even FIND US-made goods. (And services - thinking of customer-support call centers. ) And that's getting more and more difficult. And there would be some 'essentials' that I would not be able to afford if I could find them US-made. And we are doing it to ourselves, one purchase at a time.

It's not a _given_ that quality must suffer - not if the folks who have done the outsourcing insisted that their contract manufacturers followed well-established principles of building quality into the process. Clearly, in many cases, (dog food manufacturing and toys, for example), they haven't been doing that. Nor have they been insisting that the contracted overseas manufacturers protect their own environments, nor protect the safety of the workers, like US laws require (and which are even sometimes enforced). Of course, that would drive up the cost of the goods, wouldn't it?

I am in an industry that is moving to aggressively outsource the work done to overseas, and the quality of the work done overseas is bad and not likely to improve, but unfortunately people as a whole have gotten "hooked" on low prices and are not willing to pay more money for a quality product in a business environment because it hurts their personal bottom line (Aaron Feuerstein excepted, of course -- he paid the price of bankruptcy for the courage of his convictions, and for that I salute him and wish there were more like him, because if there were, he probably would not have had to pay that price.). My pay has dropped 40% in the last 3-4 years, and if I have to replace any of the work I do today my pay will probably drop another 30-40%.

I hear you. I won't get into a rant that reveals how little I truly understand of the economic forces at work, but I just have to wonder about the effects of all this 10 years down the road. We've had the Baby Boomers and Gen X and Gen Y - will the next generation be known as Gen Outsourced into Poverty?

FurPaw

--
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched,
every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

To reply, unleash the dog.
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Relevant Pages

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