they're making the most out of their business sure. but actions like these only end up hurting working class americans in the end.
i'm betting the unemployment rate would be lower if we hadn't moved so many jobs to china. these businesses were making money here in the states having their products manufactured stateside. but someone realized they could make more money if they could lay off a factory full of americans and move production somewhere else
Did it ever occur to anyone that maybe the choice between moving production out of American is a choice between staying in business or not staying in business?
If a company cannot make enough money to pay it's employees and it's suppliers then it is bankrupt and the jobs are lost as well.
You act as though it's a bunch of executives sitting around a table and deciding to move production offshore JUST BECAUSE it's better on the balance sheet. If only life were that simple.
When you move production offshore you have to figure the added expenses of extra quality control, extra vigilance over the supply chain, extra legal work to protect your intellectual property, government regulations in every country your goods pass through, translators, and translating all your contracts into another language, delays due to cultural differences and foreign holidays, delays due to government issues and
inconsistency, relationship building, travel back and forth, customs duties, and information leakage to your competition.
This is NEVER an easy decision for a company to take their production and move it far away from their control. It is never an easy decision to close a factory and lay people off. I don't really know where people get off thinking that there are some executives just sitting around and wiping out factories like moving pieces on a Monopoly board.
Let me explain how this works.
In order to CREATE a job someone or a group of someones has to INVEST in an enterprise. Those investors are in it to make as much profit as they can because that is where they continue to get more money to INVEST. When the expenses of the enterprise exceed the income and the enterprise stops paying dividends to the investors then the investors demand that they continue to earn money from their investment.
One way to do this is to cut expenses, which are labor, materials, advertising, benefits, building upkeep etc.... If income can be maintained with lower expenses then investors can continue to get dividends from their investment.
So basically the enterprise exists to benefit the INVESTORS first and not the employees.
Who are these investors? All of us that have our money in retirement accounts that are invested in mutual funds.
I own no stock. But everyone that does wants their investment to increase in value. And sometimes keeping a positive balance sheet means eliminating high cost labor in favor of lower cost labor.
This SUCKS for the working class person but it's just a fact of life. Jobs come and go depending on the economic and competitive environment.
Everyone who works for someone else has to live their life as if their job could be gone tomorrow. But we don't - we spend as if the job will be there forever. Don't make this into a class warfare issue as if it's the executives against the factory workers. It's not.
Here it how I think business should be run and this is not my idea, it's been successful for many businesses;
I am in favor of open book accounting. In this type of system everyone in the business is completely aware of the businesses financial health and they all are responsible for the bottom line. This way the employees make extra efforts not to waste time and resources. Each person working there isn't just drawing a paycheck they are invested in the business and work harder to protect their investment.
There are so many factors in business, and especially in corporate business, that it impossible to make simple sweeping declarations like those greedy suits went overseas just to make more money. Well yes they did but it isn't a matter of greed, it's a matter of survival and responsibility to the investors.
To keep this very simple and pool related. If you owned a pool room and your employees all got together one day and demanded a 50% raise and you got out the calculator and determined that if you gave them this raise then you would be out of business in a month then you would have to fire them in favor of cheaper labor.