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It's always about the bottom line whether the talent is outsourced locally or overseas.
So ... an increasing amount of young Americans are getting a proper education. That's what we like to hear.
Unions' weapons in dealing with improving salaries and working conditions at corporations: strike and arbitration. Their weapon for keeping their jobs: renegotiation. Neutron Jack didn't care about that, did not honor union contracts, and reduced the workforce at GE by 25% in his first five years. My dad (35 years at GE before getting the Golden Handshake in the early 90s) was not a union member, but was forced to lay off dozens of union workers at his plant. Where were the politicians? Negotiating with the unions and the company.
State and local politicians can do little to prevent a company from laying off workers or closing a plant, no matter how hard they try. They can offer tax breaks or other incentives for companies to stay or locate in their area, but I've seen corporations locate in a particular area for a 10-year tax break, and leave before the 10 years were up; they just repay the taxes or pay a fine, and move on. They don't care.
If you look at the "when" - the mid 70s is when heavy industry began to collapse. I was living in Dayton at the time, home of the highest number of GM workers outside of Michigan at Frigidaire and Delco plants, Mead Paper, National Cash Register, Standard Register - a good number of Fortune 500 companies for a city its size. The reason given when NCR eliminated 20,000 jobs in Dayton in the first half of the 70s, or when GM closed two Frigidaire plants in 1979, and then two years later refitted the Moraine plant to build Chevy S-10s with half the number of workers, was union labor costs.
Other factors were automation and rising fuel costs in the U.S., the advent of OSHA making factories safer (but more expensive to operate), and overseas competition.
Now that is spot on.
And leaving cannibalized shops in their wake.
Eh, that's crap. The jobs disappeared first. The collapse of heavy industry meant fewer middle income jobs that didn't require specialized training or skill.
My nephew earns a starting salary of 65k working for Master Card.
Job has something to do with data analysis. Can't see the job being around after AI takes off.
What is your basis\education to make that assessment? Ever even written code or built something that remotely does things like that?
Generating a decision tree works fine for a certain number of variables. Expand that to hundreds or thousands of branches and building the AI is vastly more complicated and costly than the job and experience.
It's always about the bottom line whether the talent is outsourced locally or overseas.
The US had a huge advantage coming out of WW2, I live in a now extinct steel town where any slob out of school could make fat money.
Our entire culture is one of jocks over students which is clearly starting to shift.
The irony here is that companies have shifted to importing "undocumented" workers to suppress wages and unions but it's not Neutron Jack (a total fool whose company culture of corruption destroyed itself).
Meanwhile, the very people championing the unions are cheering on the importation of illegal...err I mean undocumented workers. My uncles, union steelworkers upset with off-shoring and on-shoring, were told they were racists that should learn to code...they're lifelong democrats.
Glad your dad got out early like my dad did and had a nice retirement. Wish you had uncles etc. like mine so you could see the damage to those a bit younger.
The US had a huge advantage coming out of WW2, I live in a now extinct steel town where any slob out of school could make fat money.
(
The rest of the world was in ruins. USA was the only supplier, and it took many years for Europe & Japan to start being meaningful producers again. They were rubble after WWII.
Can you explain further ? What kind of push for unsustainable wages was going on in the 70's ? When all this offshoring nonsense was starting to spark up. A couple of years ago, when we were going through some of my late Dad's stuff, we found a paystub from 1971. He was employed by Chrysler, and at that time, was just a line worker, he was making $3.50 an hour. And are you talking about blue collar or white collar jobs ? This just isn't about those auto workers on an assembly line, this is also about white collar jobs, service jobs, etc. many that have nothing to do with the auto industry.
Back then, the Unions were more responsible for a safer workplace than they were trying to push wages up, at least as far as I know. You can't compare a the standard of living here in the US, and the wages for it, to countries that pay there workers a penny and a bowl of rice a day, and have zero concern for their workforce.
Yes, has the Unions and our politicians caused the price of doing business in this country to go up ? Yes, but I don't think that started taking hold until offshoring was well under way. And the relatively recent drive for non skilled jobs to make $15 plus an hour is definitely hurting things.
Then add in the millions of legal and illegal immigrants that are willing to work for less, work harder, that come here to take advantage of our country, it's like we are on a downward spiral. It's only a matter of time before things implode.
Granted, this was probably 20 years ago, and those facilities are probably state of the art factories now, thanks to our country sending them all our work.
Can anyone help me understand how our country and it's workforce thrived in the 50's, 60's and 70's ? It even thrived before WWII , so that can only partially be used as an excuse.
It seems to me, when companies started looking to the end of the next quarter, instead of the next 20 years, things started to unravel.
" things started to unravel."
Only if you believe "things started to unravel".
My nephew earns a starting salary of 65k working for Master Card.
Job has something to do with data analysis. Can't see the job being around after AI takes off.
" Can't see the job being around after AI takes off."
The wagons and reins and harness makers, etc. said the same things when cars came upon the scene.
Wells Fargo stage coaches died when the railroads came.
The pony express.
"During its 18 months of operation, the Pony Express reduced the time for messages to travel between the east and west US coast to about 10 days. It became the west's most direct means of east–west communication before the first transcontinental telegraph was established (October 24, 1861), and was vital for tying the new state of California with the rest of the United States. Despite a heavy subsidy, the Pony Express was not a financial success and went bankrupt in 18 months, when a faster telegraph service was established"
The computer replaced the typewriter and FAX machine.
It used to be called "progress". Now?
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