From a great article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last weekend...
Substitute your city for Milwaukee and you will see why the USA has become a nation of consultants and service groups instead of manufacturing anything at all!!http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=708870Milwaukee businesses leaders seem to want a return to the 19th century
By MICHAEL ROSEN
Posted: Jan. 19, 2008
At a recent Public Policy Forum luncheon, some Milwaukee business leaders criticized the city's business climate. Their comments suggest that many corporate leaders remain committed to low wage, low skill economic strategies that have cost Milwaukee thousands of middle class jobs and contributed to the city's growing rates of poverty and inequality ("Business leaders want to warm city's climate," Jan. 11, www.jsonline.com/705904).
Complaining that CEOs don't get the same red carpet treatment in Milwaukee that they get in China, Oilgear boss Richard Armbrust said: "Get on a plane, go to China, and you get picked up in a limousine with lights flashing."
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Before international competition became a serious threat, Milwaukee's corporate elite began moving production in search of low-cost labor and short-term profits. The interests of others, particularly those who devoted their lives and labor to help these businesses prosper, were ignored.
When global competition heated up, Milwaukee's elite chose to compete on cost rather than on quality and service. Milwaukee's deindustrialization and deunionization are a byproduct of these low-road strategies, which stand in contrast to Germany, another mature industrial economy, where manufacturing and workers are flourishing based on high-wage, high-skill production.
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They want limos with lights flashing when they are arriving somewhere !!
:rofl:
I write this because I have a T-shirt my daughter brought me from Greece, the 2004 Olympics, where EVERYTHING sold HAD to be made and come from Greece. It cost her a little more than T-shirts made from sweatshops from various countries around the world, BUT it is the softest, best made, best woven cotton, T-shirt I have ever had. Why couldn't USA have quality over quantiy any more?