Mel
member
Reged: 12/14/05
Posts: 6896
Loc: Excelsior Springs, MO
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GE is Moving from Wisconsin.
Keep your eye on Waukesha, Wisconsin......Their biggest employer just moved out. General Electric is planning to move its 115-year-old X-ray division from Waukesha,Wis., to Beijing. In addition to moving the headquarters,the company will invest $2 billion in China and train more than 65 engineers and create six research centers.
This is the same GE that made $5.1 billion in the United States last year, but paid no taxes - the same company that employs more people overseas than it does in the United States.
So let me get this straight. President Obama appointed GE Chairman Jeff Immelt to head his commission on job creation (job czar). Immelt is supposed to help create jobs. I guess the President forgot to tell him in which country he was supposed to be creating those jobs. Thanks Jeff, you're a "real" American....give Barack our Best! If this doesn't show you the total lack of leadership of this President, I don't know what does.
Please pass this information to others and think about it before you buy a GE product.
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Member DU, Delta
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names - John Kennedy
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sptsman
member
Reged: 12/14/05
Posts: 6199
Loc: Missouri
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Mel, as much as I dislike Obama, this has been going on looooong before he took office. I remember working for Brown Shoe Co., in the late 80's / early 90's and they closed their last domestic manufacturing plant. Many of you will recall the old shoe factories that dotted the map across Missouri. There are hundreds more examples we all know about.
It's hard to blame GE or Brown Shoe or any of them. If you were running those companies, you would do it to. If you didn't, the company would fold and there would be no stock value or dividend payments. There would be no jobs for anyone, including you. The blame goes mostly to the "leaders" of the past 50 years, that have allowed imbalanced trade regulations to cripple us. The blame goes to everyone that has walked into a WAL-MART (or a hundred other big box retailers) and bought a pair of shoes or an article of clothing, becasue is was 25% or 50% less, as a result of being manufactured in China or Indonesia... Heck, look at your hunting gear. I'll bet there is a significant amount that has been manufactured outside of the USA.
The fix is not so simple. We could change the rules of the trade game to benefit American workers but that would cause a fairly serious rise in prices. And we all want our inexpensive products. It would also have serious geo-political implications. You think we have troulbe with China now. Wait until their economy starts tanking becasue we eliminated a large percentage of their exports. Talk about an ugly problem...
I wish I knew the answer... A good start would be to base tariffs on imports, on the wage they pay their workers. If you make it less worthwhile to manufacture overseas, most won't...
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"Hunts are best measured by the endurance of the memories they produce..."
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Hellbender
member
Reged: 12/14/05
Posts: 3416
Loc: Taney County
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Can't agree sptsman, I would if we were talking small ticket items, but not something like X-ray equipment. GE makes some huge moving machines, with millions of parts that can be made here and I'm not buying that they can't doing it today right here. I would like to see the total job loss here and better yet I like to here the HNIC announce it.
Not only are they taking the company, training engineers means they intend to take the technology there.
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A government survey has shown that 91% of illegal immigrants come to this country so that they can see their own doctor.
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Ozark
member
Reged: 12/14/05
Posts: 4012
Loc: out in the woods
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Long ago, the federal government was financed entirely by tariffs rather than by taxes levied on its own people. Sure, the tariffs were ultimately paid by citizens who paid higher prices for imported goods - but their choice to buy those goods was VOLUNTARY.
My ultra-conservative U.S.-first idea:
1. There should be no tariffs on the import of raw materials to be used by American industry. This would keep the price of U.S. made products low for our own people. Foreign countries would no doubt put high import tariffs on our products but to hell with 'em - we don't need their business, and if their people want to buy our chit anyway we'll make it good enough to be worth the extra money.
2. Any MANUFACTURED product or part coming into this country would be hit with a 100% import tariff. You want to drive a Japanese, Korean, or German car that's nifty - you can pay twice the price for it and help fund our government in the process.
3. Other countries would no doubt retaliate by slapping high tariffs on U.S.-made products. As stated above, to hell with 'em. However, some of the tree-swinging camel-jockeying wogs MIGHT also get the idea of withholding their natural resources from the U.S., or charging extra for them. Correcting those situations and keeping foreign supplies of raw materials available and cheap for U.S. industry is the proper function of the U.S. military - not that "nation building" or "winning hearts and minds" silliness. Just sayin'.
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sptsman
member
Reged: 12/14/05
Posts: 6199
Loc: Missouri
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Quote:
Hellbender said:
Can't agree sptsman, I would if we were talking small ticket items, but not something like X-ray equipment. GE makes some huge moving machines, with millions of parts that can be made here and I'm not buying that they can't doing it today right here. I would like to see the total job loss here and better yet I like to here the HNIC announce it.
Not only are they taking the company, training engineers means they intend to take the technology there.
So, you think they sat around the boardroom table and decided to move jobs from the USA to China (or any other county), but could have kept them here for the same costs? If so, then why move? Spending millions to close a factory, build new and train new people is not something any corporation would do, if there weren't significant cost savings on the other side. It's business 101...
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"Hunts are best measured by the endurance of the memories they produce..."
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wuchang
spiritual advisor and gatekeeper to the Spirit World
Reged: 12/14/05
Posts: 5227
Loc: uphill
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Any Chinese Government subsidy in the moving, building, training etc?
Of course it would be called a "subsidy" and not a bribe.
The folks wanting the level playing field already know that most govts subsidize their domestic industries so they can compete with American made goods.
As for the American consumer.... enjoy that iPhone 5 while hailing Apple as a great American Company.
These multi nationals are so interwoven, they can move operations to wherever the best deal is.
BTW, no one really bitched when Missouri created an "incentive" package to keep Ford in KC or GM in Wentzville.
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Ozark
member
Reged: 12/14/05
Posts: 4012
Loc: out in the woods
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My longtime fishing/hunting partner lost his job here at a manufacturing plant in Ozark six months before he could have retired with 30 years service. They closed the plant and moved it to Reynosa, Mexico, about 200 yards outside the Texas border.
They make small electric motors for ceiling fans and so forth, and the motor parts are now trucked to Reynosa for assembly, then trucked back to Cassville, Mo. for final assembly into the completed products. There are plans to soon move the Cassville plant to Mexico, also.
Adding insult to injury, the company paid my friend for one final week's work and sent him to Mexico to teach his replacement how to do his job. The new guy makes $2.42 an hour with no benefits - and that's what makes it worthwhile for the company to haul this stuff back and forth.
Thing is, it's not just cheap foreign labor that lets companies do this. Max said that Mexican plant was an awful mess with everything done on the cheap - dangerous bare electrical wires, no safety guards on machines, oil puddles on the floor, extension cords running all over the place. On the "environmental" side it's a mess, too, with waste oil, solvents, paint, and water, including water from the restrooms, simply run out onto the ground. They pollute the air, too - reclaiming the copper from trimmed-off wiring and metal from parts by burning off the insulation and paint in a big open bonfire outside the plant.
These companies avoid U.S. SAFETY and ENVIRONMENTAL laws, as well as LABOR laws, by manufacturing outside the country then shipping their stuff back in. These are laws that our liberals (to their credit, sometimes) felt strongly about and worked hard to pass - so WHY do they put up with companies avoiding those laws so easily and taking away American jobs in the process? It doesn't make sense.
I've noticed that liberals have a real tendency to "pass a law" to fix any perceived problem - and then they don't follow up. Once the law is passed they feel like they've fixed something and don't seem to notice or care when their law has unintended consequences and has made the problem worse (NAFTA, electric cars, ethanol fuel, etc., etc.). Seems like they just want to feel good, but never really fix anything and more often than not they make it worse.
BTW, my longtime partner, Max, died two months ago and I sure miss him. Losing his job like that caused him and his wife to have a real poor retirement, and I wanted to tell his story here. I can just hear how he'd tell it to you himself if he could: "Them a-holes - moving that plant was a bunch of CHIT!"
Yep, it was. R.I.P. Max.
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MB2
member
Reged: 12/14/05
Posts: 5722
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Quote:
sptsman said:
Quote:
Hellbender said:
Can't agree sptsman, I would if we were talking small ticket items, but not something like X-ray equipment. GE makes some huge moving machines, with millions of parts that can be made here and I'm not buying that they can't doing it today right here. I would like to see the total job loss here and better yet I like to here the HNIC announce it.
Not only are they taking the company, training engineers means they intend to take the technology there.
So, you think they sat around the boardroom table and decided to move jobs from the USA to China (or any other county), but could have kept them here for the same costs? If so, then why move? Spending millions to close a factory, build new and train new people is not something any corporation would do, if there weren't significant cost savings on the other side. It's business 101...
Why the move?
Exactly as Hellbender stated. It's not the infrastructure or jobs that the Chinese want or need. They are buying the technology that G.E. possesses.
And that, my dear, is exactly what the Chinese purchased (for pennies of the real dollar value) from General Motors when it went into receivership. It was cheaper to buy the technology than develop it themselves. It's the brains they want, not the brawn. It takes years and uber bucks to develop a new product, like the Chevy Volt, and it won't turn a profit until massive numbers of them are sold.
These large companies funnel their profits back to the location of their headquarters for future research and development.
That's why LOCATION of headquarters is almost 100% in regards to any business dependent on new technology.
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