Well, just to let you guys know, I have been made aware of a very unfortunate piece of information. Paslode has decided to have their major internal components for the cordless nail gun group, to be manufactured and machined in China. This may not sound like much, but this amounts to 95 % of the internal workings of the gun. This will include all framers as well as trimmers. This will more than likely lead to more failures in the field, and God knows when we pay as much for these tools as we do, we expect them to work ! Oh well, another quality tool down the crapper !!!
- Nehmo ? Quality of a product doesn?t necessarily suffer when the manufacturing operations are moved from the US to China. The company can use same quality control procedures at the new location. But I suspect your objection to Paslode?s decision comes from protectionism rather than a concern for quality. If that?s so, then you need to find a better issue than quality. The US isn?t known for top quality anymore.
Probably for legal and economic reasons, Paslode decided it was more efficient to manufacture these components in China. The other elements of the Paslode?s business, design, marketing, and the remaining manufacturing processes, still take place in the US.
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. That?s how the economy of manufacturing works. You have something done where it is cheapest, legally possible, or most convenient to have it done.
Anyway, where did you learn about this? I welcome the news myself. Maybe because of this I?ll be able to afford one of their (currently-overpriced) guns someday.
Suffice it to say, I have first hand knowledge. And the quality problem will be in the materials used, and the expertise (or lack thereof) in their skilled labor.
I'm sure you've heard of the trade deficit... Enjoy the outrageously cheap merchandise while you can. I'm no expert on gloabalization, but it seems pretty obvious the current situation can't go on forever. I'd be the worlds biggest hypocrite to say I've never bought anything made overseas, but each time it's with a twinge of guilt and the sinking feeling that I'm somehow contributing to the decline of our great nation. Eventually the hens will come home to roost.
**If** the cheaper price actually gets passed on to the consumer, then I suppose this could be viewed as an upside for the general population. On the flipside, it's probably safe to say this development is bad news for the US workers who used to manufacture those parts...or the stores they spent their paychecks at...or the guy next door to the plant who sold them lunch...or the contractor who was going to build them a house...etc...etc...
About right. The only guys that're getting rich are the CEOs and decision makers (BTW 99% are your fellow WASP homeboys) who cut cost at the expense of the workers and pat themselves on the back with "cost cutting bonus".
Not even China gets all that much benefits out of it. First of all China doesn't trade with US only. China's overall trade is par or deficit (China runs trade deficit with a lot of countries.) And the factory is probably owned by Paslode, yet another concern for China's economic fragility - large foreign ownership of domestic production.
Time to kick some y'all's benedict arnold homeboy CEO's asses, instead of scapegoating China.
It's actually starting to decrease, the trade deficit with China due to increased construction, requiring more imports from other countries, US included.
The real problem lies in their currency, pegged to the U.S. dollar. They need to let their currency free-float on the market before things can really even out.
Supposedly the Chinese gov't are gearing up for this, or they're just paying lip service to the U.S. Congress, nobody really knows except for Beijing.
Congress won't do anything but pass unenforcable puffery legislation out of fear of the backlash from U.S. business interests and Chinese relations.
Sometimes the prices do get passed on because of competition. I recall buying a new shirt for $5 about 40 years ago. I can find them at about that price today in the discount stores. Stereo components, cameras, TV, etc are all made cheaply overseas today and prices are far better than 10 years ago. Some is better technology, some is cheaper labor in Korea, then China. As consumers, we are demanding the lower prices. We are demanding higher wages also and since management can't or won't pay it, they take production overseas.
I'm no expert, but I have to wonder what our economy is going to be in 10 or
30 years as we lose manufacturing base but add casinos and the low pay service wages they pay.
Unless you've been at the Paslode factory in China, you have NO first hand knowledge!!
I give Paslode credit for doing their homework before making such a decision...they're not paid to put the company out of business. But of course, you could wind up being right and sales will suffer. Welcome to the free marketplace.
If there is a way to lower cost, people will find it and do it. If you find the way but don't do it, others will and you end up losing the business and your job anyway.
My take of outsourcing and manufacturing relocation has always been if another guy tens of thousands of miles away can do what you do for one tenths of your salary, then perhaps you do not deserve the high pay and the life style that goes along with it.
The reason we enjoy the life style for the past 50 or 100 years is precisely because we do things other people can't and we name the price in the market place. The only way to keep it going is to keep innovating.
I commend those ceo's for doing their job. They are at least saving some jobs in the domestic sector rather than giving the business away to the competitor.
There was no mention about them doing their homework. I have personally seen too many cases where the bean counters made the decision to go off shore and didn't know what to do when the containers of incorrectly made parts arrived.
The largest business in the US is a business that doesn't manufacture anything (Wal-Mart). Our country is moving out of the manufacturing and merchantile era into the information age.
I'm sure there were people, just like you, who lamented the rise of cities and manufacturing while the agrarian and feudal society languished. There are parts of the world that haven't even made it to the agricultural phase yet.
We don't need to manufacture our own shirts or mine our own Bauxite to make aluminium - not if we can get these things cheaper elsewhere. Adam Smith settled this hash once and for all in the late 18th century.
Read about Lou Dobbs' "Exporting America : Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas":
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On a personal note, I've had sales rep bragging how much money he can save me by getting consultants from overseas on L-1 visa loophole, and stuff them four to an extend-stay suite. As far as I can tell, these poor souls are getting paid couple dollare more than Wal-mart employee.
Is that a good thing? Are we all going to work at Wal Mar for $8 and hour with minimal benefits?
We still feed our own country and assist in the feeding of others that have not made it to the agricultural phase. Some never will as they do not have the proper land to grow a decent crop. That does assure our farmers future employment. Gone is the family farm, here is the large coporate farms with much more efficiency. We have not yet, and probably never will, lose the agrarian society unless man evolves so far that he no longer eats food.
But we still have to create wealth of some sort to buy the goods from the people that do make our shirts and mine our bauxite. As we go into the information age, we are farming out some of that work to India. Did you see
60 Minutes last week? We are now farming out some of out major medical procedures also.
In the "information" age you tout, Electric Boat laid off thousands of skilled workers making $12 to $20+ per hour. Casinos opened up and took many of those people and gave them jobs at $8 per hour. People liked them so much they took two :) How will they afford to buy those shirts in the future?
People don't need to keep up, they need to look to the future.
You might want to read up on how we are scapegoating China's currency for our deficit problem. Here's an article from LA Times just couple weeks ago:
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***April 16, 2005***
"The escalating China-bashing in Congress on other fronts is threatening to create a far greater economic problem than any we face currently. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) is threatening to hold up the confirmation of the Bush administration's nominee for trade representative, Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), unless the Senate considers his bill aimed at stemming China trade. Another bill would slap hefty tariffs unless Beijing stops pegging its currency, the yuan, to the dollar.
The currency issue is a convenient scapegoat.
Unless you live on the other side of the Pacific, it's far better to blame an undervalued yuan for all our supposed ills than it is to blame
federal budget deficits or the Federal Reserve's role in artificially inflating consumer spending. Nor is it convenient for members of Congress to dwell on the fact that Washington has often advised other nations to peg their currencies to the dollar as a means of encouraging
stability, and that as recently as the East Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s the U.S. was grateful that China didn't devalue the yuan."
And this trend of China bashing goes way back, as the exact same issue also came up couple years ago:
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"The Fine Art of China-Bashing
As the Bush administration pushes even harder on China to revalue the yuan, the real motivations behind the "China-bashing" by US officials remain shady. Is the administration's rhetoric really meant to "help U=2ES. manufacturers compete against Chinese companies", ask the authors,
"or just help U.S. politicians score points with anxious voters"? When the US Treasury Department found China innocent of manipulating the yuan in its recent report, members of the US Congress attacked the agency as weak-willed and are choosing to ignore the study's conclusions."
The Constitution of the PRC clearly states that all real estate, buildings, houses, factories, roads, farms (except for some collectives), equipment, machine tools, and all means of production are the property of the state. The document is available on the website of the PRC.
In the PRC individuals are permitted ownership only of personal property, e.g., clothes and furniture.
Foreign owners of businesses may own those legal entities as ideas, however, the state does not recognize the private ownership of the physical assets or physical means of production.
The supposed "capitalism" is only a phenomenon that exists in the realm of personal property and cash. The production assets of firms, that exist only by permission in the PRC, are all owned by the PRC.
Don't kid yourself. The PRC is a communist state in which the individual has no rights whatsoever.
It is terribly unfortunate that American business pragmatists have not dropped their pragmatism and affinity for tyrannical socialism and decided to do business with free-enterprise firms and countries in the free world.
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