10.07.11
Don’t hold your breath waiting
ABC News and the Boston Consulting Group try to pass off measly news as a big story on lost jobs returning from China.
The newscast is here. Do see it.
The news organization, and press release from the consulting group ABC based its story on, offer no particularly compelling evidence.
Ford is the biggest employer, now choosing to make some more car parts domestically, work it had previously outsourced. (What’s not said is whether or not the labor is all part of second-tier hiring phenomenon, one which pays the workers at rates in which they cannot afford the goods they are manufacturing .) The big appliance maker, Whirlpool, is also featured, for two factories, one which is not in the United States, but Canada.
The Whirlpool jobs are a drop in the bucket of the unemployed. A third instance is for unskilled factory work making hair dryers in Texas. One assumes it pays barely above minimum wage.
All of the factories are based in the south, all in Right to Work states, indicating one of the drivers is to simply take a vulture’s advantage of lack of labor collective bargaining rights and depressed wages.
ABC News wraps this up in an ongoing series emblazoned with an American flag, desperate for any news it can package as good.
One imagines the news image isn’t burnished much these days by such things, as being fat-wet-kiss loving to big business and power suits from corporate consulting groups doesn’t seem any more popular than going to the mirror and suddenly noticing a stye.
When you get right down to it, if there is any job return it’s about exploiting the desperation of a labor market willing to do things ever more cheaply, even if it’s personally ruinous.