After Decades of Outsourcing, Manufacturing Jobs Coming Home to US

[Kadie]

After Decades of Outsourcing, Manufacturing Jobs Coming Home to US

Published: Monday, 7 May 2012 | 12:27 PM ET
By: Michael Moran, GlobalPost


Beginning in the 1970s America’s high-paying manufacturing jobs in the steel, textile, electronics and automotive industries relocated first south to Latin America and then east to Asia.

In what some dubbed “a global race to the bottom,” labor rights have dwindled all along the way and the American middle class, long sustained by those manufacturing jobs, finds itself gutted. Now the fate of what is left of the American middle class is at the center of a presidential election and forcing a reexamination of the impact of the global decline of labor rights.

But after years of pain for America’s manufacturing sector and its workers, some economists and analysts are wondering if the tide may be turning.

Call it “re-shoring” or “rebalancing” or just “revenge,” but the dynamics of global labor, transportation and productivity costs that eviscerated American manufacturing over the past decade have begun to shift again.

Over the past few years, some key American manufacturers have either brought jobs back to the US from Asia and Latin America, or have made important decisions not to relocate them in the first place.

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http://www.cnbc.com/id/47323840/

[The Wielding Truth]

1. This deserves the biggest REC!

[CrispyQ]

2. Yep. They outsourced $25-$50 per hour jobs & brought back $10-$15 per hour jobs.

In repub-speak that's progress.

[Vincardog]

3. They outsourced well paying UNION jobs with retirement and health guarantees and replaced them with

low wage temp jobs with on benefits. Some trade.

[Warpy]

4. The lack of quality control offshore has also been a concern

Too many of their customers bringing too many goods back because they've broken or arrived unusable have finally registered as a problem. Add to that the facts that labor and governments are both getting a little annoyed at the screw jobs they've been getting and the scene is set for foreign plants to be even more troublesome than US plants, unionized or not.

Piracy is threatening established trade routes and the military can do only so much to protect them because of Stupid's wars of corporate convenience stretching resources to the breaking point.

In addition, the plants created during the 80s and 90s are starting to be seen as obsolete. Instead of refitting the foreign plants, they're starting to think about building new ones here.

While there was more cachet talking about the Singapore or Bangalore office, the Hoboken plant was a hell of a lot easier to visit and keep an eye on.

[leftyohiolib]

5. theres also a good amount of intellectual property theft going on over seas

perhaps that has something to do with the re-shoring