Thursday, January 26, 2012

Manufacturing and the jobs crisis

As a reporter who covers jobs and manufacturing, I recommend two recent articles, one from The New York Times and one from The Atlantic magazine.

The former deals with Apple and is titled: "How the U.S. lost out on iPhone work." The latter tells the story of Standard Motor Products and is called "Making it in America."

Both stories delve deeply into timely topics, given the Republican debates and the State of the Union speech. Happy reading and I welcome your feedback on these well-researched, well-written articles.

Here are the links:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/8844/

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

The first article on Apple is correct.

This is something I saw almost 10 years ago when I lived in China for a year.

The Chinese are smart and hard working. Americans for the most part are neither.

Just look at our schools. Pathetic. Catering to the lowest common denominator at the expense of our best.

That's a winning formula!

Also, the fanciful idea that America can somehow bootstrap itself into prosperity through small businesses and entrepreneurs is just so 1970's.

Yes, back when Apple and Microsoft got started that was the way to do it.

Today, any sensible entrepreneur would outsource production of whatever gizmo he created to someplace like China or India as soon as it was feasible.

Those "garage" jobs are not going to grow into American manufacturing jobs as they did in the past.

The past is the past. We had a good thing going and basically blew it.

Andy Grove of Intel is another one to consult on this matter. He has said basically the same thing.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_28/b4186048358596.htm

Let's face it, our politicians are basically clueless, but they will tell us what we want to hear and recycle the same worn-out cliches about how we can rebuild America by doing what we did 30 years ago.

Nope. Not gonna happen.

I guess we'll all have to become insurance salesmen...