***********.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-18/america-s-dirty-war-against-manufacturing-part-1-carl-pope.html
***********.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-19/america-s-dirty-war-against-manufacturing-part-2-carl-pope.html
***********.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-20/america-s-dirty-war-on-manufacturing-part-3-commentary-by-carl-pope.html
“I’d love to make this product in America. But I’m afraid I won’t be able to.”
My host, a NASA engineer turned Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has just conducted a fascinating tour of his new clean-energy bench-scale test facility. It’s one of the Valley’s hottest clean-technology startups. And he’s already thinking of going abroad.
“Wages?” I ask.
His dark eyebrows arch as if I were clueless, then he explains the reality of running a fab -- an electronics fabrication factory. “Wages have nothing to do with it. The total wage burden in a fab is 10 percent. When I move a fab to Asia, I might lose 10 percent of my product just in theft.”
I’m startled. “So what is it?”
“Everything else. Taxes, infrastructure, workforce training, permits, health care. The last company that proposed a fab on Long Island went to Taiwan because they were told that in a drought their water supply would be in the queue after the golf courses.”
So begins my education on the hollowing-out of the American economy, which might be titled: “It’s not the wages, stupid.”
The conventional wisdom is that wages and union contracts simply made American cars too expensive. During the auto- industry collapse of 2008, the news media bombarded the public with data about how much higher labor costs are in Detroit factories compared with those in non-unionized Southern states. The New York Times reported, for example, that at GM “the average worker was paid about $70 an hour.”