2.6 mil new jobs doesn't sound crazy anymore

[JUGGERNAUT]

As much as I don't like Kerry I equally distain the good news reports.

Manufacturing is going to return to the US because automation has become a predominant factor in that industry here. If you consider the highest automated nations of the now G8 the US, Japan, & the UK rank in the top 3. Machines produce a higher level of productivity than cheap/slave labor.

 

The US believe it or not has lower costs involved in skilled workers to supervise & maintain that automation. So productivity gains in this sector in my opinion don't mean nearly as much as job & wage growth.

 

Sprint just announced a cut of 850 jobs in it's IT depts.

IT was the biggest wage growth sector in the 90's. I have yet to see one report suggesting an increase in IT jobs, so I doubt very much wage growth is going to occur.

[kapkomet]

So you are equating IT jobs as what drives wage growth? That's ludicrous.

 

Look, Dot.Com people were over paid to begin with. I don't feel sorry for someone that should have been making 100k to begin with getting knocked off that 500k perch. 100k is fine, 500k was overpaid. And there was a lot of that. That HAD to be broken. The wage growth in the 90's was, at best, articifial. I think that the wage growth you are seeing in basically all sectors EXCEPT IT is more in line with what should be happening anyway. You absolutely CANNOT sustain an economy on IT. We all saw the results.

 

Remember, too, that y2k inflated growth in the economy too. Frankly, looking back, that was a gimmick to make people and companies spend money on IT infastructre - a trap, IMO.

 

Bottom line: IT is NOT the place you should be looking for growth, because the articial "wage growth" in the 90's shouldn't have been as high as it was.

[JUGGERNAUT]

So you are equating IT jobs as what drives wage growth?  That's ludicrous.

 

Look, Dot.Com people were over paid to begin with.  I don't feel sorry for someone that should have been making 100k to begin with getting knocked off that 500k perch.  100k is fine, 500k was overpaid.  And there was a lot of that. That HAD to be broken.  The wage growth in the 90's was, at best, articifial.  I think that the wage growth you are seeing in basically all sectors EXCEPT IT is more in line with what should be happening anyway.  You absolutely CANNOT sustain an economy on IT.  We all saw the results.

 

Remember, too, that y2k inflated growth in the economy too.  Frankly, looking back, that was a gimmick to make people and companies spend money on IT infastructre - a trap, IMO.

 

Bottom line:  IT is NOT the place you should be looking for growth, because the articial "wage growth" in the 90's shouldn't have been as high as it was.

I never said it was the end all place to look for wage growth in the new millenium.

All I said is that it was the driving force behind it in the 90's. It appears you agree.

 

The problem is that govt spending didn't decrease at the time IT wages were declining. So you had the triple whammy: increased govt spending, decreased wage growth, & decreased tax revenues. You can't sustain any economy with the formula. It's a recipe for disaster. Now with outsourcing throw in, tax revenue is expected to decline even faster. That's why Lou Dobbs keeps sounding the alarm along with the WSJ. Outsourcing & automation affect all highly skiiled labor areas. Not just IT.

[kapkomet]

Automation, I agree with. Outsourcing? That money is still taxed. Or do you mean foreign outsourcing?

 

And even then, MNC's (multi-national corps) are still taxed, but there's a lot of loopholes.

[IlliniBob72]

In our community we are losing Electrolux (2700 workers), a plant that has been here for over 100 years, outsourced to Mexico.  Our town has 8,000 citizens so do the math what this does to us and the surrounding community.  Federal Mogul is shutting its plant, 540 jobs outsourced to Mexico.

And a plant hadn't closed down in the years 1992-2000.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

Where are these manufacturing jobs being created?  It sure doesn't seem to be around here unless there is some creative accounting going on...  There have been (and still more each month) factories shutting down completely or shutting down and moving either south of the border (Mexico, not Missouri) or to China.

I do believe there was a somewhat buried story a few months ago that they were re-naming fast food jobs manufacturing jobs in order to inflate numbers of manufacturing jobs.

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/20/...ain601336.shtml

 

Google search for a lot of articles about it. It's a fairly deceptive way to make it seem like there are less manufacturing jobs being lost. And regarding this move, the Chairman of the report was sent a letter by John Dingell (D-MI) stating some of the following: "I am sure the 163,000 factory workers who have lost their jobs in Michigan will find it heartening to know that a world of opportunity awaits them in high growth manufacturing careers like spatula operation, napkin restocking, and lunch tray removal...Will federal student loans and Trade Adjustment Assistance grants be applied to tuition costs at Burger College?...Will special sauce now be counted as a durable good?"

 

And kapkomet, you are correct. There are a lot of loopholes (i.e. putting corporate HQ in a PO box in the Cayman Islands so all the funds are tax free while getting all the benefits of the US without having to pay for them) And the loopholes isn't a one party thing either. Both parties are up to their necks in this s***.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

I do believe there was a somewhat buried story a few months ago that they were re-naming fast food jobs manufacturing jobs in order to inflate numbers of manufacturing jobs.

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/20/...ain601336.shtml

 

Google search for a lot of articles about it.  It's a fairly deceptive way to make it seem like there are less manufacturing jobs being lost.  And regarding this move, the Chairman of the report was sent a letter by John Dingell (D-MI) stating some of the following: "I am sure the 163,000 factory workers who have lost their jobs in Michigan will find it heartening to know that a world of opportunity awaits them in high growth manufacturing careers like spatula operation, napkin restocking, and lunch tray removal...Will federal student loans and Trade Adjustment Assistance grants be applied to tuition costs at Burger College?...Will special sauce now be counted as a durable good?"

 

And kapkomet, you are correct.  There are a lot of loopholes (i.e. putting corporate HQ in a PO box in the Cayman Islands so all the funds are tax free while getting all the benefits of the US without having to pay for them)  And the loopholes isn't a one party thing either.  Both parties are up to their necks in this s***.

Once again facts do not support that assertion, unless you consider burgers and napkins to be "durable goods" or "metallic products" or "computer and electronic products".

 

 

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm

 

Dont take my word for it though, go read what the Department of Labor has to say about it.

[cwsox]

And a plant hadn't closed down in the years 1992-2000. 

I was speaking about "my community."

 

In our community we are losing Electrolux (2700 workers), a plant that has been here for over 100 years, outsourced to Mexico. Our town has 8,000 citizens so do the math what this does to us and the surrounding community. Federal Mogul is shutting its plant, 540 jobs outsourced to Mexico.

 

 

Indeed, no plant closed in this community during the Clinton years, which is what I presume you mean by "1992-2000." The actual Clinton years were 1993-2001.

[southsider2k5]

I do believe there was a somewhat buried story a few months ago that they were re-naming fast food jobs manufacturing jobs in order to inflate numbers of manufacturing jobs.

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/20/...ain601336.shtml

 

Google search for a lot of articles about it.  It's a fairly deceptive way to make it seem like there are less manufacturing jobs being lost.  And regarding this move, the Chairman of the report was sent a letter by John Dingell (D-MI) stating some of the following: "I am sure the 163,000 factory workers who have lost their jobs in Michigan will find it heartening to know that a world of opportunity awaits them in high growth manufacturing careers like spatula operation, napkin restocking, and lunch tray removal...Will federal student loans and Trade Adjustment Assistance grants be applied to tuition costs at Burger College?...Will special sauce now be counted as a durable good?"

 

And kapkomet, you are correct.  There are a lot of loopholes (i.e. putting corporate HQ in a PO box in the Cayman Islands so all the funds are tax free while getting all the benefits of the US without having to pay for them)  And the loopholes isn't a one party thing either.  Both parties are up to their necks in this s***.

If all of these new manufacting and other jobs are all minimum wage jobs as I keep hearing people say, then how do you explain real wage growth?

[cwsox]

then how do you explain real wage growth?

as fiction if referring to current times

[southsider2k5]

as fiction if referring to current times

How do you explain it as fiction?

[LowerCaseRepublican]

IIRC, real wages have steadily been decreasing since the 1970s. And the CEO of Manpower, I might be wrong but isn't Manpower the #1 temp agency in the world? I think if a company hires temp workers they could afford to take on more workers/pay more $$ because they do not necessarily have to provide benefits/health care to temp workers. I dunno if that's THE explanation, just one I developed after closely reading the article posted by SS2K4.

 

And Nuke, that's the reason the Bush administration is taking such heat for the idea of making fast food workers "manufacturing" jobs because it's inaccurate and deceptive.

[southsideirish]

I'll tell you what. As soon as this asshole we have in office right now shows me how Iraq was in any way involved in the terrorist attack of 9-11 then I will vote for him. As soon as he shows me that Iraq has nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction then I will vote for him.

 

Or he can just say he lied about the whole thing.

 

Wait a second. No I won't! I will never vote for this asshole cocksucker liar. Our troops and citizens are over there working their asses off and risking their lives every day for what? A big fat lie!

 

f*** George W. and every thing he stands for.

[kapkomet]

IIRC, real wages have steadily been decreasing since the 1970s.  And the CEO of Manpower, I might be wrong but isn't Manpower the #1 temp agency in the world?  I think if a company hires temp workers they could afford to take on more workers/pay more $$ because they do not necessarily have to provide benefits/health care to temp workers.  I dunno if that's THE explanation, just one I developed after closely reading the article posted by SS2K4.

 

And Nuke, that's the reason the Bush administration is taking such heat for the idea of making fast food workers "manufacturing" jobs because it's inaccurate and deceptive.

First, I can tell you now that we go through Administaff (which is the concept of a conglomeration of small businesses getting together and keeping the overall cost of benefits down - so the concept that GW was walking around like it was a new concept has been around for a while, idiot), and I'll tell you what we pay for "benefits".

 

It's roughly 23% more then a base salary per person. So a person making $100,000 at our company costs us $123,000.

 

Now, if I as a hiring manager go out and contract through Manpower, I pay at least a 33% markup on the rate. Translation: someone coming in as a temp making $20.00 an hour, we're going to end up paying Manpower $26.66 an hour (at least). That means, generally I pay the same OR more for contractors.

 

I have a real difficult time when people say they contract out people and it costs them less. Frankly, there's ways around this... and if management were half ways intelligent, they'd find a way to lower their costs.

 

So why do comapanies do this? Here's the big dirty secret. I don't have to count contract folks as headcount. Translate that to Wall Street. We're not too heavy on our employees headcount that way, and we get the full write off of "contract labor". It's nothing more then a shell game.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

IIRC, real wages have steadily been decreasing since the 1970s.  And the CEO of Manpower, I might be wrong but isn't Manpower the #1 temp agency in the world?  I think if a company hires temp workers they could afford to take on more workers/pay more $$ because they do not necessarily have to provide benefits/health care to temp workers.  I dunno if that's THE explanation, just one I developed after closely reading the article posted by SS2K4.

 

And Nuke, that's the reason the Bush administration is taking such heat for the idea of making fast food workers "manufacturing" jobs because it's inaccurate and deceptive.

http://www.thestreet.com/markets/economics/10166527.html

 

 

Does the Philly fed have a partisan motive to skew numbers? I think not. The manufacturing sector is smoking lately and they're adding workers. That's just in the northeast but similar reports from the Midwest, south and west are almost carbon copies. That's the bottom line. The long decline in manufacturing is over whether the left wants to admit it or not. You can sit there and assert that the data is phony but everybody that is anybody in the business world disagrees.

[JUGGERNAUT]

The Wall Street Journal has been doing a good job at covering the story on job growth & job sourcing in America for well over a year now.

 

1) Foreign-outsourcing: This is occuring en-masse in software, call support, & manufacturing. Foreign engineers are being fitted with terminals to over-see production of automated lines in America. The WSJ did a big story on this & it's impact on mechanical & robotics engineers in America.

 

This is likewise becoming predominant in back-office operations such as accounting, claims processing, legal processing, & other clerical work. It's raised issues of privacy of American's personal data being shipped overseas.

 

2) Foreign-job-transfer: Global companies operating in America are using a loop-hole to replace American engineers & high skilled labor with cheaper foreign ones. The loop-hole is that the cheaper foreign ones are employees with the Global company before the transfer is processed. This is creating departmental wide job loss. As I understand there are practically no limits to which a company can do this.

 

The Wall Street Journal has predicted a bad scenario where high skilled labor in America might actually start moving overseas to find jobs by the end of the decade.

There's a joke that for years American's have always referred to working at McD's in your late 30's or 40's would be the worst possible scenario. The WSJ has painted a scenario where that job might not even be available in the next decade.

 

It's happening so fast that I don't even the govt can get a grip on it. The thing I don't think politicians are aware of is that there are two stages when clerk jobs go overseas:

1) The foundation stage. The infrastructure gets laid down to support the networking

& back-office processing to facilitate the work. This state usually sees trickle job loss.

2) The implementation stage. When the foundation state is set down, then whole depts are lost.

 

We will probably be long into the implementation stage by the end of this decade.

[IlliniBob72]

I was speaking about "my community."

 

 

 

 

Indeed, no plant closed in this community during the Clinton years, which is what I presume you mean by "1992-2000."  The actual Clinton years were 1993-2001.

Well, if you're only talking about your community and not tying it to the national situation, perhaps you should talk to your mayor then. Sounds like he's doing a real s***ty job, by your standards. Of course, when anything bad happens in the business world, it is the government's fault.

 

This outsourcing that you are constantly crying about, is this a phenomenon of the last three years? Did Bush get into office and his first day on the job sign a bill to ship American jobs overseas??? I would thought that this would have something to do with NAFTA, signed by Clinton in 1993, but that couldn't possibly be, right? If it is a result of something Bush has done, I'd love to see how. Please, enlighten me. Something occuring on his watch doesn't mean it's a result of him. I've seen a drastic increase in my child production in the last three years, yet somehow I'm not crediting Bush with that.

 

And you're right, I left the first three weeks of 2001 off of "the Clinton years". I figured I'd give you more Bush time in office for him to have f***ed things up.

[IlliniBob72]

And if we're going to use the world within 30 miles of us as the end all be all, that's fine. One of the biggest employers in the Peoria-Bloomington area is Mitsubishi that has a plant in Normal employing in the thousands. My father works for NTN, Inc., a Japanese owned ball bearing manufacturer.

 

I found a few facts that I thought were interesting...

 

"Over the last 15 years, manufacturing "insourced" jobs grew by 82% - at an annual rate of 5.5%; and manufacturing "outsourced" jobs grew by 23% - at an annual rate of 1.5%."

 

"Over the same period, total "insourced" jobs grew by 117% - at an annual rate of 7.8%; and total "outsourced" jobs grew by 56% - at an annual rate of 3.8%."

 

"U.S. subsidiaries in Michigan have consistently supported a significant number of jobs in the state. They now employ 244,200 Michigan workers-an increase of 50% over five years."

 

America would end up losing in the long run if it went to an isolationist economical policy.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

And if we're going to use the world within 30 miles of us as the end all be all, that's fine. One of the biggest employers in the Peoria-Bloomington area is Mitsubishi that has a plant in Normal employing in the thousands. My father works for NTN, Inc., a Japanese owned ball bearing manufacturer.

 

I found a few facts that I thought were interesting...

 

"Over the last 15 years, manufacturing "insourced" jobs grew by 82% - at an annual rate of 5.5%; and manufacturing "outsourced" jobs grew by 23% - at an annual rate of 1.5%."

 

"Over the same period, total "insourced" jobs grew by 117% - at an annual rate of 7.8%; and total "outsourced" jobs grew by 56% - at an annual rate of 3.8%."

 

"U.S. subsidiaries in Michigan have consistently supported a significant number of jobs in the state. They now employ 244,200 Michigan workers-an increase of 50% over five years."

 

America would end up losing in the long run if it went to an isolationist economical policy.

If you listen to Sideshow though all those people at Mitsubishi and NTN are flipping burgers and stuffing napkin holders. It's so typical of the left lately. They cant say the economy is hemmoraging jobs anymore so they fall back to the utterly rediculous argument that all the jobs being created are minimum wage crap jobs if they dont try to say the jobs created numbers coming out this year are totally false to begin with. Additionally, they just love to talk about jobs that are lost overseas but totally forget that jobs are coming back here from foregin companies who locate plants and offices here and American firms who find that their overseas plans were a failure.

 

They just wont admit they are wrong on this issue no matter how much evidence comes out to the contrary.

[JUGGERNAUT]

Additionally, they just love to talk about jobs that are lost overseas but totally forget that jobs are coming back here from foregin companies who locate plants and offices here and American firms who find that their overseas plans were a failure. 

Read the WSJ on the subject. The wages for the persons supervising the plants have dropped considerably. They are coming back to America because it makes cost & profit sense to build plants that are predominantly automated over here.

 

Any new plant is going to take on at least twice the work force needed to run it because of the need for quality assurance in the plant. But once that process is in place & the plant is running at optimal efficiency you will see the work force cut in half. These are temp jobs in a 3-5 yr cycle at best.

 

Without a real policy in place to deal with the drastic difference in the cost of labor & supplies in the US vs China, & other low wage regions there will be no boom coming soon. Inflation related to energy prices & an ever-increasing highly skilled & highly educated work force outside of the US is going to dampen any gains.

 

Capital costs more in the US than these low wage regions because taxes & laws keep them artificially high. Meaning they don't allow true market forcces to dictate what the market is willing to pay. You can't have it both ways. You can't artificially hold things constant in your own country & then open the doors to a global economy that has proven time & again that human rights & American values don't have a place in the movement of capital around the world. Need I remind you of Gap & Nike?

[Texsox]

You are also seeing a shortening of the supply chain. In the distant past companies were very verticle. For example a auto plant would manufacture the radio, seats, sheet metal, instrument cluster, electric motors, etc. Now they sub contract to companies that specialize in different areas.

 

FOr some companies they try and soource on a global scale and find out that transportation time has it's costs. Ships are delayed by storms, seas, etc. Planes are somewhat more expensive. So they are looking to bring their current suppliers closer. We see it here in Mexico. For example when Black and Decker moved in they either bring suppliers with them, or selects new ones from the local supply base.

[JUGGERNAUT]

I don't believe any one at the Fed level is going to change this. It must come from the states themselves. I was intrigued by Kerry initially because he began to talk about it.

But when he unveiled his plan it was pretty much the same speak as Bush. Both are grossly in favor of the global economy as it's moving today.

 

If you are wishy-washy between the two then you might consider Bush on this basis.

Since his time as gov of Texas & during both his campaign & term in office he has always been a strong believer in extending NAFTA to the entire western hemisphere.

That's not just lip service either because he's in favor of regulation & laws that will shift capital from overseas to central & south America. Why does that make a difference? Because democracy is still alive in south America. You can't have human rights initiatives without it. If you had to guess which region would be more likely to raise it's own wage growth & build it's economy it would be the CA & SA.

 

When you consider the Hispanic links to Bush's family it only strengthens that bond. Jebs desire to grant amnesty to illegals who have been living in Florida for years is not that bizarre really. It's basically a statement that it's cost-prohibitive & politically incorrect in the state of FL to deal a heavy hand to the problem. So if they are going to be here anyways it's best to tax them like everyone else.

 

I don't really know Kerry's views on the issue but I know that I've tried to follow his campaign enough to where if it was a central focus topic I would have heard something.