Why 5,300 Jobs Disappeared

[Jon Katz]

I just read a fairly thorough analysis in the Toledo Blade about the state of manufacturing in southeast Michigan and northwest Ohio. Among the people quoted in the story are NAM officials, politicians and union representatives.

Here are a few comments from the story:

“Essentially, American firms and the American people are being asked to compete against communist economies, managed economies, closed economies, and these create unbearable hardships." -- Democratic U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Toledo, Ohio.

"We’ve got to do something about energy. We have got to compete. We have found, and history has proved it, you can’t build a barrier around this place.” -- Rep. Bob Latta, a Republican from Bowling Green, Ohio.

“The decline in manufacturing is a global phenomena, it’s not just a U.S. phenomena.” -- Dave Huether, an economist with the National Association of Manufacturers.


Read the entire story here.

[Milo3]

We're competing against communist countries for jobs? I wonder which countries she means, China is far from being communist, it makes the sherrod brown democrats look quite protectionist.

One of the dilemma's of reading an article like this, is that it is using a backward looking view of the recent past to describe today. Today, many manufacturers, except the detroit (big 2-1/2) dinosaurs, are quite busy and exporting based on a finally recalibrated us dollar. The chinese currency has appreciated 18% in the past couple of years, resulting in many opportunities to export by US manufacturers making products worth exporting. Especially to Europe. So this backward looking article is perhaps missing today's reality. Except for the pain of the folks whose firms didn't make the cut.

By the way,you left out ms kaptur's biggest gaff, Where she says that "other countries subsidize the health and pension costs shouldered by corporations here,"

I don't think that she would be pleased to have the health and pension coverage that the Chinese have.
The health and pension coverage "provided in China" isn't even close to our standards- thats not the issue. Or is she saying that the canadians And the brits are beating us in manufacturing on price because of this health and pension issue? Funny, that doesn't seem to be the way the trade flows are going. Politicians talk, but they make no sense.

Perhaps - just perhaps, we are paying our legacy union workers more for benefits than the market seems to be able to support. Just perhaps.

Toyota and Honda are doing a fine job making and selling cars in North America, and the list of new auto plants keeps growing. Interestingly, not in the legacy union states for the most part. Gee, do we need statistics to find a correlation here?

The revaluation of the dollar is the only macroeconomic factor worth considering, the rest of it is decisions of an efficient market, and consequences of a legacy of lame corporate management, predominately in Detroit.
milo3