The country's largest manufacturer of family sleeping bags says new competition from Bangladesh could force it out of business if the U.S. does not level the playing field.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/12/18/facing-closure-uss-largest-sleeping-bag-maker-seeks-relief-free-trade-loophole/#ixzz18W1oratM
I for one am all for competition here, there and everywhere and when there is an even playing field it works out well. We have however a playing field that is so out of whack that is skews any chance of a First world company competing against a third world. Think for a moment about the pay comparison of an average US worker ($7.25) and a worker from the country of Bangladesh ($0.13) Who will have the cheaper cost per product? How do these two companies compete with each other, well on paper they can't. What a country usually does is to apply a tariff on the incoming product to create some kind of balance between the two.
The ultimate decision on where a product comes from IMHO is up the the consumer, they drive where the product will come from, if the majority of the population chooses the cheaper product then it will come from the country that produces it for the lowest cost and that may or may not be the country the consumer is in. The mostly unseen consequence of buying a product from out of the country is in decreased demand from within the buyers country, this forces the company to cut hours, lay off workers, shut down or move to a cheaper source of labor in another country. So in the end that cheaper product you bought does have an initial lower cost but on the back side are the costs of hurting your own workers.
The argument has also been made that with the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs we will transfer into Green, Service and High Tech jobs will take there place, not so fast. Consider those jobs for a moment, they are very skilled jobs, not the highest end but they require a level of skill above some types of manufacturing. As a Raw analogy do you think that the guy on an assembly line who puts X widget into Y hole is ready to step into a higher level of employment, maybe and maybe not, Some can retrain, maybe. Take into another point and that is that some people are just plain stupid and will never function at a higher level and some would not want to even if you gave them the opportunity and I do not fault them in the least bit, some people do not want the stress of a challenging job, they age completely happy with where they are at, and that's fine, but we have to make those types of jobs available to them first. There has always been and will always be someone on the low end just as there is someone at the top and the middle, You can't just have a top.
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