It is incredible to me how people can be so easily manipulated. I happen to have seen a bit more of the whole story. I worked with Borg Warner Corporation in the mid Seventies and lived in the Chicago suburbs. I would go by a Rainbow Bread manufacturing plant which was state of the Art and was built one mile from a modern Borg Warner Plant where I was employed. I would often stop after work at their seconds shop and pick up great bread at really low prices. The plant employed area workers who made a living wage and supported their families. The Borg Warner plant was purchased by a company called Emerson Electric, which in the early 80s was known for sacking companies, by breaking unions, and moving manufacturing to rural America. At about the same time Rainbow closed their plant and shipped jobs to Texas, the Emerson Electric management took a third of the manufacturing from the Illinois location to the State of KY. For the next 20 years they moved machines first to Mexico, moving half the capital equipment off the factory floor to Mexico, and then in July 2010 they closed their doors and shipped the balance of jobs from Illinois to China, and lo and behold they reduced the work force in KY and America lost 1000 American jobs and some of the best bearings manufactured in the world.
Sadly, with my treatment, I pass by the both these manufacturing facilities. The bread facility now has an Italian bread special brand which I think is called gondolla, but the Bearing plant which employed a 1000 people has been demolished to make room for an outlet mall selling foreign goods.
Utilization and improved productivity is what has allowed America to have such abundance. However, somewhere in the early 80s the vultures determined that they could consolidate wealth by bringing American wages down to third world status and exporting our jobs. In the absence of a tax policy which rewarded job creation, we allowed the finacialization of America where job destruction was rewarded, and capital had a higher priority over labor. The characterization of this being a union problem is obscene. As management I crossed picket lines at that UAW Bearing plant and have very strong beliefs that unions have a place in our society, and at the bargaining table the numbers can be cranked out. This company was in Bankruptcy not because of unions, but because of a process of capital extraction from America and a policy of benign neglect by our Congress to address the same. We fought a revolution over financial exploitation, yet intelligent people post on this forum that what is happening to this company is the problem of the Union......it is not. concessions could be made and Americans could retain their jobs if only congress would get our priorities right and tax financial manipulation which takes our jobs, and rewards job creation. We have become a huddled mass with no value in our labor, and indentured servants to capital which by manipulation and clever legislation has left us impotent to understand our condition, or understand the problem.
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