Delphi Proposal to Cut Wages in Half!

....and they'd be welcome to buy our resources. What makes you think
otherwise?

 

Sure, that will not, and can not, happen under current trade laws.

mike hunt

 

May I interject an alternative view? As I recall Rockefeller had to be
dragged down before he went on his charitable donations and led the
way, I do believe. And the person who dragged him down was Ida Tarbell,
a journalist of the first rank who went after him. He, Rockefeller
appreciated this, because I do believe it helped his health. He had
been quite ill. When he decided to just not get it all but give it
away, his health improved.

About giving back to society has me perplexed? How can the poor give
anything back to society, for the most part? And the middle class?
Well, this has been changing. But many people have to be coaxed and
exposed before they decide that it's embarrassing that their particular
group is not giving anything back to society. Some newspaper exposure
does wonders!

 

The poor have something more valuable than money to give to society -
time.
Go to any charity in the land (legitimate ones, not the save the
children
scams) and give them a choice between $100 and 10 hours of labor doing
whatever they need done, and see which one they would rather have.

We have a group in the city here that runs around every so often and
rips down all the butt-ugly band posters and such that jackoffs staple
to the telephone poles. I've watched them in action and I don't see
anything that looks like high tech expensive equipment they are using.
Rather, just a few simple cheap tools and elbow grease. And the
results
are fantastic.

 

you are right to a point but i'm still paying 99 cents for a quart of oil
and they now make gas from sour crude oil and not lite sweet crude and the price
of sour is higher than lite sweet and diesel from what i was told is a byproduct
of gas refining and look at that

 

that would be revoking the nafta agreement. which i'm all for, we need to take
care of ourselves first before we fix the world
and by the way how can we as a free country be truly free to express our
opinions to each other when we can't speak the others language (spanish) thats
the beginnings of a country take over from wiithin. don't give away your guns
we are going to need them

 

The problem is that it's gotten too complex for a simple answer like
this.

Consider a real simple example, manufacture of electrical circuit
breaker panels (not the breakers, the panels that they mount into)

The businesses involved in the supply chain here are as follows:

1) Mining operations that dig the iron ore out of the ground and
process
it into pig iron

2) Steel mills that take the raw iron and produce sheet steel

3) The panel manufacturer that takes the sheet steel and cuts and
bends it into the box

The well meaning government decides there's too much cheap sheet
steel coming in and it's damaging the domestic steelmakers. So
they raise tariffs on foreign steel

The panel manufacturers were buying cheap foreign steel to make
panels here. Now they can't so they have to raise prices, and then
become uncompetitive. Now the foreign panelbox manufacturers can
undercut them and flood the market.

So the upshot is you have helped out one domestic industry but in so
doing you
have harmed many other domestic industries. The effect is you simply
shift
job loss from one industry to another.

The key in all of this is getting the consumer to buy in. If you can
convince
the consumers to insist on domestic suppliers, they will put pressure
on those
suppliers to also buy domestic, who put pressure on their suppliers to
also
buy domestic, and so on right up the supply chain. Unfortunately this
is not
a concept that has been trained into the American public since grade
school,
which is why there is so incredibly much low-quality junk sold in the
US, since
people buy so much on price only.

We ARE starting to see these attitudes change in certain markets -
particularly
food. People in the US are beginning to push their local grocery
stores to buy
from local farmers and suppliers, for example.

But, so many industries have been foreign-dominated for so long that
now theres
no domestic suppliers left. For example the manufacture of TV sets.
Even people
willing to pay more for a domestically produced TV simply cannot do it.

Unfortunately the genberal public in the US seems to be unable to
retain much
for very long. Every time the US goes through an economic slump,
people
start getting a clue about "Buy American" and we see interest in this,
along
with various advertising campaigns about it. But as soon as the
economy starts
to recover, people lose interest and are right back to ignoring
everything on
the product except for price.

 

The American consumer must lean from the Japanese once again, as the
American manufacture have learn that quality counts. Japanese consumers
have consistently been more incline to buy those products made in the own
country rather than product made in other courtiers. They understand it is
far more important to support ones own economy than that of foreign
countries. Unfortunately many Americans are confused about from whom they
are buying.. Toyota for instance gives the impression that many of the
vehicles it sells in the US are made in the US. The fact is the majority of
their vehicles are imported and those that are assembled in the US are
assemble primarily of cheaper imported parts. Honda does a much better job
of actually building in the US on mostly US parts. In the case of both
however the profits still leave the country federal corporate tax free.

mike hunt

 

Actually what is far worse than the profits leaving tax free is the
fact that
only the lower-level people get a salary from them.

It probably is unfair to say but if you look at new manufacturing
business
starts in the US, and I'm talking non-retail, and non-service, your
going
to find most of them beng done by folks who worked in the corporate
boardrooms for 20+ years making six figure salaries. Those are the
employers we want to have in the country. We need new retail business
starts like a hole in the head - all they do is push the few surviving
ma-and-pa retailers out of business and put in giant multiplexes that
employ a bunch of high school students at minimum wage.

When companies like Toyota and Honda come in, the six figure
executive positions are reserved for the motherships in their homeland.
Additionally, particularly with the Japanese, they dislike making
infrastructure investments in the US, the first choice of suppliers is
Japanese firms, they nickel-and-dime everything they build here.
There are not a huge number of spinoff firms coming out of Honda
and Toyota investments here in the US. Contrast that to General
Motors and all of it's spawn.

While an economy filled with workers making $70K a year would probably
be a fairly pleasant thing, it's not going to be able to produce many
new business starts that are worth sneezing at. While a lot of people
decry the rich/poor gap, the fact that we have a good number of people
making half a million bucks a year, after taxes, running around in the
country does provide a fairly fertile ground for new busines starts.
And
that is one of the things that keeps the US going, since there's always
going to be business failures every year and unless your replacing
these
with new business starts, you end up with all business becoming giant
monopolies and everyone working for big wasteful conglomerates.

Ted

 

What has most of this got to do with the auto parts industry.
We are talking auto parts here aren't we. Car assembly and design are
completely separate subjects, but as we know mother GM has the same
worker contract problems.
There are other NA parts manufacturers doing very well, Magna is one.

Unfortunately Delphi is stuck with too many costly union plums.
From what I read it's not the direct wages that are a problem.

The lack of a USA universal health care system is also a problem for USa
workers. In Canada the health care system reduces costs of operating a
business and the workers get better health care than many USA company
health care contracts. The USA stands out as a rich country that
doesn't take adequate care of it's people. Other rich countries of the
world have health care for all.

 

Toyota workers in the US that assemble their cars, of imported parts, have
less desirable health care than do domestic auto worker and Toyota vehicles
cost more than comparable sized and equipped domestic vehicles. Where in
the Constitution is one guaranteed government supplied health care? What's
next a government supplied car so one can go the a doctor or pharmacy?

mike hunt

 

Shhh! Don't give 'em any ideas.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')