China Starts Outsourcing From ... the US

hackingbear writes: Burdened with Alabama's highest unemployment rate, long abandoned by textile mills and furniture plants, Wilcox County, Alabama, desperately needs jobs. And the jobs are coming from China. Henan's Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group opened a plant here last month, employing 300 locals. Chinese companies invested a record $14 billion in the United States last year, according to the Rhodium Group research firm. Collectively, they employ more than 70,000 Americans, up from virtually none a decade ago. Powerful forces — narrowing wage gaps (Chinese wages have been doubling every few years), tumbling U.S. energy prices, the rising Yuan — up 30% over the decade — are pulling Chinese companies across the Pacific. Perhaps very soon, Chinese workers will start protesting their jobs being outsourced to the cheap labor in the U.S."

Comments

Re:Leverage the poor, whoever they are

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternatively: Businesses will continue to reduce poverty, wherever it exists and whoever it is. Greed is blind to creed and color. All it cares about is profit.

Re:This I didn't expect.

[oh_my_080980980]

The only people who were disparaging manufacturing jobs were corporations who moved them overseas.

Re:First post

[Karmashock]

Actually we've seen this happen in the US for many years with a lot of foreign companies. Often because US companies fail to resolve labor or regulatory issues and a foreign company cuts through the issue to find a way to produce products in the same place without incurring many of the previous costs.

Toyoda for example has done this repeatedly and been able to produce cars more cheaply in the US then many of their American competitors using the same labor.

A lot of it boils down to legacy corporations that have grown too large and inefficient.

Things need a reboot on occasion. Many large companies should go through a serious reorganization top to bottom including the renegotiation of all contracts to take into consideration new opportunities and concerns.

Re:oh boy

[ultranova]

China's downfall in production will come when the factory workers start having unions that are too powerful.

Isn't it strange how success is always the accomplishment of awesome management but failure is never the fault of incompetent one?

In any case, you're wrong. The world is running out of hellholes that tolerate slave labour, so those companies that can't turn profit without it have nowhere to go and no future save bankruptcy auction. That should make this the time of great opportunity for every businessman who can actually live up to their own hype; based on the amount of whining we're hearing instead of eager expectation, I guess most of them know the truth about themselves...