A few key factors have made bringing jobs back to America seem more pragmatic. In key manufacturing countries such as China and Brazil, wages are increasing rapidly. Skyrocketing energy costs have dramatically increased shipping costs. These factors, coupled with the widely-held belief of manufacturers that Americans produce better quality products, make it very practical to bring jobs back to the US.
Some companies have already brought man jobs back, a process know as "on-shoring." General Electric used to base production of a water heater in China, but has recently relocated to Kentucky.
Many are skeptical that bringing back manufacturing jobs will help to turn around the economy. But the White House asserts that these jobs will be better than manufacturing jobs in the late twentieth century, and can help improve technological advances.
Do you guys think bringing back manufacturing jobs will have a significant effect on decreasing unemployment and turning around the economy? Is this something the US should be focusing on, on do you think President Obama should focus on other problems, such as Social Security and education?
4 comments:
I don't think this will have a huge effect on unemployment but it certainly can't hurt. Getting more jobs in America is much better than having those same jobs somewhere else. It is definitely something that the government should be focusing on. It is always better to have American products made in America because then we don't have to rely on other countries.
Manufacturing is critical to the US prosperity in this century. First, advanced manufacturing creates productivity and new innovations in the US. Second, advance d manufacturing can generate more output and employment. Even if manufacturing can never reach the levels that it did in previous decades, having an advanced manufacturing can help solve the employment challenges that we face in the long run. Third, manufacturing can improve our trade balance as well as help the US bring down the trade deficit.
However, after reading an article in the New York Times about why the iphone is manufactured in Asia rather than the US, I question how effective Obama will be trying to bring manufacturing back to the US. Only 10% of the iphone is manufactured in the US while the semiconductors are all manufactured in Korea, Taiwan, Europe, Japan, and Africa. The iphone is not even assembled in the US but in China. Why? Well, it’s cheaper abroad and the workers oversees are more flexible than the US. Foreign workers are much more diligent and have more industrial skills than Americans. These are the factors that Obama has to deal with if he plans to bring back the manufacturing jobs because for some companies like the iphone, “Made in the USA” is not a viable option.
I think bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States can potentially help decrease unemployment and help the economy, but I don't think bringing manufacturing jobs back alone will be enough to solve the entire unemployment issue and completely revitalize the economy. I think it should have a positive effect, but more definitely needs to be done.
I believe the creation of jobs in the United States is something President Obama and the government should focus on alongside other issues, such as Social Security and education, as Alyssa mentioned.
I think the main issue with having manufacturing jobs brought back is that the majority of the American workforce is involved in service industries and not manual labor industries. I'm not sure what the statistics on the unemployment between the two separate divisions of the workforce are, but if there's significant unemployment in the manual labor sector, bringing these jobs back will reduce the unemployment percentage. But then again, many unemployed workers who have previously held jobs in the service sector may just be desperate enough to take on such manual labor jobs, even though they're not really tangential to their former positions. Either way, having more job opportunities available will, needless to say, be more beneficial than not.
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