Forum Post: The Twisted Thinking of Corporate America

When Michael Moore appeared today on Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN to discuss the Occupy Wall Street movement in front of a live studio audience, a gentleman in the audience made a very key important point about the scarcity of jobs in America today. Specifically, that it is the direct result of ever increasing advances in technology combined with the offshoring of skilled manufacturing jobs to China.

Having personally investigated and witnessed this specifically in the manufacturing supply chain of the U.S. consumer technology products sector, it is a fact that without exception the manufacture of every U.S. brand of computer and smartphone device as well as backend hardware infrastructure equipment is offshored to OEM companies (original equipment manufacturers) that are predominantly from Taiwan and who in turn produce and ship these products from their wholly-owned factories located in China.

Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, you name it, this is the case. For example, Apple products may have “Designed in California” printed on their products, but their manufacture is in China, employing nearly one million local people (yes, one million) there.

The justification for this situation is always that America is no longer a competitive manufacturing location in terms of labor and other associated operating costs, even when the cost of overseas transportation logistics is included into the equation. This type of thinking is completely distorted, not to mention very unpatriotic. Would Taiwan/China ever tolerate a reverse scenario of this situation? Not in a million years.

What it is really all about is squeezing another 5% to 10% net profit margin to the bottom line, whatever it takes, without passing it onto American consumers and businesses while also devastating the domestic U.S. employment base that in turn is a significant contributing factor in precipitating the housing crisis. To claim otherwise is a falsehood, as Americans would gladly match that difference being built into slightly higher retail prices if it means those products are actually being built in America.

This of course is just one specific category in the overall manufacturing landscape in America today. It can also be said of endless value-added product categories from automotive parts to major household appliances to apparel, even fast-moving consumer goods, in which U.S. retailers are also complicit.

Even in the online social networking arena, a phenomenally successful soft technology sector invented in the U.S., the likes for example of Google, Facebook and Twitter (all of which are banned in China) have nonetheless all established their respective R&D centers right next door to China in Taiwan. To say that they need to be close to Chinese markets is certainly no excuse when the very nature of their businesses is borderless in the first place.

Even more so when considering that a readily available talent pool of highly skilled and equally capable unemployed/ underemployed American-Chinese professionals already exists in the U.S. If anything, this is yet another blatant case of the lowest possible labor costs driving U.S. corporate policy decision making under the false pretense of so-called free trade globalization.

All brought about by a system of higher learning institutions that for years have instructed finance and MBA types that robotically implementing such unethical and unpatriotic business practices is not only acceptable, its domestic consequences for American society can simply be considered collateral damage. As with anything that eventually gains critical mass, this behavior is now standard operating procedure.

It is high time for all Americans who are being exploited to hold not just their banks and the government accountable for the current economic turmoil, but equally as importantly the litany of cynical mainstream U.S. corporations.