Apple had a plant in Fountain, Colorado that they sold in 1996. All work was transferred to SCI at the same facility for three more years.
Apple plant in Elk Grove, California made G4s and G5s until April 2004.
Interesting. All my Apple equipment says "Designed By Apple in California, Made in <Insert Asian Country Here>". I've seen "Assembled in USA" also, but that's a far cry from actually making the motherboards and other electronics. I believe the Elk Grove plant took displays, hard drives, CD-ROMs and motherboards from other countries and assembled them.
To my knowledge, NeXT was the last PC maker that built their own motherboards, and that was at an automated plant.
For the labor pendulum to swing back to the US somewhat, US labor cost will need to stop rising or decline somewhat. Perhaps in the US there might be company provided housing and healthcare in exchange for low pay.
...you will never find a community in the USA that will let you build a factory that spits out all this hazardous waste. there are a lot of these wackos here in NYC and there are still parts of NYC that aren't being built up because of pollution clean up costs. Whole Foods abandoned a store here it was well into the process of building after the pollution clean up costs got out of control
I call BS.
"Plans to open the upscale natural food chain's first Brooklyn store were thrown into disarray when leaky oil tanks were found buried beneath the site in 2006, contaminating the soil with cancer-causing chemicals, such as benzene...Once the cleanup is done, Whole Foods will be eligible for tax credits to offset the costs..."
Americans enjoy a high standard of living, and subsequently have a high cost of living. Exposing workers to hazards, and neighborhoods to toxins is not a suitable compromise for the return of outsourced jobs.
Note that this wouldn't benefit the Chinese worker much unless they already had the means to buy imported goods (which nationalism would say needed to be "protected", sound familiar?)
Our government could encourage manufacturing here by taking certain steps:
1. Allow companies to expense a lot of the plant and equipment. Most of the hi tech equipment has short life so this makes sense. Possible investment tax credits for domestic equipment investment... especially if manufactured here.
2. Do not allow companies that have manufacturing overseas to defer income taxes indefinitely as it is being done now. Disallow transfer pricing. The increased revenue will allow the government to lower corporate tax rates.
Higher capital investment that leads to mass automation can reduce labor use and costs. There are added savings like quality control, logistics from manufacturing in the US.
You can take the bad parts along with the good; Reagan also destroyed inflation, forced Japanese manufacturing plants to come State-side, and cut unemployment in half.
Those policies of deregulation could have been handled a little differently and avoided Wall Street meltdowns and huge shifts in wealth to the rich. Such is the way of the GOP, though. Skip ahead to the 2000's and see Bush's policies. He did the same thing with the debt, let the banks destroy the economy, vastly increased military spending, but did nothing except increase our trade and budget deficits. At least Reaganomics did something right.
I don't have any answers for this debate, but I think it's only going to get worse. I decided a couple years ago to buy things made practically anywhere except China. I know many companies may get medals and other supplies from there (possibly radioactive, lead or otherwise), and you can't possibly know where every raw material comes from. Most of the USA doesn't even have any clue where most of the food we eat every day comes from, because they don't want you to know...
However, unless I can't buy a similar product made in the US or even Europe, I try really hard not to support the multitude of bad things happening in China and the US and European companies who choose to produce things there as well.
I just try to support good products and companies I care about with my pocketbook and avoid the other products if at all possible...
Interesting. All my Apple equipment says "Designed By Apple in California, Made in <Insert Asian Country Here>". I've seen "Assembled in USA" also, but that's a far cry from actually making the motherboards and other electronics. I believe the Elk Grove plant took displays, hard drives, CD-ROMs and motherboards from other countries and assembled them.
To my knowledge, NeXT was the last PC maker that built their own motherboards, and that was at an automated plant.
If someone has a PC motherboard with "Made in the USA" on it that's less than 10 years old, I'd love to see it. Put it in a museum!
IBM could've made the PPC chips for the G4's but they didn't include AltiVec. They did build a new facility in Fishkill NY for the G5's (and other chips.)
Where the chips go from there I haven't researched yet, but I currently live near IBM's East Fishkill facility. It's too bad that corporations think more of the manufacturing cannot be done here. I think the US is ready for a decent compromise from heavy handed unions and the willful lack of worker's rights. We have enough in place now for us to take the best of both and come out on top of the world again.
if it's that easy and cheap why isn't apple making iphones here but instead paying the shipping costs from China along with all the other costs of doing business in China?
probably because in the 21st century you will never find a community in the USA that will let you build a factory that spits out all this hazardous waste. there are a lot of these wackos here in NYC and there are still parts of NYC that aren't being built up because of pollution clean up costs. Whole Foods abandoned a store here it was well into the process of building after the pollution clean up costs got out of control
"wackos" - meaning people who don't want toxic waste and health-damaging pollution in their communities? Yeah, it may be bad for (some kinds of disreputable) business, but it's not "wacko" to not want deformed babies and people dying of emphysema in their 30s (conditions in the industrial U.S. and U.K. in the 1800s, and in China today). Add a few dollars to the production cost, or keep your precious iPhones; I'll keep my health, thanks.
PS - Whole Foods still intends to build that store in Gowanus, if that's the place you're referring to.
Seems to me you pulled that number out of an orifice. It assumes (as did another poster) that somehow assembly costs are a very significant portion of the cost of each iPhone, something I would strongly refute. We all have seen the articles on how much the components of an iPhone cost, and that Apple marks everything up about 100%. I therefore propose that it only costs $10 or so to assemble an iPhone, as there's not a whole lot of $ left to play with. As such, if you were to clean up these factories of their hexane and give these workers the bonus they were promised, you'd only add $1-2 to the cost of each unit. If you're willing to deny these workers that small amount, then you're a jackass, pure and simple.
You are not thinking recursively. You are only looking at the top-level labor costs. But then you have to look at the components. Those have to be made too, and there's more labor costs there. And then the components that make up those components have to be made and so on. If you continue with this eventually you'll arrive at the raw natural resources that make up the components, and everything else is labor costs. The quantity of raw resources that go into such a small device is very small and cost very little, everything else is labor costs (in fact you can even argue that the cost of the natural resources is also labor costs, i.e. cost of extracting them, but let's not get into controversial things like the labor theory of value here). So if you move all the labor into the US, then yes the price of the final product will rise considerably.
if it's that easy and cheap why isn't apple making iphones here but instead paying the shipping costs from China along with all the other costs of doing business in China?
probably because in the 21st century you will never find a community in the USA that will let you build a factory that spits out all this hazardous waste. there are a lot of these wackos here in NYC and there are still parts of NYC that aren't being built up because of pollution clean up costs. Whole Foods abandoned a store here it was well into the process of building after the pollution clean up costs got out of control
Quote:
Originally Posted by gin_tonic
But every part will cost more if you'd like to move the manufactures back to the USA. Every chip, case, screen, even wires will be priced higher.
And you keep in your mind that it'll increase enviromental contamination
Western companies manufacture in Asia to gain razor-thin competitive edge in manufacturing costs, and the difference can be quite small and still justify a manufacturing relocation, when you're talking about millions of widgets - if you save a couple dollars per widget, you're talking big differences on the bottom line. They don't necessarily relocate manufacturing in order to reap massively larger profits - pushing the margin even a fraction of a percentage point can make the difference between a tech company surviving (on the U.S. stock market) and being eaten for lunch. When the dollar started falling 2 years ago, some durable-goods manufacturing started to re-blossom here (thwarted by the "great recession", sadly), in part because the cost of shipping adds a huge layer of expense. If it's true that an iPhone, as a random example, would cost massively more if manufactured here, I'd love to see studies/statistics that show this. I don't necessarily doubt it, but I do doubt the labor savings specifically are as massive as our knee-jerk media reaction to the idea of "cheap Asian labor" vs. "bloated union wages in the U.S." (uh, and here's a non-orifice-originated statistic: less than 8 percent of U.S. private sector workers are union).
Big picture: eventually, the nearly complete disappearance of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. will combine with an accelerated decline in service-sector jobs (has been happening already for 15 years - it's just a long-term consequence of manufacturing jobs leaving) and result in a massive shrinkage of the middle classes and, therefore, a massive shrinkage of markets for high-end widgets, and then it won't really matter where stuff is manufactured because there won't be anyone here able to buy anything anyway. Henry Ford got it right - you've got to pay your workers enough to buy your mass-produced product, if you want a mass market for it. Floating the Yuan _might_ help some, but eventually the Asian labor force will have to improve its own lot in order to afford the widgets they're building, thereby building a mass consumer market there mirroring the one in the West. But that may never happen because the population in China is 70 percent peasant - something that the U.S. labor market never had to deal with. In other words, their potential supply of dirt-cheap unskilled labor is basically unlimited, especially compared with ours (for now, anyway).
The problem in the US is the cost of living keeps increasing while most people's earnings, adjusted for inflation, have been falling. Meanwhile, pay on the high end for executives, athletes, etc has been skyrocketing while their taxes burden has decreased.
the u.s. economy has been hurt by relocation of manufacturing jobs overseas. one big advantage that manufacturing has over services is that it can take advantage of foreign markets. you can't sell services such as car repair, merchandise retail, hair cuts, etc. to anyone outside the domestic market. by losing manufacturing, the u.s. has been hurt economically.
unfortunately, you can't convince the typical MBA of this who only sees things one quarter at a time and whose short term economic understanding is what is fueling the economic decisions (such as relocating manufacturing facilities overseas) made in the u.s. today.
if the u.s. didn't have a natural monopoly on things like operating systems (Apple and Microsoft) and CPUs (Intel and AMD) and internet technologies (Cisco) the u.s. would be in worse shape today than it is today.
i'm sure that's all common sense, but it bothers me when people say that it doesn't matter that the u.s. has lost manufacturing jobs because the free market will sort it all out for the best in the end.
Americans enjoy a high standard of living, and subsequently have a high cost of living. Exposing workers to hazards, and neighborhoods to toxins is not a suitable compromise for the return of outsourced jobs.
unfortunately, you can't convince the typical MBA of this who only sees things one quarter at a time and whose short term economic understanding is what is fueling the economic decisions (such as relocating manufacturing facilities overseas) made in the u.s. today.
The typical MBA works for a company, and has only its interests to consider. "The big picture" should be left to governments setting policy. The MBAs have nothing to do with it.
Quote:
if the u.s. didn't have a natural monopoly on things like operating systems (Apple and Microsoft) and CPUs (Intel and AMD) and internet technologies (Cisco) the u.s. would be in worse shape today than it is today.
"natural monopoly"? That happens when economies of scale are such that a non-regulated market will have only one vendor. Think electric power. There is no particular reason why Apple couldn't be a foreign competitor to Microsoft, or why some Finnish college student couldn't write an operating system kernel. There is nothing "natural" about American dominance in this field.
Quote:
i'm sure that's all common sense, but it bothers me when people say that it doesn't matter that the u.s. has lost manufacturing jobs because the free market will sort it all out for the best in the end.
The free market doesn't "sort it all out for the best". The free market is good at one thing only, and that is balancing supply and demand. As for manufacturing, similar claims have been made years ago about agriculture. Growing food seemed to be such a core issue, that it was a recurring theme in national and nationalistic movements through the mid 20th century. Yet today, in most modern countries, agriculture accounts for about 3% of jobs. Mechanization and automation have reduced the need for labor.
Manufacturing was going through a similar process. Jobs were reduced as automation increased. This automation required a lot of capital investment, but reduced variable costs significantly. To some extent, this trend has reversed, because of the availability of cheap labor in China and other developing countries. However, in the long run, such capital expenditures pay off, and when the few workers get ever more sophisticated jobs overseeing the machinery, the cost difference between a plant in China and a plant in the US will decrease, to the point where shipping and administrative cost differences will determine the location of plants.
Comments
Apple had a plant in Fountain, Colorado that they sold in 1996. All work was transferred to SCI at the same facility for three more years.
Apple plant in Elk Grove, California made G4s and G5s until April 2004.
Interesting. All my Apple equipment says "Designed By Apple in California, Made in <Insert Asian Country Here>". I've seen "Assembled in USA" also, but that's a far cry from actually making the motherboards and other electronics. I believe the Elk Grove plant took displays, hard drives, CD-ROMs and motherboards from other countries and assembled them.
To my knowledge, NeXT was the last PC maker that built their own motherboards, and that was at an automated plant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT6aphdX0rI
If someone has a PC motherboard with "Made in the USA" on it that's less than 10 years old, I'd love to see it. Put it in a museum!
For the labor pendulum to swing back to the US somewhat, US labor cost will need to stop rising or decline somewhat. Perhaps in the US there might be company provided housing and healthcare in exchange for low pay.
Ah, yes, Tennessee Ernie Ford:
...you will never find a community in the USA that will let you build a factory that spits out all this hazardous waste. there are a lot of these wackos here in NYC and there are still parts of NYC that aren't being built up because of pollution clean up costs. Whole Foods abandoned a store here it was well into the process of building after the pollution clean up costs got out of control
I call BS.
"Plans to open the upscale natural food chain's first Brooklyn store were thrown into disarray when leaky oil tanks were found buried beneath the site in 2006, contaminating the soil with cancer-causing chemicals, such as benzene...Once the cleanup is done, Whole Foods will be eligible for tax credits to offset the costs..."
NY Daily News
Americans enjoy a high standard of living, and subsequently have a high cost of living. Exposing workers to hazards, and neighborhoods to toxins is not a suitable compromise for the return of outsourced jobs.
Who said I'm American?
If you're not it would explain the "doesn't matter to others as long as I'm not bothered" attitude.
Note that this wouldn't benefit the Chinese worker much unless they already had the means to buy imported goods (which nationalism would say needed to be "protected", sound familiar?)
Reaganomics?
1. Allow companies to expense a lot of the plant and equipment. Most of the hi tech equipment has short life so this makes sense. Possible investment tax credits for domestic equipment investment... especially if manufactured here.
2. Do not allow companies that have manufacturing overseas to defer income taxes indefinitely as it is being done now. Disallow transfer pricing. The increased revenue will allow the government to lower corporate tax rates.
Higher capital investment that leads to mass automation can reduce labor use and costs. There are added savings like quality control, logistics from manufacturing in the US.
Reaganomics?
No, Reaganomics was about deregulation to the point of a Wall Street meltdown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWen53eqmJo
No, Reaganomics was about deregulation to the point of a Wall Street meltdown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWen53eqmJo
You can take the bad parts along with the good; Reagan also destroyed inflation, forced Japanese manufacturing plants to come State-side, and cut unemployment in half.
Those policies of deregulation could have been handled a little differently and avoided Wall Street meltdowns and huge shifts in wealth to the rich. Such is the way of the GOP, though. Skip ahead to the 2000's and see Bush's policies. He did the same thing with the debt, let the banks destroy the economy, vastly increased military spending, but did nothing except increase our trade and budget deficits. At least Reaganomics did something right.
However, unless I can't buy a similar product made in the US or even Europe, I try really hard not to support the multitude of bad things happening in China and the US and European companies who choose to produce things there as well.
I just try to support good products and companies I care about with my pocketbook and avoid the other products if at all possible...
Interesting. All my Apple equipment says "Designed By Apple in California, Made in <Insert Asian Country Here>". I've seen "Assembled in USA" also, but that's a far cry from actually making the motherboards and other electronics. I believe the Elk Grove plant took displays, hard drives, CD-ROMs and motherboards from other countries and assembled them.
To my knowledge, NeXT was the last PC maker that built their own motherboards, and that was at an automated plant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT6aphdX0rI
If someone has a PC motherboard with "Made in the USA" on it that's less than 10 years old, I'd love to see it. Put it in a museum!
IBM could've made the PPC chips for the G4's but they didn't include AltiVec. They did build a new facility in Fishkill NY for the G5's (and other chips.)
Where the chips go from there I haven't researched yet, but I currently live near IBM's East Fishkill facility. It's too bad that corporations think more of the manufacturing cannot be done here. I think the US is ready for a decent compromise from heavy handed unions and the willful lack of worker's rights. We have enough in place now for us to take the best of both and come out on top of the world again.
if it's that easy and cheap why isn't apple making iphones here but instead paying the shipping costs from China along with all the other costs of doing business in China?
probably because in the 21st century you will never find a community in the USA that will let you build a factory that spits out all this hazardous waste. there are a lot of these wackos here in NYC and there are still parts of NYC that aren't being built up because of pollution clean up costs. Whole Foods abandoned a store here it was well into the process of building after the pollution clean up costs got out of control
"wackos" - meaning people who don't want toxic waste and health-damaging pollution in their communities? Yeah, it may be bad for (some kinds of disreputable) business, but it's not "wacko" to not want deformed babies and people dying of emphysema in their 30s (conditions in the industrial U.S. and U.K. in the 1800s, and in China today). Add a few dollars to the production cost, or keep your precious iPhones; I'll keep my health, thanks.
PS - Whole Foods still intends to build that store in Gowanus, if that's the place you're referring to.
Seems to me you pulled that number out of an orifice. It assumes (as did another poster) that somehow assembly costs are a very significant portion of the cost of each iPhone, something I would strongly refute. We all have seen the articles on how much the components of an iPhone cost, and that Apple marks everything up about 100%. I therefore propose that it only costs $10 or so to assemble an iPhone, as there's not a whole lot of $ left to play with. As such, if you were to clean up these factories of their hexane and give these workers the bonus they were promised, you'd only add $1-2 to the cost of each unit. If you're willing to deny these workers that small amount, then you're a jackass, pure and simple.
You are not thinking recursively. You are only looking at the top-level labor costs. But then you have to look at the components. Those have to be made too, and there's more labor costs there. And then the components that make up those components have to be made and so on. If you continue with this eventually you'll arrive at the raw natural resources that make up the components, and everything else is labor costs. The quantity of raw resources that go into such a small device is very small and cost very little, everything else is labor costs (in fact you can even argue that the cost of the natural resources is also labor costs, i.e. cost of extracting them, but let's not get into controversial things like the labor theory of value here). So if you move all the labor into the US, then yes the price of the final product will rise considerably.
if it's that easy and cheap why isn't apple making iphones here but instead paying the shipping costs from China along with all the other costs of doing business in China?
probably because in the 21st century you will never find a community in the USA that will let you build a factory that spits out all this hazardous waste. there are a lot of these wackos here in NYC and there are still parts of NYC that aren't being built up because of pollution clean up costs. Whole Foods abandoned a store here it was well into the process of building after the pollution clean up costs got out of control
But every part will cost more if you'd like to move the manufactures back to the USA. Every chip, case, screen, even wires will be priced higher.
And you keep in your mind that it'll increase enviromental contamination
Western companies manufacture in Asia to gain razor-thin competitive edge in manufacturing costs, and the difference can be quite small and still justify a manufacturing relocation, when you're talking about millions of widgets - if you save a couple dollars per widget, you're talking big differences on the bottom line. They don't necessarily relocate manufacturing in order to reap massively larger profits - pushing the margin even a fraction of a percentage point can make the difference between a tech company surviving (on the U.S. stock market) and being eaten for lunch. When the dollar started falling 2 years ago, some durable-goods manufacturing started to re-blossom here (thwarted by the "great recession", sadly), in part because the cost of shipping adds a huge layer of expense. If it's true that an iPhone, as a random example, would cost massively more if manufactured here, I'd love to see studies/statistics that show this. I don't necessarily doubt it, but I do doubt the labor savings specifically are as massive as our knee-jerk media reaction to the idea of "cheap Asian labor" vs. "bloated union wages in the U.S." (uh, and here's a non-orifice-originated statistic: less than 8 percent of U.S. private sector workers are union).
Big picture: eventually, the nearly complete disappearance of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. will combine with an accelerated decline in service-sector jobs (has been happening already for 15 years - it's just a long-term consequence of manufacturing jobs leaving) and result in a massive shrinkage of the middle classes and, therefore, a massive shrinkage of markets for high-end widgets, and then it won't really matter where stuff is manufactured because there won't be anyone here able to buy anything anyway. Henry Ford got it right - you've got to pay your workers enough to buy your mass-produced product, if you want a mass market for it. Floating the Yuan _might_ help some, but eventually the Asian labor force will have to improve its own lot in order to afford the widgets they're building, thereby building a mass consumer market there mirroring the one in the West. But that may never happen because the population in China is 70 percent peasant - something that the U.S. labor market never had to deal with. In other words, their potential supply of dirt-cheap unskilled labor is basically unlimited, especially compared with ours (for now, anyway).
unfortunately, you can't convince the typical MBA of this who only sees things one quarter at a time and whose short term economic understanding is what is fueling the economic decisions (such as relocating manufacturing facilities overseas) made in the u.s. today.
if the u.s. didn't have a natural monopoly on things like operating systems (Apple and Microsoft) and CPUs (Intel and AMD) and internet technologies (Cisco) the u.s. would be in worse shape today than it is today.
i'm sure that's all common sense, but it bothers me when people say that it doesn't matter that the u.s. has lost manufacturing jobs because the free market will sort it all out for the best in the end.
Americans enjoy a high standard of living, and subsequently have a high cost of living. Exposing workers to hazards, and neighborhoods to toxins is not a suitable compromise for the return of outsourced jobs.
Spoken like someone who has a job.
And a high standard of living.
unfortunately, you can't convince the typical MBA of this who only sees things one quarter at a time and whose short term economic understanding is what is fueling the economic decisions (such as relocating manufacturing facilities overseas) made in the u.s. today.
The typical MBA works for a company, and has only its interests to consider. "The big picture" should be left to governments setting policy. The MBAs have nothing to do with it.
if the u.s. didn't have a natural monopoly on things like operating systems (Apple and Microsoft) and CPUs (Intel and AMD) and internet technologies (Cisco) the u.s. would be in worse shape today than it is today.
"natural monopoly"? That happens when economies of scale are such that a non-regulated market will have only one vendor. Think electric power. There is no particular reason why Apple couldn't be a foreign competitor to Microsoft, or why some Finnish college student couldn't write an operating system kernel. There is nothing "natural" about American dominance in this field.
i'm sure that's all common sense, but it bothers me when people say that it doesn't matter that the u.s. has lost manufacturing jobs because the free market will sort it all out for the best in the end.
The free market doesn't "sort it all out for the best". The free market is good at one thing only, and that is balancing supply and demand. As for manufacturing, similar claims have been made years ago about agriculture. Growing food seemed to be such a core issue, that it was a recurring theme in national and nationalistic movements through the mid 20th century. Yet today, in most modern countries, agriculture accounts for about 3% of jobs. Mechanization and automation have reduced the need for labor.
Manufacturing was going through a similar process. Jobs were reduced as automation increased. This automation required a lot of capital investment, but reduced variable costs significantly. To some extent, this trend has reversed, because of the availability of cheap labor in China and other developing countries. However, in the long run, such capital expenditures pay off, and when the few workers get ever more sophisticated jobs overseeing the machinery, the cost difference between a plant in China and a plant in the US will decrease, to the point where shipping and administrative cost differences will determine the location of plants.