OUTSOURCING

I’m tired of hearing complaints about outsourcing. Chances are, if you’re one of the ones complaining, you’re one of the ones who caused the problem. In my mind the average complainer about outsourcing is a tenured, union factory worker. They stand the most to lose. Considering their behavior for most of my lifetime, I have a hard time feeling sorry for them.

During a business trip to a GM factory in Linden, NJ in the mid-nineties, I became privy to some UAW wage information. It wasn’t uncommon for a middle-aged union member with no college degree, to make well over one hundred thousand dollars per year assembling automobiles. One hundred thousand dollars! While I was there, I witnessed “working” UAW employees sleeping in cars, reading newspapers, and generally standing around a lot. I left feeling surprised that cars weren’t even more expensive than they actually are.

Now to be fair, I wouldn’t want to make a career out of assembling automobiles, even at those wages. The monotony would overtake my lust for the cash somewhere after the third week. So I’m glad someonelse is willing to do that job. I really am! But couldn’t that job be done just as well by 19 year old college students, working part-time?
Installing the same dash board or bumper on the same vehicle, day after day, just isn’t rocket science. So do we really need that $100k/year UAW employee? It seems to me that the job would be a better fit for a less expensive, temporary, unskilled worker. McDonald’s and Subway have built legendary businesses with the help of such folk.

And also, to be fair, the cost of living there in New Jersey, just across the river from N.Y. City, is a lot higher than it is here in Dallas. So to some degree the UAW has some plausible deniability when it comes to the wages they demand. Hey, you gotta’ be able to pay the rent, right? I mean really, it’s GM’s own stupid fault for puttin’ the factory there in the first place. Yeah. That’s it.

A union employee taking a 20 minute break every two hours spends an hour per day on break. Do the math. Over a 20 year career that same employee will spend 1.735 YEARS on break! If I were a UAW employee with 12 or 20 years under my belt, I’d be hoping and praying that GM never wakes up and realizes how good I’ve got it. But when they do wake up and decide to close that factory in Linden and build a new one in San Antonio, they are naturally going to count the cost. And while they’re counting, why wouldn’t they cast a wandering eye a little farther south? Just across the border, in Mexico.

Thanks for Reading,

Mike