The reason why the computer chips are not made in the USA is the same reason nothing is made here. Everyone wants to save a dollar with no regard to its long term ramifications. Like I told my kids years ago. Why do I try to buy American. Because the families down the street benefit from it compared to families in a different country.
I thought this pandemic would wake American companies up and realize they cannot rely on other or countries for our survival but Americans have short term memory. We will just move on and bury our heads in the sand for a few dollar savings. Then the next global issue will come about and we will be crippled again.
For that to happen, an entrepreneur would need a good faith belief that a major manufacturer, like Ford, would deliberately pay “middle class wages” to ensure we weren’t reliant on forced labor from children in sub-human sweat factories in far away lands. Since Ford, like every other large corporation maintains very strict budget for these expenses -- remember the much touted plastic oil pans for the 2017 Raptor? Their budget staff doesn’t consider long term sustainability. It’s the same mentality that drops the axe on senior technical staff in favor of inexperienced contractors. Sure, they see an initial savings of a few scores of thousands of dollars, but eventually they pay up when the inexperienced staff take orders of magnitude longer to resolve problems or come up with innovations or solutions. Win / win, AMIRIGHT? Budget guys get their pat on the back and quarterly monetary award, upper management is able to show their boss, grand boss, great grand boss, etc. how much money they ’saved’ but nobody seems to care that they’ve just put experienced, senior staff out on the street and quite likely into the caring arms of a competitor- anti-compete agreement be damned. They also don’t notice at first that their new staff can’t and won’t handle things with the same skill, efficiency or technical prowess that the team they replaced did.
So long as major manufacturers continue to prioritize penny pinching over sustainable growth, we’ll have this problem.
kogod.american.edu
