Posted 5/20/2009

THE REAL REASON THE USA IS LOSING ITS GOOD JOBS

There's a reason the USA is losing its good jobs and its middle class.

It isn't wage rates. And it isn't the tough recession.

Wage rates are just an excuse and our jobs have been disappearing overseas since every administration since 1955.

If high wage rates were the problem, how do we account for Japan and Germany, which are export powerhouses even though their wage rates are higher than those in the USA?

If the unions were the problem, how again do we account for Japan and Germany, where the work forces are more heavily unionized than those in the USA?

Why don't manufacturing jobs leave Germany and Japan and migrate to countries like China and India, which have much lower wage rates?

And why are the fortunes of American workers so bad while those of Germany and Japan so good?

There is one major cause of manufacturing job flight from the USA.

Respect.

The American worker, like Rodney Dangerfield, don't get no respect.

German and Japanese societies have great respect for the man (or woman) who works with his hands. But the USA has long disrespected working-class people.

No American mother wants her daughter to marry a factory worker. Not even a foreman. Since the early 1950s, middle-class mothers and fathers have sent their daughters off to college to get their "Mrs. degrees." That was code for marrying a man with a white-collar future.

Parents were afraid that girls with only a high school degree would end up marrying the sexy guy who was planning to work for union wages in the local Ford plant. (In those days, daughters weren't expected to work or have careers. They were supposed to marry a rising white-collar man, move to the suburbs, make a nice home for hubby and produce lovely grandchildren.)

As time went on, parents became very selective about their daughters' futures. They developed a hierarchy of white-collar social class occupations for prospective husbands. At the top of the list was telling the neighbor that your daughter was marrying a doctor ("He's a surgeon, you know"). Engineers were high on the scale ("He's going to design cars for General Motors"). Lawyers were well respected in those days ("She's marrying Ernie, you know, the big attorney").

Business was the next level down. Even that became stratified according to the size, reputation and prestige of the firm ("He's going into U.S. Steel's executive training program"). Being able to brag that the son-in-law was going into management training at GM, Ford, Chrysler, Bethlehem Steel, Sears and A&P were just as good.

At the bottom of the business pile was small business. The bureaucrat of the large company vastly outranked the entrepreneur in social prestige. "He's starting a company" meant "He couldn't find a good job" to most people.

Nobody in the USA during the 1950s and 1960s wanted their daughter to marry a blue-collar guy who worked in a factory. Nobody wanted to tell her neighbor that her daughter was marrying a foreman. Nobody wanted to see daughter's hubby carrying a lunch bucket down to the local machine shop. And nobody living in the Republican suburbs wanted to admit that beloved daughter had married a union man.

As time went by, the anti-worker attitude of mothers and fathers hardened into outright contempt for the American worker.

Then the Law of Unintended Consequences took hold. Competent boys and girls were brainwashed to avoid factory employment at all costs. (Only ditch digging and farming ranked lower on the social scale.) Anybody and everybody who attained the level of partial literacy was dutifully sent off to college.

Those who did not go to college were generally on the bottom rungs of the ladder of competence. The rare factory worker who was competent was soon promoted to "lead worker," and then foreman.

But the best workers did not make the best managers, any more than baseball superstars make good team managers. This pattern of promoting people up to and above their levels of competence led to a sub-par level of factory managers. Within a decade, factory managers began living in the suburbs and wearing suits to work – driven by their wives "to get respect." Along with the new garb and new digs came the suburbanite's contempt of the man who worked with his hands and machines.

As the manufacturing management class divorced itself from the factory, workers were forced to identify with their unions, not their companies. Cooperation between labor and management was forever lost, as an "us against them" attitude swept over America.

Making matters worse, manufacturing managers were considered inferior by their associates and their superiors because they were a "cost factor." Sales management and marketing management were the masters of the corporate universe because they were revenue-generating factors. The man who brought home the bacon achieved far more corporate status than the man who merely ate it.

The icing on the cake was the tendency of large corporations to appoint sales executives and marketing executives as CEOs. Manufacturing executives were rarely put up as CEO candidates by corporate boards. Although people believed anybody could get to be President of the United States, no one believed that a factory worker could become president of his company.

Three decades ago, Caterpillar Tractor promoted a man to CEO who had started his career as a factory worker. So far as I know, there hasn't been a similar case since.

In one automobile unit I studied three decades ago, there was a management team of six people. The executives in charge of administration, marketing, engineering, finance and human resources managed a total of 1,000 people. The manufacturing manager supervised more than 18,000 people. Yet he was far and away the least competent of the six executives.

It was no surprise to me that this auto unit was vastly inferior to a comparable Toyota unit in every aspect of auto manufacturing, cost and quality. Even though both divisions had new engine machine lines, the Toyota unit required only one man-hour to produce one engine, while the American unit required seven man-hours to produce a comparable engine. Wage rate differentials clearly had no impact with this kind of disparity in efficiency.

The reason for the disparity in performance had everything to do with sharply differing levels of respect for the working man. At the American company, no one below the level of senior vice president could shut down a manufacturing line – even when the line was producing poor quality and everyone was aware of it. But at Toyota, any line worker could shut down the entire line if he detected lower-quality product flowing into his work station.

America's contempt for the working man is the main and overriding causal factor in the flight of good-paying factory jobs to lower-wage rate countries in Asia.

Remember, despite its high wage rates, Toyota easily outran General Motors to the number one position in world auto sales. Germany is an exporting machine despite the power of its unions and the nation's socialized approach to governance.

If you doubt what I have written here, ask yourself one question: Have you ever met a mother or father who wanted their daughter to marry a factory worker?

When your grandmother said, "No way," she set into motion the events and status structure which destroyed America as a manufacturing nation.

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