I hear you Ian, and I am sorry to hear you are out of work. I've had 2 companies in less than 3 years fold under me so I sympathize, as a matter of fact we pretty much had to sell our house and go back to apartment living due to the loss of income and the huge pay cut I took to even have an opportunity to go back to work.

One of my primary job functions is to outsource manufacturing operations overseas or wherever it's cheapest to do. Every major company in America today has people doing what I do to keep the profits soaring and the shareholders happy, there is no long term concern for American workers since all of us just sit around and live off our investments. :rolleyes:

The new phrase of the 2000's is Global Sourcing. :rolleyes:

What's really sad is that in most cases jobs could stay here if US corporations would lower the bar for their profit margins and stop wasting so much money on the 5% of the staff consuming 90% of the profits. Before you roll your eyes, in my actual experience it's true.

I actually feed current US suppliers the numbers they need to hit to continue to do business with me, and while the numbers typically represent a reduction in their current pricing structure they almost always could manage to keep the business here if they would look at the big picture and do the work for less.

Unfortunately many of them take the stance that "I'm going to make 25% margin or I'm going to make nothing at all!". Bang. They lose the business and some guy in China is happy as shit because they just took another dollar from America.

There are a few surprisingly happy endings though, I have a business associate that I have worked with for years in the contract manufacturing business, always as a large customer to him. When I took this job I called him and told him I was searching for a world class supplier to move about 3 million dollars worth of business to, we worked the numbers and he decided that he would work for 5% margins instead of 20% as he was used to just to keep the jobs in America. He's in Georgia and managed to meet Chinese costing targets, pretty impressive thinking.

What it means to him is less cash in the bank and maybe no new Jag this year but he keeps his company running and I meet my goals as well, welcome to the new world order.

Other major manufacturers from the US worked to get this business as well but guess what? Even though they carry an American name and corporate address they have all of their facilities in 3rd world countries, guess why my friend got my business?

I'm also working the same type of issues with a company in San Diego but it's been hard to convince that owner to take a lower profit but keep existing business.

Greed is what's killing this country, at all levels and within all companies.
to those who no longer care about American workers.