Most of us have learned by now that going cheap doesn't usually pay. Oh sure, there's less out of pocket but otoh it won't last as long, do its job as well, or not have to be taken in every week for repairs. The problem is that even if we have a job our wages are so stagnant we often don't have much choice but to go cheap because we have to stretch every penny to the breaking point.
For years - decades - corporate managers have been using our poverty to justify a lean, mean approach to everything but executive salaries and bonuses (where they have been, as we know, exceedingly generous), cutting costs with a cleaver to squeeze out every possible 1/4-penny, and with wages being their absolute favorite element to slash. From hiring illegal immigrants and pretending they weren't to outsourcing work to Third World countries that have dirt cheap pay scales, US corpo's have routinely thrown millions of Americans out of work in order to buff their stock price (and pay themselves big fat bonuses for doing it).
So how's that strategy working out for them?
The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) says it’s pushing for a joint effort by the company and union to track the cost of reworking engineering done overseas.
SPEEA President Cynthia Cole contends her members spend up to half their time re-doing outside work. For months last year, she said, a sea of desks surrounding aircraft in the 787 factory was mostly inhabited by SPEEA engineers reworking faulty engineering.
(emphasis added)
How much money do you suppose US corpo's have to spend every year to re-do the slipshod work of underpaid, outsourced suppliers? Boeing is clearly not the only one having to do this. It's the reason that the whole "outsourcing" fiasco has gone sour in the corporate world - no matter how cheap the original work is when you have to do something twice it costs a lot more. Some time ago I wrote about the growing movement in American business to bring functions that had been outsourced overseas back to the States because it was costing them so much to "save" money through globalization.
Which is pretty much what we predicted would happen. SPEEA - a very active union - may just have started something that will make it easier for a lot of unions to argue against outsourcing: spend the money for a study and see how much it "saves" the company to kill off American jobs.
I'd suggest adding how much it costs the society as a whole but there isn't a US corporate executive aliove who would give a fuck even if he knew his cost-cutting was destroying the country. Our welfare, individually and as a nation, is not part of the US corporate paradigm. Think about health insurance corpo's, for example (the most direct industry to have life-and-death power over individuals and society): when it's a question of profit or people, which do they choose?
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