[jcommin]

So when did this all change? I have been in the manufacturing world for over 50 yrs and I started seeing this in the early 70s. We used to make stuff, really good stuff. By we got greedy and sloppy. There were 6 steel mills in Chicago, that probably produced more steel than in the entire country during WWII. In the 70s, the USA auto market was 95% USA made - that changed too.

I'm going to focus on steel just a bit. The equipment in those mills was built in the turn of the century. I saw rolling mill stands from the early 1900s. When you have the lock on the steel market, prices are easily raised because there is no other game in town. However along comes technology from abroad especially from Japan, the mini mill concept and continuous casting and eliminating open hearth process. This story is too long to write but those 6 mills were gone by the 80s. Those profits bought other non-steel related companies and money was never reinvested.

The same goes for automotive. Toyota comes out with the Toyota System soon to be copied by others. Back in the 80s, changing dies on a transfer press took a week, the Japanese did it in a day. We took a day to change one die in a single stroke small press but by continuous improvement, we cut that down to an hour. We blamed unions for high labor cost and moved things to the southern states to reduce labor. That trend continues to this day, Taiwan, Mexico China, India, etc. There isn't a machine tool made in the USA anymore, no stamping presses either (most of the American ones are foreign owned). The list is endless.

I worked for a Tier 1 automotive company that was initially family owned until it was sold in 1999. They made allot of money without the worry of charts, graphs, daily numbers and stock price. There were 2 metrics: past due dollars and fill rate. You don't want to shut a n OE line down. How fast can I fill the order at a 98% fill rate. That all changed - Daily metrics, end of month, end of quarter, end of years numbers was checked. Miss a target, how are you going to recover?

A company can control (3) things: labor, material and plant property and utilities. The hardest is land and utilities unless you downsize or relocate. Material is next and this is where you begin to play with chemical compositions, substitutes (plastic for steel, etc) and the easiest is labor.

The rust belt in the Midwest saddens me, because I'm old saw what we did here. There are vacant plants all over this country just decaying or been converted into residences.