There are Chinese products and Chinese products. The good ones, like Lenovo (IBM) laptops are great, as are numerous other Chinese-made electronic products.
The bad ones are generally designed by a LOCAL company, dealing with LOCAL and unproven suppliers. Geely now owns Volvo and will very quickly adopt Volvo safety and general parts quality to their own designs.
I expect the Chinese to have good cars on the export market within 5 yeras. With a lengthy warranty, the way Hyundai did it.
Chinese fridges such as Haier are pretty dismal, yet the cheap ones sold by Sears under the Kenmore name are penetrating the market. A friend of mine in Europe had 3 Haiers in 2 years, all covered by full warranty. Remember early Japanese and Korean cars?
The secret is to lean heavily on parts suppliers and install Japanese quality control. As well, design the vehicle with good safety margins.
Geelys will likely be the first Chinese cars sold abroad, probably in Asia and other developing countries. Then Europe and North America will follow.
"-Why should the UAW, or any union, control a company’s business decisions? That would be a monopoly.
-No one said anything about UAW controlling a companies business decision. And that’s NOT a definition of a monopoly."
Look, I was a labor studies major in college. And I empathise with labor in almost all cases (that’s not to say that labor is “always right” in disputes, but that’s generally where my sympaties lie).
But, in a strict ecomnomic sense, a labor union is a collusion of sellers of labor, to artifically create a market rate for labor in excess of the free-market equilibrium. It’d be somewhat akin to Ford, Toyota, et. al. getting together to set new car prices.
Now theory is one thing, and when we’re no longer talking about “widgets” but rather one-half of a person’s waking hours, I support the right to organize on humanitarian grounds. But the fact remains, it’s sellers conspiring to offer fewer units of labor* at higher prices, and messing with the equilibrium is generally seen as a “bad thing” in Econ 101.
*(Don’t get me started on monopsonistic effects on the marginal rate of labor, which–in theory–can result in both an increase in average wage and total hours worked. File that under “v” for “voodoo Econ, Mk. 2.”)
I’m a piano tuner/tech, and I just want to say this: I hope the cars that come from China are better than some of the garbage, waste-of-raw-materials pianos that we’ve been getting from China. There are few things that irritate me more than going into a $750,000 house with $200,000 worth of cars in the garage to find an untunable POS Chinese grand piano. It happens a lot!
Sound familiar? Japan went through the same teething process. Let’s hope China doesn’t catch on too quickly. GM feels the quality is there enough to plan importing models from it’s partnerships there as it does already from Korea, Belgium etc.
The bailout money has been put to good use, building overseas factories so the investors can return a profit. It’s this and similar actions by American companies that have resulted in a rise in stock prices(not recently) while reducing jobs here. Hand tax payer money over to American Corps. and let them do what they wish to turn a profit. Sounds a lot like tax cuts for the wealthy with the same expected return on American jobs…NOT ! They, like everyone use it to turn a profit; elsewhere usually. That’s what you get with an American congress bought out by corporate interests. The Tea Party corporate express, fast track to 3rd world nation status.
Sounds a lot like tax cuts for the wealthy with the same expected return on American jobs…NOT !
Corporations LIVE by Jack Welch’s model…Keep upper management here in the US and move all manufacturing and engineering overseas. It’s been the corporate model in the US for YEARS…But we should keep supporting that model by BUYING American…YEA RIGHT…
The Tea Party corporate express, fast track to 3rd world nation status. </b
Of course it is…What do you expect from the Billionaire Koch brothers who started and funded the Tea party movement. When you already have you Billion…the BEST way to make your money worth more…is to make things cheaper…How do you do this…By driving down labor (ship it overseas)!!! China and India will soon have labor rates equal to the US…not by their wages going up…but by our wages going down. This philosophy is GREAT for the Millionaires and Billionaires…but LOUSY for the economy. And what’s LOUSY for the economy is GREAT for the Billionaires and Millionaires.
“*(Don’t get me started on monopsonistic effects on the marginal rate of labor, which–in theory–can result in both an increase in average wage and total hours worked. File that under “v” for “voodoo Econ, Mk. 2.”)”
But you got me revved up with this comment. The USW used the threat of strikes to strong-arm the steel companies into not jsut increasing wages, but also by creating new, completely unnecessary jobs. When I left, we had at least twice the number of hourly employees needed to run the mill I worked in. It was all done by negotiating the new jobs into the contract. That’s not theory, it’s fact.
The steel industry is a perfect example of Union workers going a muck…
They also did NOT allow the companies to update any equipment to make the companies more competitive because it would mean laying workers off. Then when steel companies started going under and there were massive layoffs…the union came BEGGING to the companies to update…But by then it was too late. They didn’t have the capital for such an investment.
If you trace countries with strong unions and left wing governments, you get string of sob stories: Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, United Kingdom, France. Uruguay has some of the most generous social benefts but the country could never afford them and it never go off the ground. Argentina is a make-believe country with corrupt left wing governments and strong unions but no work ethic. It could be one of the world’s most properous nations if it tried.
Australia is a rare exception to the above; it has maintained a reasonably high standard of living, but the prosperity is mainly resource-based, rather than manufacturing-based.
Sweden almost went into the drink, but they realized at the last moment that you can’t forever keep increasing benefits and work shorter hours without ruining your living standard. Although Swedish plants are generally productive, the high wages and huge payroll burdens make the total wage rate uncompetitive.
Germany has the world’s highest labor costs, but it makes many products of high quality and also unique products. And German plants make very good use of labor hours.
In short, any society where veryone is trying hard to take more out of the system than they put in, is doomed. There was a British comedy years ago called “On The Busses”, as well as a movie with Peter Sellers, called “I’m Allright Jack”, which said it all.