This Is What You Get When You Mess With Us
This city is filled with once-busy factories that made everything from furniture to clothes to toys. Now, they stand empty since the jobs long ago moved elsewhere: Mexico, Hong Kong, China. The luckier ones have been transformed into high end apartments for the yuppies whose high-paying jobs tend to be in the service sector. Prices for the loft condos run from $500,000 to $3 million, far beyond the housing budgets of the working and lower middle classes, prices the people who once manned the factories would be unable to afford. The manufacturing jobs that once were so common in this country are long gone and deserted factories all over the country blink out into the streets through their large, boarded-up windows, empty, listless.
The jobs left so the moneymen who owned the factories could pay people less per hour to make the products. They made out like bandits, paying next to nothing to the people of the Third World to make our crap for us. Shockingly, Americans only expressed lukewarm criticism of the farming out of these jobs and only turned up their TVs and dropped out.
When I see stories like Mattel’s latest recall, only the latest in a series of recalls of bad products made in China, I think of those closed factories and the dead manufacturing, once the backbone of this country’s economy. I wonder if anyone else anywhere feels any sense of regret that manufacturing was allowed to die out in this country. I wonder if anyone regrets their decision.
CNN was blaring in the lunch room at work when a coworker said something like, “We should stop importing stuff from China.” Too little too late. We’ve been painted into this corner by the CEOs who wanted to make more money and the people who didn’t care enough to allow this to happen. American workers making things under the noses of the federal government and countless consumer advocacy groups were fired by other Americans just so we can buy a pack of tube socks at WalMart for a dollar. This is what happens when a matter of a few dollars and cents becomes the top priority with no regard for anything else.
Note: The title of this post isn’t a threat to anyone. I just wanted to use some Radiohead which I still love but cannot listen to any longer.
August 14th, 2007 | Category: News
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