Times Brings Balance to Outsourcing Coverage
The insourcing side of the story shows how imported auto industry plants bring 60,000 jobs to U.S.
by Megan Alvarez
June 22, 2005
The New York Times is
not known for their balanced news coverage of American business, but
thats exactly what they delivered with their June 22, 2005, story
on the auto industry. Reporter Micheline Maynard detailed the
often-overlooked story of how the U.S is attracting jobs from
overseas.
Foreign automakers are adding jobs in the United States at a rapid
pace. Instead of delivering another story about outsourcing of jobs
from U.S. manufacturers to other countries, Maynards front-page
article covered the increasing investment of foreign automakers in
the U.S. and the jobs they are creating.
The story made it clear that the U.S. is gaining jobs from foreign
automakers, which now have a total of 13 factories located in eight
different states. According to Maynard, a quarter of all cars and
trucks built in the U.S. 1.4 million are foreign brands made in
factories owned by foreign companies. This is up 18 percent from
2000. She also pointed out that the plants alone employ 60,000
people, and that doesnt include jobs created at companies that
supply the assembly plants.
This is the flip side of the stories about job losses at the Big
Three auto manufacturers. Just five pages into the Business section,
the Times reported that Ford is going to cut 5 percent of its
white-collar jobs in North America. Maynard reported in her article
that GM plans to cut 25,000 of its workers by 2008.
That raised the question of why American car companies are declining
while their foreign counterparts are expanding. Maynard explained
that the free market is the cause. Foreign companies have not been
buried beneath impossible union contracts with overwhelming benefit
packages. According to the article, actual salaries were only
slightly lower at the new plants. When health care and other
benefits were taken into account, union workers earned about $55 an
hour, nearly 15 percent more than nonunion workers.
Toyotas nonunion workers were also more productive. The nonunion
workers kept the plants operating at 107 percent capacity, while
GMs plants only operated at 75 percent. The productivity of
nonunion workers has led many foreign owned companies to locate in
the South, where many states do not require workers to unionize.
In the midst of almost-daily headlines about outsourcing and its
supposed effects on the American economy, Maynards story was a rare
reminder of the positive impact of insourcing.