NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/misc/consumer/21383

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Path: sparky!uunet!hobbes!gorn!deeptht.armory.com!rstevew
From: [e-mail] (Richard Steven Walz)
Newsgroups: misc.consumers,soc.culture.japan,sci.electronics,alt.sex,soc.culture.african.american,misc.education,misc.entrepreneurs
Subject: Re: DOES AMERICA SAY YES TO JAPAN? - Off track!!
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 1 Jan 93 10:38:31 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: The Armory
Lines: 136

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Bob Kehoe) writes:
>|> In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Joseph F. Mays) writes:
>|> >Honda plants in America are assembly plants which build cars out of parts
>|> >made and imported from Japan.  Read:  far fewer jobs, and less skilled
>|> >ones.
>|> >
>|>
>|> I don't have any Honda data in my hands right now, but
>|> the press release that accompanied the Camry Wagon I'm
>|> testing this week claim that Toy's Georgetown, Kentucky
>|> manufacturing plant produces three-quarters of all Camry
>|> sedans sold in the U.S. and 100% of all Camry wagons
>|> exported worldwide, using 75% domestic content.
>
>I believe this to be fairly accurate.  Here is some data (a few years old)
>on the Marysville, Ohio Honda plant.  They produce 360,000 cars each year,
>in fact Honda expected in 1988 to be export 70,000 of these cars a year by
>1991 - 50,000 of them back to Japan.  I don't know if this has happened
>however.  As far as componenents go, the Japanese have transplanted more than
>250 component-manufacturing firms to the US to supply these plants.  These
>firms are also building huge R&D plants in the US.  Mazda has a $23 million
>facility in California and Nissan has opened a $40 million research facility
>in Arizona.
>
>These plants will contribute $226 to $452 billion dollars to the US and
>Canadian economies over the next 10-20 years and provide 60,000 American
>jobs.  This transplanting trend has just begun.
>
>Earlier (in a previous post), I mentioned that it is highly advantageous for
>Japanese companies to move their plants to the US because the cost of
>transportation represents a huge portion of the consumer price of a product.
>Due to lower costs in labor through automation etc., and the lower cost of
>raw materials.  In fact the actual production cost of a product represents
>less than 20 percent of the retail price.  The actual cost of farm labor and
>raw farm products represent less than 15 percent of the price grocery
>stores and restaurants charge retail.  Only about 17 percent of the price
>of finished apparel was attributable to the actual cost of cloth and labor
>needed to cut and sew it.  Most of the rest of the 80 percent represents the
>cost of distribution.  It makes a great deal of sense for the Japanese to
>move their plants to the US and provide American manufacturing jobs.  Why
>are most Sony TV's and Nissan cars also assembled in the US rather than some
>lower-cost labor market?  Cost of distribution.
>
>Certainly the Japanese aren't great gift horses trying to give America a break.
>I believe they are unfair in their hiring and firing practices based on
>ethnic origin.  They will destroy themselves long before they destroy America.
>
>Here are some references to help back up my above comments (something far too
>few posts on this topic seem to contain):
>
>OTA, Technology and the American Economic Transition:  Choices for the Future,
>207,237
>
>Andrew Mair, Richard Florida, and Martin Kenney, "The New Geography of
>Automobile Production: Japanese Transplants in North America," Automobile
>Production (October 1988): 352-360.
>
>Pilzer, Paul Zane, Unlimited Wealth The Theory and Practice of Economic
>    Alchemy, 1990, Crown Publishers, 44-46, 179-180.
----------------------------------------------
You know, it was real nice for you to post those references, and now
someone can use you for a reference too! My how grand. Now, all we have to
do is show these references to the Japanese and surely they will realize
that they are doing something wrong in not screwing us badly enough, uh
huh! In fact if we show them how well we're doing, they might just pack up
and go back to Japan instead of staying here and eating us alive. You must
never have seen the formerly strong midwest of this country up close and
personal or you'd realize that there isn't 8 or 9 or 10 per cent
unemployment, there's more like thirty percent, if you include the people
who are working for less at dead end jobs now and weren't a couple decades
ago. And you might also notice that those few people in those towns and
cities in the midwest that can afford to buy a new car are buying Japanese
cars, and I guess that somehow doesn't faze you at all, now does it? The
reason they can't afford to buy American made cars is that Japanese cars
cost less and use less gas. And when they do it, they sink us even further.
The luxury in this country, one of which is called expansion of the
industrial and research and development infrastructure or base, is derived
from profit after you pay your employees. If we don't get that profit, if
it goes back to Japan, then we won't have shit quite shortly, because we
won't be able to sell what we have been able to sell the best for the
longest and that is our research and development, our ideas, our patents.
The Japanese can give us all jobs working for them at $7.50 and hour and
end unemployment completely, and maybe they can even pay us all a bit more,
but if the profit above and beyond goes back to Japan, and the ideas that
they might derive from setting up Japanese owned research centers here at
lower wages even for the engineering innovative professions, then we are
still screwed, because if you work as an engineer for a Japanese owned
plant, you can be sure that they will have you sign away your patents and
your ideas to them, just like we have done to our engineers as a condition
of employment. The difference? Easy, that one engineer didn't have enough
to make a marginal patent work anyway, but if the marginal wealth remained
in his country in his economic system, he could at least be assured that
the technology base was improving because of him and that he would get the
bonuses that enablred him to eventually buy some consumer items that
required his patents in their construction, whereas, now, only the Japanese
will be able to buy those items at that level of salary relative to
innovative talent or even more of their people. Oh, thank you, thank you
for showing us the error of our ways when it is obvious without looking up
a few quotes from your ivory tower that you are doing nothing but helping
them screw us economically, and maybe you know it or maybe you have just
been duped by facts in books. If you haven't seen my home town and knew who
worked where and what they used to be able to buy with their luxury income,
then you don't know anything for all your insulated academic prowess. I
watched us BE their defense department for fifty years! Wouldn't you have
liked someone else to BE OUR defense department for *fifty years*!?? Think
of what we could have saved: The national debt? Easily. That was all
defensed department acquired first quarter in Vietnam, and the rest in the
last exponentially growing cold war against the "evil empire", while
Gorbachev kept offering cutback after cutback, even unilateral adherence to
the arms accords which the republicans wouldn't sign. It took getting the
old fool out of the oval office before we could start the reductions! And
then it was still a heel-dragging president fighter jock that kept
funneling money to his arms-maker friends. Biggest budget in history and
"read (his) lips", no new taxes. Ha. The tax was paid to the Japanese.
Europe doesn't let the Japanese get away with what we do. Their anti-trust
sanctions were finely honed from dealing with a bunch of smaller countries
in Europe and not having as much of a cold war debt as us. They TOLD the
Japanese what they wanted and at what kind of price it could be sold, and
they are doing much better for as weak a natural wealth base as they have
compared to us. Europe is mined out and it's been lived in a long time. We
still have four times the top soil they have and we used to have twenty
times! We SHOULD be doing much better for our literacy and imagination and
our resources even than Europe is, and we aren't in most things, notably
the products that Japan is given an inclined playing field toward our
goal. I wonder if you have any idea of all this or if you just read a
couple promo's from the Honda ad people and decided to check their sources
and got your quotations even from them. They sound far too canned for me,
too pat and commercial. I get the feeling I'm being sold a Yugo.
-RSW

--
* Richard STEVEn Walz   [e-mail]   [phone]  *
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