I read an article some years ago about Foxconn and how it made possible the manufacture of the iPhone. At that time, there was simply no other way to do it. That enormous population yields a huge supply of even the most skillful workers. What was it that video said, “they have more honors students than we have students.” Example: “Apple's executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company's analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States. In China, it took 15 days. That flexibility, speed and scale in factory workers just doesn't exist in the US. Apple says it "shouldn't be criticized for using Chinese workers" because "the U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need." There just aren't enough skilled workers in the US that have that inbetween degree of high school and college. That's what Apple wants in its factory workers and that's what China gives 'em. And though everyone cites how the cost of labor is much cheaper in China, the fact is labor is less important to a company's bottom line than supply chains are. And the reality is, all the supply chains to manufacture consumer electronics exist in China. Components are made in this facility, glass next door, a million screws can be found down the road, so on and so on—that convenience saves companies a lot more money than the benefit of hiring cheap labor.“ I remember a comment in the old article I read that simply no place in the U.S. exists where 10,000 electronics engineers could be hired or fired in a matter of a week or two. Now, Foxconn is building a new facility in India as large as 50 Manhattan city blocks. India is forecast to soon overtake China in population and become another global center for such things. https://gizmodo.com/why-apple-doesnt-make-the-iphone-in-america-5878209
The National Association of Manufacturers as long-held that at any point in time, there are 500,000 unfilled positions because our education system creates graduates who cannot add, subtract or read with any degree of proficiency. Then there's our cost of labor. And the [used to be] strength of the dollar also makes us globally noncompetitive. And the fact that Americans don't want to do that type of work in the first place, abandoning those jobs for the service economy. Any one of those is a killer. Regarding China's supply chain: Japan is the same. All the suppliers are owned by the same banks, and perhaps government. They exist to serve their affiliates. Their system is different from ours. This Japanese idea of "just in time" really shoves forecast imperfections down the affiliated supply chain. The stuff might hit the factory floor just in time, but the affiliates warehouse the goods for as-needed shipment. It seems our competitive economy creates ideas, and Asians' non-competitive systems mechanize them for profit.
Even in my day, many of the people who were accepted to the college I attended were obligated to take non-credit "Bonehead" courses to stay enrolled. (I wasn't one of them). Now they just lower the standards, thus lowering the quality of the graduates. I think it is partly due to the Progressive Agenda planned by John Dewey using the education system to shape the citizenry over time. The low standards set for everyone in America is distressing, from nurses to teachers.
In my days of running food and hospitality services for off-shore oil rigs (way back in the days of Carter), I found out that one of the reasons why the U.S. couldn’t compete in the oil market was our labor costs. I’m not even talking about what the guys on the floor like the roustabouts made but even the night baker and the cooks made more in a day than some of the guys working on international rigs made in a week. Of course, we all know that labor costs weren’t the only reason all of our off shore rigs were suddenly pulled in creating an oil shortage in the United States, but it was definitely one of them.
What is a non-credit bonehead course? I never heard of a requirement that had zero credit. Is that what we used to call "basket-weaving" courses? Still got credit though. At Kent State there was a core curriculum of courses. Everyone had to select from certain categories (writing composition, humanities, fine arts, social sciences, intro science). I found those to be the hardest courses to do well in.
When I was the program chairman for the EMT department of a state college in Texas, several of my students had to take remedial courses before they could begin a credited program. This was because they were allowed to graduate from high school without adequately learning math, language skills, or whatever. They may have gotten college credits for these courses but they didn't count toward those required for the EMT or paramedic program.
When I was a product manager, we had a seminar about Japanese manufacturing and corporations. I remember that there were groups of companies, associated based on common products or goals, that would work as a group with each other and the government to get things done. There was a Japanese name for that structure but I can’t remember it right now.
Don’t know about now but UCLA had a course in Protesting. Probably a side op for a Liberal Arts major.
Oh! I remember those. You're right! One of them was taught in the math department, called Remedial Arithmetic, for those planning on being elementary school teachers. A lot of fractions. I graded papers for that course once. How could I forget.
Back to the labor thing, we already know that China has a bunch of kids making stuff like tennis shoes, Africa has it’s diamond mines which use kids and slaves to do the work and S. America has the same doing the cacao bean thing. Observe if you will, how Cobalt is brought to the battery industry…… https://youtube.com/shorts/nMafI9SdGyo?feature=share Basically, there is no way we can compete in a heckova lot of industries when other countries are gathering, supplying and making materials with near slave labor.
The “K” did it! Kanban is a lean manufacturing system but the word I was seeking is Keiretsu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu
I used to manage purchasing for a division of NEC. I ordered our stuff from overseas, and was never involved in any of the JIT stuff.
A Bone Head course was a course required of matriculants who didn't meet standards. They usually got in because their parents or grandparents were alums and gave the school a lot of money or wielded influence in other ways. They were admitted but required to take non-credit courses to bring them up to the standards that had to be met by everyone else. If they didn't take and pass the courses, they were booted out of the school despite their parents. Usually the courses were Math or English.