Thread: How I Helped Move a Factory to Mexico

How I Helped Move a Factory to Mexico
A temporary job gives a college grad a close-up view of the dilemmas and human cost of competing in a global marketplace
Nick Leiber





U.S. factories have struggled for decades to compete with cheaper overseas labor and imports. The economy, once partially driven by manufacturing, is now dominated by service businesses. In 1997 there were 17.4 million manufacturing jobs; by 2007 that number had slipped to 13.8 million, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Many of these factory jobs—and in some cases, the machinery itself—have been shipped to countries in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. A version of this familiar scenario played out recently at the Long Island City (N.Y.) plant and headquarters of auto parts maker Standard Motor Products (SMP). Larry Sills, the company’s chairman and CEO, says he decided to relocate the bulk of the plant’s operations to Reynosa, Mexico, because of reduced demand for the plant’s main product line (distributor caps and rotors) and competition from China. He says the company is profitable, but not enough to justify its nearly dozen factories in the U.S. and overseas.

What’s driving relocations like this one, of course, is the gap between the wages paid in the U.S. and elsewhere. While a line worker in a U.S. factory earns an average of about $18 an hour, the equivalent job in Reynosa, Mexico, pays up to $3 an hour, including benefits, says Ralph Biedermann, a partner with Mexico Consulting Group in San Francisco. John Christman, director of the Mexico Maquiladora Industry Econometric Service of Boston-based Global Insight, says the annual increase in outsourcing (BusinessWeek.com, 4/7/0 U.S. jobs to Mexico has declined in recent years, replaced primarily by China.

What was it like on the factory floor of Standard Motor Products in the final months before the relocation? We asked Max Leiber, the brother of a BusinessWeek.com editor, to recount his experiences as a temporary worker from January through March at the Queens location, which ended its manufacturing operations on Mar. 28, 2008. His story follows.

After I graduated from college, I moved in with my brother in New York City and started temping and working odd jobs while I tried to figure out the next step of my life. I sorted files at a UBS (UBS) office in Manhattan, painted my brother’s apartment, and covered for a doorman in the Bronx, among other jobs. By my third assignment with a temp company, I didn’t pay much attention to the job description. I expected an easy time doing mindless office work.

Sending the Work to Mexico

But I was in for a surprise from day one. The building didn’t look like an office building. It was a gray factory, six stories tall, that seemed to take up an entire city block. I walked past a few guys having their morning cigarettes, a secretary buzzed me in, and I sat down in a small lobby to wait for the man who would be showing me around. He arrived wearing a shop jacket with an embroidered name tag and introduced himself. He seemed uncomfortable. He didn’t smile when I apologized for being overdressed in my red tie and shiny dress shoes. As I followed him from the reception area to the office I’d be working in, I got a sense of the enormous scale of the place, with its giant stacks of pallets and workers whirring by on forklifts.

My job, he explained, would be to assemble data on auto parts the factory produced and send it to somewhere in Mexico. As he started to speed through the details, I interrupted him, asking, “Can I ask you why I’ll be doing this? You must already have this data in your database.â€

well America , just keep up with your gutless lib attitude and with the influx of Illegals , all our jobs will be $3 dollars an hour too .
This why we are here ! NOT to be racist or anything remotely close to what msm says . Were here to see our laws are Enforced . Our Taxes are spent on American's . Last but most important , SOVEREIGNTY . NO President of our country has the Right to do as Dubya has !!! Bail out Greedy Wall street company's with taxpayers dollars . Allow Mexico to built Consulates all over our Nation . And to import dirt cheap labor putting the citizen between a rock and a hard spot . Of course there is also the Oil Cartel , $100+ an raising fast . The War in which Haliburton stole huge sums of money . And this THEY call
a Global Market place !!!
Looks like Marxism ! the Super Elite Rich and then the taxpaying losers , US and our Grandkids .
I say America can stand on her own with the right people in office . And i STILL have no one to vote for . How can we allow our nation to be hi-jacked by crooks and creeks ? With LIES and using Lenin's own Hate Speech manifesto to shut us up ?

That is exactly what is on its way...$3 an hour jobs all for globalization, instead of them bringing up wages to match Americans, they are going to drive ours down with the 3rd world country's, I just want to know what they think they are accomplishing by this when no one will be able to afford their products any more....any everyday idiot can see the consequences of their actions.

Their globalization sucks and people better stop buying the products as much as possible from these other country's, there are only a hand full of country's who can afford the products these people sell.

Of course now we can see why they are sending all the manufacturing out of there, if we want or need anything we are dependant on other country's, they sure had this well planned out didn't they!

If our Elitist Politicians are not helping to import Illegals and "H-*" visa holders to take United States Citizens jobs they our outsourcing the jobs to Third World Countries, see the Bushwacker at his North American Union Conference in New Orleans.