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€