Why Morey?
Morey featured in Forward Magazine -
SUDDENLY LOW COST
by Steve Lawrence
Looking for the least-expensive place to make a stainless steel, anodized aluminum, high-end electronic parts or even Frisbees? Check out the United States.
How about automated teller machines, earthmovers, ready-to-assemble home and office furniture, or water heaters? A variety of manufacturers have turned their backs to a surprising extent on China and other supposed low-cost countries. They have either brought manufacturing facilities back to the States, or decided they can be more competitive by staying and expanding production in America.
The crux of their thinking is not simply low price, although that remains, of course, a critically important factor in the simplistic offshoring approach of some manufacturers. Rather, the most important concept now is total cost of production—with those costs measured in terms of wasted time, inflexibility, shipping costs, management attention, political uncertainty, intellectual property theft, quality standards and all the other serious issues that have dogged companies that sought supposed “low-cost” havens in Asia. In the world of economic cycles, the pendulum is swinging once again in favor of the “all-in” winner: the skilled, fast, reliable and extremely efficient companies of North America.
There was a time, not 10 years ago, when hardly anyone would have believed it. China, with its pennies-a-day laborers, and India with an almost-as-inexpensive work force, one that even speaks English, were the almost faddish, low-priced spread for a range of manufacturers. You could make a finished product in China, they would say, for what the raw materials would cost in Ohio. And by the middle of the last decade, the store shelves of America were packed with goods “Made in China.” Even our bridges, tunnels, buildings and electronics were all-too-often made with materials that arrived by boat from Asia.
The result, as we know, was a continuing loss of factories and manufacturing jobs and an ongoing trade deficit. Last year alone, says the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The manufacturing sector accounted for 36% of all mass layoff events and 43% of initial claims filed.” The bureau said that for the year, “the total numbers of mass layoff events, at 28,030, and initial claims, at 2,796,456, reached their highest annual levels on record.” And this only continued an ominous trend. The U.S. Census Bureau, for instance, reports that between 2002 and 2007, even before the recession dug its teeth into the economy, 1.3 million manufacturing jobs had been lost and nearly 57,000 “manufacturing establishments” as the agency calls them, had been closed.
