WHERE WAS IT MADE?

Did you ever just for the heck of it, take a mental note of all those "Made in ...." marks on all the objects that innundate our world. Chances are you like myself could just about care less, however I was bored one day and just checked all the objects on my desk to discover that almost none of them were made in the United States. It quickly becomes apparent how far corporations have gone with globalization to outsource their manufacturing and labor to countries where the cost of labor is very small and the average worker lives in poverty. It's inherantly likely that these everyday products were once made in the USA moved to production overseas at the expense of an American worker. I'm not a flag waving advocate of patriotism, however I do become incensed at the notion of a greedy corporation run by multibillionares and millionares sacrificing hardworking Americans making a fraction of what they do, to have all that work done in another country in a sweatshop where they hire children, work 80 hours a week at about 50 cents a day. This might as well be slavery.

Couldn't so many of these products be made right here in the United States, and provide more jobs for Americans? I'm not totally against globalization, however using outsourcing to produce something while not vastly improving the quality of living of the workers or giving them comparable compensation to a worker in a first world country is unethical.

Now of course it could be said that if many of these products were manufactured and assembled here they would cost more and the companies assocated with the products would lose money because less people would buy them. But think about it, with the disparity in compensation between the entry level worker and the CEO and Boards of Directors graphed on an exponential curve rather than a linear one it's not hard to see where all the money is going. Why must the heads of corporations make tens of millions of dollars a year, and the entry level worker make $20,000 if he's lucky. Don't get me wrong, experience, skill, depth of knowledge, and tenure do deserve greater compensation as an incentive to maintain or increase productivity, however I can't understand the reasoning for compensation being so rediculously over inflated toward the upper end of a large corporation's payscales. Imagine what would happen if the compensation curve was flattened to a direct linear increase, and the profitable wealth of the company was redistributed to the entire scale equally. What this does is put more wealth in the hands of more people, inproving the quality of more people's lives, and improving the surrounding economy that those individuals have influence upon.

When corporations outsource for cheap borderline slave labor by laying off workers locally, they are only doing themselves and the rest of the domestic economy a disservice in the long run. Sure those at the upper strata of the corporation are going to stand to grow much richer, and the shareholders will be happy, however those people whose jobs were lost reduce the quality of the economy locally. People without money don't spend what they don't have, if if they do they eventually become a debt collection burden for other companies like retailers and banks or tie up the court system with bankruptcies. People that don't have much money more often than not don't buy what they can't afford, and the demand for higher quality or more expensive products diminishes. Those same people that were layed off from the company may not even be able to purchase the product that the company they were layed off from produces.

I can't imagine that shipping these products across the ocean from places like China, India, and Malaysia is cheap, or for that matter anywhere as cheap as shipping the products domestically via rail or truck. It is obvious though that the net cost of manufacturing and shipping products from another country has been determed by the corporation to be less expensive than doing it domestically. But again, this is all attributable to the distribution of profitable wealth in the corporation. Wouldn't it be more cost effective to pay that CEO $500,000 a year with the fewer stock options and hiring domestic workers at a decent wage or salary and offering them stock options, instead of paying that CEO $15,000,000 a year with millions of dollars in stock options? Mind you this is just the CEO, there are of course many extremely wealthy corporate executives at the heads of these corporations reaping the benefits from the larget majority of the corporate profits, while the average worker sees almost none of this having been already factored into the labor expendature percentage and to eventually become the recipiant of a "pink slip" anyway.

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