Cruisers Forum
Main Forum => General Discussion => Topic started by: Two Hams in a Can on June 24, 2017, 10:59:55 am
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Putting the political comments in perspective, the main topic of the article makes me glad to be a Phoenix Cruiser USA customer. http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-workers-elkhart/#interactive-elkhart ;)
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I would imagine that some here could relate to the stories of hard work at low wages and couldn't keep up the pace for too may years, their bodies taking too hard a beating.
As for me, what strung a note was the woman who was skilled in making musical instruments, eventually watching her job go to China. I lost my job twice to the orient, but it wasn't a manufacturing job, rather an engineering job in product design for the electronics industry. The first time in 2002, my last year there I spent some of my day training my counterpart in Taiwan. The second time was in 2015 where projects got started in the USA, then after the "smart" work was done, the projects transferred to Malaysia. The company I had worked for, at it's peak in 1999 had 160,000 employees, most worked in the USA. Today it has around 8000 employees, most work outside the USA. I am grateful to have lasted as long as I did, but it was so hard to watch the many thousands of people before me loose their job. The main hall to the cafeteria at lunchtime used to be so full of people. At the end of my time there, you could roll a bowling ball down that hall during the lunch hour and nobody would notice. The 300 acre campus is sold with most of the company buildings slated to be torn down. What remains of the company at that site fills just one building today employing about 800 people of which many are from foreign countries here on work visas. I've been back there doing a little contract work helping the remaining product development skeleton crew. Walking the halls, I feel like I am in Asia.
You can imagine my feelings about jobs. I found myself politically similar to most of the people who were interviewed in that article.
Back to the subject matter. Because of the lack of turnover at Phoenix, it sounds like they do things quite differently than at the other places the article mentions. It is the privately owned companies that see beyond the penny.
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Thanks for the very interesting Reuters link. The RV industry is really a microcosm of what is generally happening across our country. Lucky for us that we own RVs made by a small company that can better select its employees and is not subject to a fraction of a penny increase in per share earnings being the talisman that determines every step of every day.
As I read this article (and having owned two Class B rigs made in Canada) I wondered if the general superiority of rv manufacturers like Pleasure Way, Leisure Travel and Roadtrek could be partly due to the fact that the labor laws and general attitudes are different across the border? I don't propose an answer to that question, I just find the question interesting.
If as the article states, turnover is often over 100% (supposedly because of pay and working conditions) you gotta assume that quality is lower in those companies. I would think that would be particularly true in those companies that have recently been acquired. The pressure will be on for more, more, more and cost reduction, cost reduction, cost reduction.
Paul
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Here's another article on the subject as a whole, not just Elkhart companies in particular. . . http://rvdailyreport.com/opinion/rv-death-spiral-manufacturers-in-race-to-the-bottom/ :)(:
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That was a good article; thanks for sharing. As more industry consolidation means more of the expected low quality that results from labor conditions nearly rivaling 19th century sweatshops, I wonder if manufacturers figure potential repeat business no longer matters because after the next economic downturn Baby Boomers will be so decimated by 401K declines as to not buy another one anyway, and so few Generation X and Millennials will have the interest, leisure time, or money to buy? Of the latter group it seems for every young family in an RV there are twenty others who'd rather fly to a resort if they didn't have crushing student loan debt and a job with little more security to take a vacation than an RV plant worker. So, is today's RV boom the last one and corporations wisely think they'd best appease shareholders while they can, or is it just boardroom short-sighted myopia and stupidity? Meanwhile, we can all subsidize this system with tax dollars to try and repair damaged worker bodies with Medicaid or, for those permanently damaged, Social Security Disability. Would unionization help them? That's an even more touchy subject but if like mine, the union heads would push to accept an offer worse than the initial offer, have their board vote the heads a $100,000 bonus each, declare "victory", and leave me working two years longer than planned so no 4x4 Phoenix Cruiser or Provan Tiger in sight, yet. Grrrrrr on multiple counts!