Unmade in America

This article was an amazing and very shocking example of our countries way of life. The constant American way for more and more and more no matter what the cost. The catastrophe at Enron should have been an example to our country that the way we operate in large corporations should change, but yet no one has taken heed of their mistake.

Most major companies, DELL being the most largely used example in this piece, rely on outsourcing to create many of their products. The U.S based portion of the company tends to be the upper and higher level management and then the manufacturing is done in many other countries all over the world. These companies have factories in so many places that your new technological trinket has seen more of the world than you most likely will ever see in your lifetime.

Barry Line points out many problems with this new way of running a corporation. The first in which affects many of the lower class people in this country: jobs. Our jobs are being taken away from people who need them most and being shipped off to other countries where the same job can be done for much much less. I know I've personally had this experience where I've called Citibank for help with my account and been put in even more confusing situation trying to understand the strong Indian accent of the customer service representative. Secondly, another problem I picked up from the reading is the lack of accountability these companies have to the other often poorly run factories in foreign countries. They only have a contract with most of these factories and therefore do not own them and in turn are not respondsible for the conditions in which they operate.

We were able to see after September 11th the extreme reliance these corporations had and still have on outside manufacturing sources. They had to shut down operations (the few of those that are still done in the US) for a while because they were not able to receive incoming foreign made parts since our borders had been shut down. Previously in the old way of creating a product all of the pieces were made in one central location, so if something went wrong management could go over and fix it quickly and rely on back inventory unitl then. This is something that is impossible in our new situation where companies suach as DEll and Compaq, in the race to be the top PC maker, keep as little as 4 days worth of inventory on the premises. This is barely enough to keep the company a float for more than a day. Doing things the old fashioned way allowed for a more secure product with less flaws and more consistencey; this is something that we should and need to go back to.

This most important problem with this new way of running corporations is the extreme foreign reliance we have. Our major companies are so internationaly spread out that if something should happen in a country where the majority of the factories are located they could collapse. It is very dangerous for our government to allow these companies to put our countries economy on the line in this way just for a higher status on the DOW. Everyone thinks that having world trade open up is such a great thing, and it is to a certain extent, but not at the expense of our economy and not if it allows our economic status to be in the hands of many other countries. Something so important should be something that only we, The United States, have control of.