Jobs will continue to move overseas

The loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs to offshore countries has been under way for the past three decades and will continue into the foreseeable future, promises University of California-Davis industry scholar Martin Kenney, co-editor of Locating Global Advantage: Industry and Dynamics in the International Economy. In examining what has happened to U.S. manufacturing jobs industry by industry, Kenney details the transfer of American jobs to other countries in the apparel and textile, vehicle, television, personal computer, semiconductor, and other high-tech industries.

Kenney reveals several surprises. For instance, while there no longer are any hard-disk drives produced in the U.S., 60% of the wages in the hard-disk industry are paid to American workers. "It's all in the higher-paid jobs of design, marketing, human resources, and coordination," he says, adding that the American challenge will be to keep those jobs. In fact, if U.S. companies had not shipped those manufacturing jobs to Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia in the 1990s, Kenney maintains that Japan, with its able complement of service and manufacturing abilities, could have put the United States' hard-disk manufacturers out of business.

The "just-in-time" inventory trend means that China may not become the destination for high-fashion manufacturing because Mexico is closer to U.S. consumers, Kenney indicates. In this case, the volatile consumer tastes in fashion are influencing garment manufacturers to try to turn inventory around in less than a week.

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