Wednesday, October 31, 2012

"Moving" auto jobs from country to country

Mitt Romney's campaign has made a big deal of Jeep expanding its manufacturing in China, claiming Jeep is outsourcing jobs and blaming it on President Obama.  Is he also going to blame George W. Bush for all the outsourcing that was done between 2000 and 2008?

The fact is that Jeep is expanding its total manufacturing, including manufacturing Jeeps where they will be sold.

What does he think of Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, Nissan, Subaru, Mitsubishi,  BMW, Mercedes-Benz,  and Volkswagen having factories in the U.S.?  Are they exporting jobs from their home countries?  Or expanding closer to their markets.  Maybe it's the shipping companies that should complain, all that trans-oceanic traffic that is lost and the associated jobs.

See "'Transplant' auto factories in USA turn 30 this year", James R. Healy, USA Today, 2012-04-03.

As Thomas Friedman wrote, "The World is Flat".