bayerische wrote:
Jeff, you are very correct about the workforce is a huge part of the problem. People now a days think they should get "rich" from standing in a workshop... Well I wish life was that easy.
Industry wages in Finland are off the chart, but at the same time we cannot only blame the workforce. A company's demise is not only/always due to expensive labour, there's poor management, as with the US airline industry there were too many competitors on the market, simply too diluted. Now you have the big 4 left, right?
I see it, as "a way to survive" is often the result of the above. It's simpler to move the production to Mexico/China/Thailand etc... than to really get a grip of the real problems.
I'd say the biggest losers is us. By us I mean whatever country an industry is leaving.
I'm self employed, if I was suddenly to only have foreign workers that wouldn't speak a word Finnish or swedish I would fast be without customers. Not only the language would be the issue here, it would surely look suspicious on the whole for my customers.
The companies aren't blameless in most cases, as I said about the US automakers, the unions are trying to finish what the companies started thru bad decisions. But the sense of entitlement in workers is amazing at times. I had a friend who was a transmission engineer for Ford in the US. They had a transmission that was used in two cars, but each car required a different fitting on the fluid line, if you put the wrong one in it wouldn't fail immediately, but would fail about 6 months into use, creating a warranty claim and a bad taste in the owners mouth. They kept having issues with the wrong part being put in, so they put a light to go on over the right parts bin to signal which one to grab depending on where the transmission was going. Still had the problem. They put an alarm that sounded if you stuck your hand in the wrong bin, same problem. Finally they had the whole line stop if you put your hand in the wrong bin, still a problem. They corralled the worker on that part of the line, and he said that he liked putting the wrong part in because it was easier. And the frakking union supported him and kept them from disciplining him or firing his lousy behind! The union's attitude was it was the engineers fault for designing two parts and expecting the worker to put them in according to his job description.
The airline example is one where it's hard to sort out who's more to blame, the airlines for having too many, or the government for keeping many of them from merging because of either antitrust issues or more often political payback for companies or unions who are donating to the politicos. Like we've all said here, the issues are complex and no single issue is the one and only problem.Sometimes you can't get a grip on the problems, sometimes moving production is your only recourse, sometimes it's simpler than finding the real root cause of the problem.
I'm retired now, but when I did work my job was fairly outsourcing proof as I needed to be a citizen to do it. 😕 That's about the only reason it wasn't outsourced probably.
