COMMENTARY | In his State of the Union Address, President Obama made it clear that the blueprint for American economic success begins with manufacturing. He stated: "So we have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back. But we have to seize it. Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed."
The fact of the matter is, nothing could be further from the truth. This is not to say that American manufacturing workers are not the smartest and hardest working manufacturing workers in the world. But they are incredibly overmatched.
In a recent New York Times article titled "How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work," the case for why the American manufacturing sector is doomed begins and ends with one word -- wages. The article states that Foxconn, the company that employees hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers to build and assemble Apple products, pays many of their workers less than $17 per day to work 12 hour shifts, 6 days per week.
If you figure that the average worker there works approximately 50 weeks a year; the average worker is making a gross income of roughly $5,100 per year. Most amazing of all, Foxconn says that they could hire 3,000 people overnight without any problems.
It doesn't take an economics whiz to figure out that American manufacturing cannot compete in a global environment where people literally line up in hopes of landing a job that pays $17 a day.
But in the end, this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
To prove my point, ask any parent that is working as an assemblyman in manufacturing one simple question: Do you want your children to do the same line of work as you? Now that might seem to be a cold or arrogant statement, but I would guess that 90 percent of respondents would say no. And believe me, that is not to say that they are not good, honest, hard-working people. But most work these types of jobs in order to support their family so that their children can go on to live better lives than they had, not to repeat the life they lived.
As Americans, it's time to start dreaming bigger and not dream of reliving the American life of the past 50 years. Our grandparents and great-grandparents did not live through a depression and win two World Wars in order for us to work at the same factory as they did. They did it so that freedom and the American spirit would live on; building an America that was far greater than the one they left us.
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