Bringing back the Jobs

I happened to watch on Rock Center (with Brian Williams on ABC) a program about a small town furniture company 'bringing back' jobs it had once offshored to China. In a nutshell this was the story -

Lincolnton, NC - Williams began with "We are just starting to see the first glimmer of evidence that some of the jobs that were offshored to China are coming back. A factory owner who years back closed his furniture making business and sent it to China, has brought his factory back home. Lincolntown, NC, is home to Lincolnton Furniture once again."

Apparently Bruce Cochran had sold the long time family furniture business 25 yrs ago when he could no longer compete with the Chinese market. The company was offshored to China. Over the last two decades, seeing what was happening in america, stagnant wages, losses of jobs, due to shipping american companies and jobs overseas (North Carolina has lost tens of thousands of furniture making jobs in the last ten years) Bruce Cochran began to realize he was a big part of the problem. He came out of retirement and reopened his factory in the very same warehouse it once was housed. He says "it's about the people" and it has weighed heavy on his mind. The new factory has created 130 new jobs, some of the employees worked for the original company 25 years ago.

Hal Sircum is a senior partner at Boston Consulting and he sees Bruce as part of "a new and dramatic shift". Sircum says gone are the days of China having a "cost advantage" over american made products, that China is not the bargain it used to be. He states the average chinese worker is about 1/4 as productive as the average US worker. That wages in China have gone up, shipping charges have more than doubled. The days of China so often having a cost advantage over U.S. producers is about to come to an end. "We're looking at the tipping point right now and by as early as 2015 many expect we'll be at the same level as the chinese cost wise. This encompasses varied products, televisions, computers, electronics in general, and industrial good like rubber and machinery. And that would mean millions of new american jobs in the next few years."

When asked how big an impact this will have on the US, Sirkin says its going to be huge, when you take the mfg jobs and the service jobs that will be created. We will add two to three million jobs to the workforce. And that is no small thing. Bruce Cochran feels personal redemption in his actions, a living parable about people and profits and priorities.

Apparently Cochran faced an uphill battle getting the financing he needed for the new factory. He had startup capitol but needed operating capitol. He went up and down the east coast, to all the major banks in the south, couldn't find any that would lend him the money, give him the financing he needed...until he went to the small bank in his hometown.

Gives me hope :).

"A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D., or Ph.D. Unfortunately, they don't have a J.O.B." ~"Fats" Domino