Sorry, I don’t have the cite - HOWEVER. I have read that American-made products are highly respected in China. Apparently what is worth shipping over there is the “good stuff”. For example, until it ceased production, the Michigan-made Lincoln Continental was exported to China.
I heard that for some products, companies would complete enough work on a product that they could claim it was made in the US, but they shipped it across the border (e.g. to Mexico to complete some tasks), then ship them back. If 51% of it was made in the USA…
Jack Abramoff came along later.
Abramoff and his law firm were paid at least $6.7 million by the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) from 1995 to 2001. It made manufactured goods labeled with “Made in the USA”, but it was not subject to U.S. labor and minimum wage laws. After Abramoff paid for DeLay and his staffers to go on trips to the CNMI, they crafted policy that extended exemptions from federal immigration and labor laws to the islands’ industries. Abramoff also negotiated with the Marianas for a $1.2 million no-bid contract for “promoting ethics in government” to be awarded to David Lapin, brother of his associate Daniel Lapin.
Abramoff secretly funded a trip to the Marianas for Congressmen James E. Clyburn (D-SC) and Bennie Thompson (D-MS). In 1999 Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) went on an Abramoff-funded trip to the Marshall Islands with John Doolittle (R-CA) and Ken Calvert (R-CA); delegates of Guam, American Samoa, and the Virgin Islands; and eight staffers.[40]
Documentation indicates that Abramoff’s lobbying team helped prepare Rep. Ralph Hall’s (R-TX) statements on the House floor in which he attacked the credibility of escaped teenaged sex worker “Katrina”, in an attempt to discredit her testimony regarding the state of the sex slave industry in the Marianas.[41] Ms. magazine reported Abramoff’s dealings in the CNMI and the plight of garment workers like Katrina in a major article published in their spring 2006 issue.[42]
But my point is, if you ask people why they say we should Buy American, the answer will be to support American workers. And buying Toyota supports more American workers than buying Chevy. Sure, the fatcats at the top will be Japanese rather than American (at least, some of them: Both are publicly-traded companies), but who cares about the fatcats?
More or less correct. The Subaru 1.6L EA71 and later 1.8L EA81 were Flat-4 configuration engines and were transverse mounted low in the engine compartment, leaving room for the spare tire after of the air filter. Since there was plenty of room it wasn’t cramped and it saved from wasting space in the trunk, and was actually more convenient than having to empty out the trunk and pull the liner to access the spare.
Stranger
This is a misleading statement. Japanese companies have worker participation in management that American companies recoil at.
For example, in a Toyota auto assembly plant any worker on the line can shut it down for any reason to ensure quality and to improve the process. Workers are trusted to do their job well and to make decisions that affect the entire process.
When Toyota tried to teach General Motors these kinds of principles it didn’t work. They installed a stop cord, but then either punished workers for using it or disabled it.
The problem wasn’t the existence of unions.
Thank you. Ignorance fought. It was a nice thought, blimey.
Agreed – I think unions are ‘a thing’ in Germany and German brands tend to have a pretty high reputation for quality. Nordic countries have ultra high unionization rates, and they have high quality brands. Japan, conversely, has relatively low unionization like the US, but there’s a work ethic and a more collectivist culture.
I’ve heard something similar, and I’m not sure how that translates to American workers on American soil producing cars that were designed in Japan etc. Is it still like that movie “Gung Ho” with Michael Keaton or has it improved…?
But that’s not a point I was arguing. I should have fleshed my opinion out a bit: union labor is more expensive, making competition more difficult. The article states:
The transplants have long had a cost advantage over UAW plants. In 2007, before GM’s bankruptcy, Detroit Three plants hourly labor costs averaged $78 an hour (wages plus benefits), according to CAR, compared to $47 an hour for non-union plants. Closing that gap was a crucial requirement of the 2009 federal bailout of GM and Chrysler, and it remains a competitive challenge in this fall’s contract talks between the UAW and the Detroit Three.
IMO U.S. workers can do an equally good job. But I also remember some of the crap that American mfrs put out in the 1970s—just slap a bunch of chrome on and people will buy it. At some point, they just became complacent. Once Japan started taking away their business, the American companies had to improve but the damage to their reputation was done already.
My parents were both union and I get why the workers need protection from greedy companies. But it’s possible for unions to kill the goose that laid the golden egg by making them less able to compete. I’m not sure where the happy medium is.
What year was your Saturn? I believe Saturn started out that way, as a ‘“newer, different” kind of American manufacturer that actually cared about quality’, an answer to Japanese vehicle quality, but then eventually it abandoned its original philosophy and quality dropped dramatically.
My wife had a Saturn when we first met-- she had purchased it in the 90s and loved it. She drove it for a long time before deciding to buy a new vehicle in the early-mid 20 aughts (her old Saturn was running fine still, she just wanted something new) , and went for a new Saturn again because she had such a good experience the first time.
Her second experience was awful. The new Saturn was a total lemon, in the shop all the time. The last straw was when the drive chain snapped when she was on her way to work. The mechanic said it would be expensive to re-synch the valves with the driveshaft and everything, and the car might not ever run optimally again. So we cut our losses with that piece of crap…
Mine was 2000, and yeah, it was a total lemon. Their service was good - their only saving grace. But that seems to be a thing with Dell, too: we’ve got great service (and you’re gonna need it). American companies complain about foreign competition and how they can’t seem to penetrate foreign markets in some countries – maybe because the consumers there already know the quality sucks and would rather just buy a good product than buy a shit one and spend time fixing it.
The discussion about American-made foreign automotive brands made me think of the young woman who was killed by a robotic welder because her non-union employer was more focused on quotas than lock-out/tag-out training:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-23/inside-alabama-s-auto-jobs-boom-cheap-wages-little-training-crushed-limbs
Good read! I had no idea
The happy medium is for unions to protect workers’ basic rights but to quit meddling in productivity strategies, like resisting plant automation in order to “save jobs”. You’re not saving any jobs by continuing to slap together crap while your competitors are using precision robotics.
There have been many articles written on why Saturn was doomed to fail. It was always hugely unprofitable, and the idea that a single new brand would save GM from the Japanese threat was always fundamentally flawed. Some have even theorized that the whole Saturn experiment was an ego trip for Roger Smith, more of a proof that GM could successfully replicate the Japanese manufacturing miracle (complete with a “greenfield” assembly plant designed from scratch with an unprecedented level of automation) than an actual viable business decision.
Well, that was the ad campaign. Reality was somewhat different. The auto rags and JD Power gave it initial high rankings for build quality and owner satisfaction, but rankings steadily declined until the GM ‘takeover’ of the independent Spring Hill operations and subsequently just offering rebadged Chevrolet and Pontiac vehicles.
I worked at a startup where our fleet of two company cars were initially both mid-90s era Saturns. My impression was that they were fairly cramped (I’m not a big guy but I had to adjust the seat most of the way back to get good position, and my boss at over six feet was constantly brushing the headliner), with indifferent build quality (a lot of rattles, inconsistent panels gaps not helped by the fact that the unreinforced plastic body panels tended to warp over time, knobs falling off in typical GM fashion), and a lot of poor design decisions like putting the heater core just forward of the passenger footwell which caused to to get uncomfortably toasty in winter. One of the cars was mechanically pretty reliable but the other was constantly in the shop with various timing and fluid leakage issues, and finally blew a head gasket at somewhere around 80k miles. When they replaced both cars with a pair of Chrysler Stratuses it was a dramatic upgrade despite the mediocrity of the latter.
I also had a girlfriend who owned a Saturn (her first car, selected primarily because of their “No haggle” sales policy which was actually a great idea). I did a couple of oil changes and replaced a vacuum hose, and while it wasn’t the worst vehicle I’ve ever worked on from an access standpoint (which would be an Audi 4000) it was not designed with maintainability in mind. I’ve probably been spoiled by mostly working on Toyotas, Subarus, and the occasional Volvo 240, but I’ve also worked on Triumphs, BMWs, and Volkswagons, and the Saturn did not compare favorably. At least it didn’t mix and match metric and SAE fasteners like every other GM of the era but I would not want to do any serious work on the car.
Despite the fact that GM only closed the brand ten years ago I can’t recall seeing one on the road in years. The last one I recall seeing was a Skye, and that’s just a rebadged Pontiac Solstice sold in the last couple of years before the brand was retired. By contrast, I see twenty year old Toyotas and Hondas all of the time. The CRV seems to be the ubiquitous “not quite a minivan” car that just won’t die until it is t-boned by an F150.
Stranger
Great first-hand info. Mine is just second-hand anectodal info from my wife, who’s first Saturn was a mid-late-90’s model, and it was very reliable from her point of view. And I believe she had driven a Honda previously (though she probably bought the Honda used, and the 90s Saturn was her first new purchase). I was a passenger several times, and probably drove it a time or two. It was a smallish coupe, but I don’t remember it seeming particularly cramped (I’m 5’ 10").
One of the primary reasons why Detroit had higher hourly labor costs was because of retiree healthcare costs. The current employees never cost GM anywhere near $78/hour, but by the time they filed for bankruptcy, they had 10 retirees for every active employee. The biggest reason for the closing the labor cost gap with the non-union plants was shuffling off retiree healthcare into a Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA) and removing it from the Big Three’s balance sheets.
The non-union plants, being newer, didn’t have that huge legacy of retirees, and they didn’t promise retirees the generous healthcare that UAW retirees received.
This is pretty close to what’s happening in the DoD. From a budgetary perspective it’s almost a retirement plan with a small sidelight in bombs and guns.
In the world of consumer goods, there are some interesting conversations to be had about product quality, planned obsolescence, company culture, and the locations of head offices and manufacturing facilities. Unfortunately, the OP in this thread is all over the fucking place, and thus has managed to screw up the conversation from the very beginning.
He tells us that he’s not going to buy American any more because every time he does, he gets screwed, but he also doesn’t seem to know or care what it means for a company and its products to be American. Is it the location of head office? Is it the major investors? Is it some nebulous idea about corporate culture? Is it where the components of the product are manufactured, or where the final product is assembled, or some combination of those things?
About the only concrete statement about what actually characterizes a good quality brand, according to the OP, is that:
Thanks for the precision there, Mr Circular Reasoning! Good quality products come from brands that maintain high standards!
We never learn what was actually wrong with your Dell computer. I’d be interested to know, for example, which model of Dell you bought. Was it one of their cheap laptops, or a high-end model? Because over the last few years, just about every computer review site has consistently placed the Dell XPS line at or near the absolute top of the heap when it comes to laptop computers.
You say that you’d be willing to spend twice as much, next time, for a Samsung, but you might do fine if you’d just spend a few hundred more on a top-of-the-line Dell, rather than one of their more mediocre, mid-range offerings. And if you did buy an XPS, what was wrong with it? You just say that you “don’t like it”; you don’t say that it failed, or broke down, or refused to function properly, or was badly put together.
When it comes to German cars (and some other types of products), you need to distinguish their broad reputation from their actual quality and reliability. If you spent any time reading automotive news over the last couple of decades, you might be aware that some of the big German brands have actually developed pretty terrible records of unreliability, all while maintaining a good reputation among the general population. Audi, BMW, and Mercedes do produce some outstanding cars that, when running properly, demonstrate great performance and comfort, and are a joy to drive. But these makers also produce models that are notoriously unreliable in a whole variety of ways.
They have started to improve again over the past few years, after at least a decade of complaints from owners and reviewers, but for quite a while their overall quality and reliability fell far behind public perceptions. A few years back, a UK company did a survey about perception of car reliability, and compared with actual numbers. The survey respondents, responding to a question about which brands they believed to be reliable, placed Audi, BMW, and Mercedes in the top 10, but actual UK warranty and repair data for those companies at the time placed them at 27th, 28th, and 29th.
Over my life as a consumer, I’ve had pretty good luck in general, in terms of product reliability and purchase satisfaction. There are products that I’ve been very happy with; there are other products where I’ve been generally happy, but also have found some aspects of the product annoying; and there have been a few products that failed far too quickly, or that just weren’t very good.
But in all of this, one thing I’ve learned is that, while it’s understandable to get annoyed when a product sucks, it’s also pretty stupid to base your assessment of a company’s quality on a single consumer experience. Even the best companies produce some lemons, whether it’s computers or camera or cars or whatever. You just do your research, buy the product that looks like it will best serve your needs, then cross your fingers and hope that you’ve received a good example.
If you’re buying a computer, read customer review sites, and magazine reviews and consumer organization reviews. Compare the different companies–Dell, HP, Samsung, Apple, Lenovo, whatever. If you do this, you’ll probably find that you can draw some general conclusions about quality, in terms of manufacturers:
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They all have their fair share of customers who get a lemon, and who swear they will never buy anything from that company again.
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They all have their fair share of customers who like the computer, but think that the after-sales support sucks dogs’ balls.
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They all have their fair share of customers who think that the computer they’ve purchased is the best, fastest, coolest piece of electronic wizardry ever offered to the consumer. Or, at the very least, that it’s a decent product that does what they expect it to do, without any real problems.
Sure, some will have a better reputation than others for quality and reliability and durability, but even the best companies will have plenty of complaints. That’s been my experience, at least, shopping for all sorts of different types of products. I’ve concluded from this that:
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No matter which company I buy from, there’s a chance I will have problems with the product. This is especially true with technology products.
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No matter company I buy from, if I don’t have problems with the product actually breaking or failing, then the product is likely to do everything I want–and more–for the amount of time that I’m likely to keep it.
Of course, if the US had a national single-payer healthcare system, employers wouldn’t be burdened with these healthcare costs.
I owned a Saturn and it was quite reliable but for the most part I agree.
I’m not sure why anyone would prefer Apple over Samsung though. It’s not that it’s terrible equipment; it’s that it’s similar or worse hardware at twice the cost. I advised my daughter not to buy an iPhone after being on Android but she wanted to try it and immediately regretted it. Apple treats it’s consumers like they’re too stupid to know what’s best for them which also annoys me.
Or maybe it’s part of their larger strategy? Something like, “only stupid people with money would pay twice as much so that is our customer base.” Selling to stupid people with money is a pretty good market strategy. They may be smarter than I thought.