Factory Jobs: 3 Million Lost Since 2000

[TexasLawyer]

Source: Associated Press

Factory Jobs: 3 Million Lost Since 2000

Apr 20 02:58 PM US/Eastern
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER
AP Economics Writer


WASHINGTON (AP) - Three weeks ago, Dawn Zimmer became a statistic. Laid off from her job assembling trucks at Freightliner's plant in Portland, Ore., she and 800 of her colleagues joined a long line of U.S. manufacturing workers who have lost jobs in recent years. A total of 3.2 million—one in six factory jobs—have disappeared since the start of 2000.

Many people believe those jobs will never come back. "They are building a multimillion-dollar plant in Mexico and they are going to build the Freightliners down there. They came in and videotaped us at work so they could train the Mexican workers," said Zimmer, 55, who had worked at Freightliner since 1994.

That's the issue for American workers. Many of their jobs are moving overseas, to Mexico and China and elsewhere.

Just ask Tom Riegel. He worked for 27 years making Pennsylvania House furniture at a factory in Lewisburg, Pa., until the plant shut down in December 2004. The production was moved to a plant in China, which kept making the furniture under the Pennsylvania House label for shipment back to the United States.

<snip>




Read more: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8OKGR480&show_article=1

[ixion]

1. millions of jobs lost...and replaced with what?

burger flippers? :shrug:

[HereSince1628]

3. Hey you! Straighten your apron.

[MUAD_DIB]

4. Burger flippin is now considered manufacturing...

[whistle]

2. 3,000,000 low pay minimum wage service jobs added in Bush's

....republican economic miracle Juggernaut:wtf:

[AX10]

9. Exactly what happened!

[Just-plain-Kathy]

5. NAFTA and corporate whores are ruining this country . ...n/t

[antigop]

6. The very reason I will be looking at candidates' positions on trade agreements n/t

[Craftsman]

16. I second that.

[ananda]

7. Whoa!

Yet unemployment figures keep going down..

Maybe they're now the Wal-mart greeters
and office cleaners, yeah, and burger
flippers.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

8. Ok.

Someone convince me that this is not a manufactured depression.

[area51]

10. That's a great way to put it.

Good-paying jobs are hard to find.

[Deja Q]

13. With $9 trillion in debt, there are only three choices...

yours sounds right...

Also, do you think 'globalization' is nothing more than 'migration', because the amount of oil the US uses is ludicrously high and it's better to discard an expensive entity than to improve it?

(I've been watching too much bad sci-fi again... given the number of us and the cost of oil, to ditch us is clearly an insane move... it is all about greed and ultimately resetting the system. That or the politicians of the last 27 years are just fools; which can be proven also. In short, guessing at hyperbole isn't worth the time. For every fact there is another that contradicts it.)

[MethuenProgressive]

11. Mine too. Dedicated 22 years only to see my job outsourced to Mexico.

Outsourcing killed my company. $100/share stock and 12,000 factory jobs when we manufactured the product, $3/share stock and zero factory jobs after the brilliant idea of letting someone else make the stuff we were selling.

[brentspeak]

12. Outrageous. The stupidity and greed that's engulfed the decision-making

at the highest levels of American business in the past couple of decades has wrecked the nation -- with more than just a little help from equally greedy and stupid politicians.

[Craftsman]

17. Same thing happend to Bell and Howell cameras

They farmed out all their manufactoring to a young hunger company in Japan to make their cameras in the 1950's. That company is called pentax. OH by the way are from Metheun MA? My wife is from there.

[nealmhughes]

14. Come now, that is only 1 out of every 100 men, women, children, and the elderly

in the entire country. :sarcasm:

Why worry, the economy is booming! The stock market set a new record high on Wall ST. today. See, the former factory workers will just invest in mutual funds, and buy all the houses being repoed in Mass and Michigan, use them as collatoral and hedge the market. Or else go to work as . . . well, I'm not sure what they are to do, come to think of it. Groundskeepers? WalMart? Oh, I know, ladies maids and valets for all the New Nobility! A footman behind every chair! The wealth will trickle down, as the market dictates. Or else, we will become a nation of Jefferson's imagination: subsistence farmers, be there enough water and land to go around and GE seeds not have made our crops sterile.

[lonestarnot]

15. That's alot of damn jobs. IMPEACH

[Matsubara]

18. PLEASE DON'T USE LINK IN THE OP

Clicking on that link will make money for "Breitbart" a right-wing thug and best pal of Matt Sludge.

Here is another link to the same AP story that will not give money to the GOP.

Dear poster, if it's not too late to edit, would you mind putting this link in your post?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070420/ap_on_bi_ge/changing_work_force_5