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While Washington pursues CEOs, they snub U.S.
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
Posted: January 3rd, 2011
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2010%...
America's big businesses are less and less American. They're going abroad for sales and employees. That's one reason they've showed record-breaking profits in 2010 while creating almost no American jobs. Consider one of the most popular products for Christmas gifts of all time - Apple's iPhone. Researchers from the Asian Development Bank Institute have dissected an iPhone, whose wholesale price is around $179, to determine where the money actually goes. Only about $11 of that iPhone goes to American workers, mostly researchers and designers. Even old-tech American companies made big money abroad in 2010 - and created scads of jobs there. General Motors, for example, is now turning a nice profit, and American investors are bullish about its future. That doesn't mean GM will be creating lots more blue-collar jobs in America, though. 2010 was a banner year for GM's foreign sales - already two-thirds of its total sales, and rising. In October, GM became the first automaker to sell more than 2 million cars a year in China. The company is now making more cars in China than in the United States. Meanwhile, back home in the United States, GM has slashed its labor costs. New hires are brought in at roughly half the wages and benefits of former GM employees, under a two-tier wage structure accepted by the United Auto Workers. Almost all of GM's U.S. suppliers have also cut their payrolls.
Note: Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and the author of the new book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future. He blogs at www.robertreich.org.
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