Understand

I'm sorry to hear 1 in 6 manufacturing jobs are disappearing from the US job market.
I feel empathy for the workers laid off, especially the older employees.
And I understand the bitterness that arises when you realise your job is going elsewhere.

But you also have to understand.

Companies aren't in business to keep you employed
Companies are in business to make money.
There's no two ways about it, that's the bottom line.
Their responsibilies, when weighed between their P/L vs work-force issues... well.... you know what will win out every single time.

They'll continue to move manufacturing to countries where labour is cheap. With your unions, with your protected pay grades, with your quality/standard of life; you will continuously get more and more expensive in comparison.

Work will go to poorer countries, where labour is cheap, where people will work at anything, where they are *hungry*. And I don't mean in the food sense.

No, this is not armchair theory.
This is something Singapore faced a long time ago. We did manufacturing too. We lost jobs to Malaysia, Indoneia. I'm in an inhouse call centre, a rarity in Singapore where most call centres have been moved to the Philippines and India. But because we're always so scared we've got nothing, I think that makes us driven, focused, with a government that will give us a boot up the arse if we slack off. We know competition.


Oh well. To each his own. Including countries.