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Ohio Manufacturing Jobs & Presidential Politics
March 3, 2008
Politics | NAFTA bashing popular, but is it justified? | Seattle Times Newspaper
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At the risk of stirring an unmanageable political debate (please keep the discussion in line with the "respect for people" principle and avoid name calling), it's interesting to hear so much about manufacturing jobs in Ohio. I was born in Dayton and I still have a lot of family in the Youngstown area. As a kid, we drove past the empty shells of closed steel mills as we went to my grandparents' house and that left quite an impression.
So Ohio has been losing industrial and manufacturing jobs since well before NAFTA. NAFTA is being blamed today, particularly by Obama and Clinton, as the main culprit for recent job losses to Mexico or overseas. I'm excluding McCain and the Republicans from the discussion since the primary race is over and the news coverage is dominated by the Democratic side of things.
I'm not an expert on any of this, so my questions, especially for readers in Ohio:
- What has led to more job loss -- NAFTA or business mismanagement (including faulty business cases for moving factories or traditional "mass production" approaches)?
- What, if anything, would lead to manufacturing jobs returning to Ohio -- repealing or changing NAFTA or more aggressively adopting Lean and newer management approaches?
What do you think?
Posted by Mark Graban on March 3, 2008 | Comments (0)
