No job is safe if someone can do it for less
By Ron French
Detroit News
Huang Wei's future and Deb Coverdill's past are linked by a bundle of color-coded wires.
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Max Ortiz • Gannett News Service
overdill had seen hundreds of co-workers laid off and machinery shipped overseas from her automotive wire harness plant in Michigan. In October, Coverdill's plant was for sale and her job in jeopardy.
John Hardy, of Harbor Beach, Mich., worries he may lose his job as a maintenance worker for KenSa LLC,. which exports jobs overseas.
As Coverdill punched out for the day, on the other side of the world, Huang rode her electric bicycle to a modern factory in Wuhu, China. At 22, she was starting a new life far away from the rice fields of her ancestors.
Coverdill and Huang made the same product for the same company, KenSa LLC, based in Sterling Heights, Mich., but there the similarity ended.
Coverdill earned 31 times more money than Wei to make wire harnesses, the unheralded bundles of cables that light your car's headlights and power its power windows. Yet it was Coverdill who fretted over her future while Wei bubbled with enthusiasm, unaware that her new job once belonged to a Michigan worker.
It's just one car part among thousands. But wire harnesses and the migration of wire harness jobs from Michigan first to Mexico and then to Central America and Asia offer a glimpse into the economic forces shaping American industry today.
Auto suppliers face intense pressure to cut labor costs by moving manufacturing operations, while blue-collar workers learn a lesson in modern global economics: No job is safe as long as someone in the world is willing to do it for less. Companies move jobs from one country to another, and then pull up stakes to move again in search of lower-cost workers.
Michigan lost 51,466 jobs to Mexico and Canada alone between 1993 and 2002, the third most in the nation. Offshoring could cost Michigan another 46,000 jobs by 2012.
The new economy threatens a way of life for workers who for generations have parlayed assembly line jobs into the American dream, supporting middle-class homes and cottages up north on comfortable union salaries.
Yet the flood of those jobs into low-wage countries is a mixed blessing overseas:
• Thousands of Mexican workers who took American jobs a decade ago are now losing them to workers in countries offering even cheaper labor. In those countries the impact of the new jobs is no magic bullet for workers.
• In Honduras, many workers make too little at factories to buy clean water to drink.
• In China, millions are leaving farms for factories in cities, where they are sparking a new and unpredictable cultural revolution.
Today, the fate of workers in Michigan is linked to that of workers across the globe in ways unimaginable in the past, and uncontrollable in the future. Chrysler CEO Dieter Zetsche warned suppliers recently that they must "adapt or die." And "adapt" means one thing — keep moving.
