Zenith's demise.

[peverett]

This is not the experience of my family. However, we did buy one of the Sanyo sets somewhere else. It was a good TV.

[holmesuser01]

This Sanyo crapped out several times during the 4 years I was with Sears. Her old Welles-Gardener is in my basement room and it works well now after replacing the obsolete unavailable parts--thru Sears-- with parts that I found on the internet last year. Flyback, and the focus control. I have a feeling that it will run forever for me, as I dont run it 18 hours a day like she did... And yes, she knew that I wound up keeping it after Sears replaced it.

Anyway, I hated seeing Zenith go belly-up. They had the best thing going in their day. When I had my radio-TV repair shop, I rarely saw a Zenith radio, other than a tube replacement now and then.

[bgadow]

An old friend of mine put in many decades as a repairman at Sears. I had assumed he retired but later I learned that they fired him just prior to his retirement date. He sure didn't have much respect for them. He predicts that the Kmart deal will kill them. He did give me a nice Simpson benchtop digital multimeter-said Sears threw it in the garbage when the handle broke, but nothing wrong with it.

I don't understand all the ins and outs of unions and unionized companies. I know that a couple of the largest manufacturing plants in our area are shuttered now with weeds growing up in the parking lot. When they were still "running" the help was all outside carrying picket signs instead of being inside building stuff. Meanwhile the help in Asia was at work. I hope the workers are happy now that their old employers are gone. There, as in everywhere, there has to be some common sense. Fierce overseas competition isn't going anywhere so we had better get with it and do all we can to compete. China, India, etc, are hungry and if we don't get off our butts they will eat our lunch.

[peverett]

If his firing was recent, he should have gotten most of his retirment pay. The defense companies did this firing stuff alot back in the 1970s, in fact, so much that a federal law was passed that said that your earned retirement pay is yours after 5 years with a corporation. A favorate tactic of the defense companies was to set a retirement date of 25 years with no retirement if you left before this was time up. Of course, they then laid you off at 24 1/2 years.

As far as the foreign workers, also remember that many of them have no health care, no paid vacation, no retirement benifits, no OSHA safety requirements, are forced to work 12 hour days (6-7 days a week) with no overtime, etc. Do we want this for our country?

[bgadow]

Originally Posted by peverett

As far as the foreign workers, also remember that many of them have no health care, no paid vacation, no retirement benifits, no OSHA safety requirements, are forced to work 12 hour days (6-7 days a week) with no overtime, etc. Do we want this for our country?

There has to be a middle ground somewhere. They will continue to work like slaves no matter what we do & at this point there is no turning back. The only way to keep the cheap imports out would be some amazingly high tariffs, and since trade is a 2-way street other US industries would suffer. (agriculture in particular) There just has to be some common sense. We might all want $24/hour and full benefits but the competition gets 24 cents and hour and a bowl of rice. What is better, $12/hour and working or $0/hour and living on the street?

[peverett]

Sure, there is a middle ground. They only way to achieve it is to be very careful who you vote for. A lot of US politicians in office today are just lackeys for the rich (and big business).

As far as the foreigners continuing to work so cheap, they are just like us, the want nice things also. And they have to work on their governments too.

FYI, China is in the progress of building the second largest road system in the world, after the US. This is one of the reasons for higher oil prices, the demand there is increasing as workers there are able to buy cars and drive, so their income must be increasing somewhat. (They sell brand new Ford Mavericks-remember them- in China-but the Chinese one is an SUV).

A final note more relavant to the demise of Zenith is that there is still a lot of electonics manufacturing in the US. Many of the microchips in your cars(including some Japanese ones), PCs,TVs, Stereos(including foreign/Japanese brands), cellphones, etc. are manufactured in the United States! Companies with factories in the US include Intel, Freescale(formerly Motorola), TI, IBM, National Semiconductor, Samsung(yes Samsung) among others. TV manufacturing may be elsewhere, but other electronic manufacturing is alive and well here.

[Einar72]

Originally Posted by bgadow

There has to be a middle ground somewhere. They will continue to work like slaves no matter what we do & at this point there is no turning back. The only way to keep the cheap imports out would be some amazingly high tariffs, and since trade is a 2-way street other US industries would suffer. (agriculture in particular) There just has to be some common sense. We might all want $24/hour and full benefits but the competition gets 24 cents and hour and a bowl of rice. What is better, $12/hour and working or $0/hour and living on the street?

It's hard to have a middle ground under a chasm. We are a nation hopelessly divided. Take your pick - by politics, religion, economic (or even employment) status. Let me use this example: We are so admiring (as we should be) of those who serve in the Armed Forces, especially in times of war, but when they return and go back to work at GM or Ford, we slam them as lazy, overpaid Union goons, just like they were our enemies or some such rot.

Just read the book Megatrends or any book on offshoring and you can see how bad it really is. Most new manufactured goods are never even considered producable in the U.S. As I said earlier in this thread, sheer greed drives the wheels of our economy today, but without the once-necessary requirement of domestic production, it seems ever so much more bald-faced.

I'm lucky to have found work in electronic manufacturing, because the rules now are so different. A company today is often just ideas, management, distribution and a pretty face at the front desk. The rest is handled by outsourcing firms, sometimes locally or nationally, but more often than not, offshore. What's really ironic is how I am working doing PCBA production for companies that I either used to work for or were located nearby.

[peverett]

I want to emphasize that when I mentioned microchip production in the US, I meant PRODUCTION in the US, not just distribution. All of the companies that I mentioned have wafer fabrication facilities in the US. Some are building new wafer fabs here. For those that do not know, the wafer fab is where the actual integrated circuit is built. The remaining work is just placing it into the package to be soldiered onto the PC board.

[Yamaha B-2]

Originally Posted by peverett

I want to emphasize that when I mentioned microchip production in the US, I meant PRODUCTION in the US, not just distribution. All of the companies that I mentioned have wafer fabrication facilities in the US. Some are building new wafer fabs here. For those that do not know, the wafer fab is where the actual integrated circuit is built. The remaining work is just placing it into the package to be soldiered onto the PC board.

Interesting. Who is building new fabs in the U.S.? And where?

[bgadow]

Originally Posted by Einar72

Most new manufactured goods are never even considered producable in the U.S.

Sad but true...I read recently of a man who came up with a new invention but he could not find anyone in the states to build it. Production is now underway in China. Then there is the small manufacturer in our town which layed off many workers early this year; the newspaper article said they are moving from a manufacturing company to a design & distributing firm. There core product, disposable plastic cutlery, is just too easy to make overseas. The price of their American made product was not outrageous, and the quality was very good, but in an open market where the average customer ignores country of origin, that just isn't good enough.

[peverett]

New Fabs in the US-the last information that I have.
IBM, New York
TI, Dallas, Texas
Intel-either New Mexico or Oregon
Samsung-Austin, Texas

There may be more, but these are the ones I am aware of.

[peverett]

Another fab being built in the US. With a great subsidy from New York, of course.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/23/tech...reut/index.htm

[Yamaha B-2]

IBM & TI are fitting out existing structures.
Intel/Micron are jointly finishing a structure Micron built back in the mid-90's in Lehi, UT.
Samsung is finishing out a structure in Austin.
The AMD fab in NY would be 'new'.

When I think of 'new' fab, I am thinking 'green-field'. That is, they have to break new ground. Not finish something they started ten years ago and stopped when the market went south.

[peverett]

If your definition of "new" is upheld, then the only "new" fab in the world would be the AMD one. All others that I am aware of are additions or finishing out. American jobs are being created by all of them.

FYI, the Samsung finishing out is going to cost around 3 billion dollars. Quite a finishing, I would say.

[Yamaha B-2]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Kokusai furnaces that Intel uses and ASM epi machines at TI, etc., don't do that much for U.S. jobs, other than hold the line a bit. The folks doing the construction/install work might be unemployed or whatever, otherwise, I grant you. But, with only Applied Materials, Lam and a few other, considerably smaller U.S. companies supplying the tools and very little concrete (generally Mexicans, I agree - what did Daniel Boone say when he woke up at the Alamao and saw all the Mexicans? "I didn't know we were pouring concrete today." I've poured MANY yards of concrete and very little of it since ~1990 has been with anyone other than Mexican labor, especially in the west) then we are simply holding our own. I don't think there is a U.S. based vacuum pump manufactuerer at all today. Want a dry roughing pump or turbo pump it will come from Asia or Europe. I've forgotten the name of the cryopump company (Helix was the parent), but I'll bet they are pretty much gone or foreign owned by. Especially with the level of robotics and automation and 'copy exact' in the fabs of today. Better than nothing, but I'm guessing that all the new fabs put together will not result in more than a few thousand permanent new jobs in the U.S. That is simply the name of the game, unfortunately.