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Gene Ellis

Midsize Cities in Poland Develop as Service Hubs for Outsourcing Industry - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-for-outsourcing-industry.html

outsourcing europe industry poland

shared by Gene Ellis on 23 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Midsize Cities in Poland Develop as Service Hubs for Outsourcing Industry
  • Part of Poland’s edge derives from the fact that it has yet to join the euro currency union. Its currency, the zloty, has been relatively stable against the world’s reserve currencies in the last year.
  • (The public sector, employing about a quarter of Poland’s 15.7 million workers, is still the country’s largest source of jobs.)
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  • industry specialists say Poland must move into more sophisticated services, like research and development, to continue attracting investment and corporate clients.
  • “The question for Poland is, ‘How do I move up the value chain?' ” said Peter Schumacher, chief executive of the Value Leadership Group, a management consultancy based in Frankfurt and New York. “How can I go from basic process management work to more sophisticated creative work?”
Gene Ellis

U.S. Textile Plants Return, With Floors Largely Empty of People - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-textile-factories-return.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The problems in India were cultural, bureaucratic and practical.
  • Mr. Winthrop says American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Turnaround time is quicker. Most striking, labor costs — the reason all these companies fled in the first place — aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have largely turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers.
  • In 2012, the M.I.T. Forum for Supply Chain Innovation and the publication Supply Chain Digest conducted a joint survey of 340 of their members. The survey found that one-third of American companies with manufacturing overseas said they were considering moving some production to the United States, and about 15 percent of the respondents said they had already decided to do so.
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  • Between 2000 and 2011, on average, 17 manufacturers closed up shop every day across the country, according to research from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
  • yes, it means jobs, but on nowhere near the scale there was before, because machines have replaced humans at almost every point in the production process. Take Parkdale: The mill here produces 2.5 million pounds of yarn a week with about 140 workers. In 1980, that production level would have required more than 2,000 people.
  • But he was frustrated with the quality, and the lengthy process.
  • “We just avoid so many big and small stumbles that invariably happen when you try to do things from far away,” he said. “We would never be where we are today if we were overseas. Nowhere close.”
  • Time was foremost among them. The Indian mill needed too much time — three to five months — to perfect its designs, send samples, schedule production, ship the fabric to the United States and get it through customs. Mr. Winthrop was hesitant to predict demand that far in advance.
  • There were also communication issues.
  • like moving half-finished yarn between machines on forklifts.
  • The North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was the first blow, erasing import duties on much of the apparel produced in Mexico.
Gene Ellis

The Quality of Jobs: The New Normal and the Old Normal - NYTimes.com - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...-new-normal-and-the-old-normal

shared by Gene Ellis on 20 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Despite 42 consecutive months of gains in private-sector employment, the unemployment rate is still at 7.3 percent; in December 2007 it was only 4.6 percent. The current unemployment rate is higher now than in 2007 across all age, education, occupation, gender and ethnic groups.
  • That’s despite the fact that about four million workers have left the labor force, driving the labor force participation rate to a historic low
  • Although the share of the long-term unemployed has fallen from its peak of 45 percent in 2011 to 38 percent today, it is still far above its 2001-7 average. And about eight million people are working part-time for “economic reasons,”
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  • 60 percent of the net job losses occurred in middle-income occupations with median hourly wages of $13.84 to $21.13. In contrast, these occupations have accounted for less than a quarter of the net job gains in the recovery, while low-wage occupations with median hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83 have accounted for more than half of these gains.
  • Over the last year, more than 40 percent of job growth has been in low-paying sectors including retail, leisure/hospitality (hotels and restaurants) and temporary help agencies.
  • Based on history, what’s distinctive about this recovery is its sluggish pace, not the composition of its jobs.
  • The economy’s growth rate has been less than half the rate of previous recoveries and the employment losses in the Great Recession were more than twice as large as those in previous recessions.
  • What is distinctive during this recovery relative to earlier ones is the growing disparity in wages across sectors, a trend that was apparent long before the Great Recession.
  • Since then, however, wage growth has fallen far short of productivity growth, and that’s true for workers regardless of education, occupation, gender or race.
  • But technological change and the globalization it has enabled have played major roles, and these driving forces have probably strengthened during the recovery.
  • Jobs that are routine, that do not involve manual tasks and that do not need to be done near the customer are being replaced by computers and automation or are being outsourced to low-cost workers in other countries.
  • According to another study, the top 1 percent of households captured 65 percent of real family income gains (including realized capital gains) between 2002 and 2007 and 95 percent of the gains between 2009 and 2012. In 2012, the top decile claimed more than 50 percent of income, the highest share ever.
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