I'm in the Aviation industry and always hear the anti union rhetoric in relation to Boeing machinists yet all the hourly union workers and others who directly affect aircraft production combined, make up about 5% of the cost of producing it. I have seen it both ways but consider unions a necessary evil. Also what I have observed is that when they do offload labor overseas, the consumer rarely benefits, neither in savings or quality and not much later if you pay close attention, those on the board cut themselves a bigger bonus. It's convenient and has more visual impact to put the blame on domestic labor but I'm not buying this argument for a second. On the other hand, often parts of production are offloaded to different parts of the world in order to make a sale in that region. In some instances it looks closer to blackmail, send some of the work to my country or we won't buy a large order of your product seems to be the condition of it. I saw a case where my company offloaded insulation blanket production to Mexico and laid off everyone in the blanket shop. Now, all the blanket shop employees are back on the payroll and going around to aircraft on the production lines, repairing blankets due to inferior quality and they often have to work overtime to keep up with it. The motto here is "We'll save a million dollars even if it costs us ten million".
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