Made in the U.S.A. ?

[Trickymissfit]

My employer gives the employees a shoe allowance (we must wear full PPE, hard hat, safety glasses with side shields, long sleeved shirt, pannts and/or Kevlar oversleeves if wearing a Tee shirt, all supplied by the company but the shoes.

I prrefer metatarsal footwear but we have to wear ANSI approved safety toe boots (I get accessory metatarsal shields from the company. While the shoe/boot allowance is good, it don't quite cover the cost of good boots/shoes.

There is a Redwing shoestore near the plant and I stopped in to look at a pair of Redwings and I was unpleasantly suprised to find out the most Redwings are made offshore. They ain't cheap either.

Been wearing structural fiber ANSI approved shoe/Boot over guards (that are a royal PITA) but doable but with the above link, I just ordered a pair of ANSI steel toe work boots, Made in USA for less than the Redwings and just above my allotment for safety shoes.

Thanks again.

place I worked at used to spend several million dollars a year on rubber mats for machine operators to help avoid lost time from feet and knee problems on concrete floors (plus oil on the floor issues). Somebody did a study on this issue, and they found out that for the same cost, they could buy everybody a new pair of Redwing work shoes. They contacted Redwing and worked out a deal with them via a coupon. They stipulated that the shoes had to be U.S. made, steel toed and oil resistant. Not everybody got this deal, but pretty much everybody out on the manufacturing floor.

I used to buy steel by the semi truck loads, and had castings done several times a year. It was always written in the contract that the material must be U.S. made with the paper work to back track it to the source. You can't always get metal from the USA, but if you want it bad enough you can 95% of the time. The others are some forms of exotic materials, and you had to be able to prove that there wasn't a domestic supplier. I've seen more than one engineer loose his job over this.

Now it's easy to blame the exportation of jobs to some place outside our borders, but there are issues making this happen.

* some nations have content laws (Canada, China, and I think Mexico for a few). This means that a certain percentage of the product must be made there. Content laws were voided with NAFTA, and of course we now know that was a lie.

* Taxes! Businesses are taxed into the ground here, and the states don't help matters either. We often hear and read about local tax abatements for as long as ten years. In the end the rest of the folks in that area make up the difference. The corporations that can't get help here, will often get that same help offshore.

* I often hear people blaming OSHA for loosing jobs, but that's crap when you look at the total picture. The cost of OSHA was usually offset by work place injuries. You might have been able to get by with that statement twenty years ago, but not in the last ten years.

* Jobs are often lost to better manufacturing technics, and better equipment. Not so much a volume issue as a better quality part that goes together better and faster.

Assembly lines demand consistent parts at a volume suited to the sales output. Usually the only way this happens is via multi machine cells that operate with a small fraction of operators. Or they'll employ FMS systems with maybe two or three operators doing the work of twenty. On the otherhand it takes more skilled technicians to keep these machines running, and they are getting harder to come by on any given day of the week. We have whole areas of the country that a large company has to ignore due to lack of skills, and getting a good engineer is often impossible these days. Perhaps 20% are usable! Yet Japan, Korea, and China are turning them out by the hundreds. Plus the lack of math and science skills by graduating seniors in high school has reached rock bottom. We are our own worst enemy.

Most large corporations are ruled by stock holders demanding larger and larger dividends. You see this everywhere, and then there is the ever over powering corporate greed factor. Ontop of this we have the steady tax from folks in the legal profession of just about every for of manufacturing in this country. They'd be in jail if they tried that stuff off shore!
gary

 

[SidecarFlip]

Gary:

I agree in part. Remember I'm in the steel business, the transportation end, but owned by a steel company, we are American owned and operated but the bottom line is most of the domestic mills today are foreign owned and thats certainly not to say that we might be sold to a foreign entity, anything is possible.

Case in point, Acerlor Mittal (defunct Republic Steel, LTV) or Ford Rouge Steel, now Severstal.

Traceability is fine but things can get a bit muddied in that process. Just because we are American owned and operated, thats not to say we procure all our basic materials from domestic sources because we don't, it's impossible and while our products say 'Proudly Made in the USA' the intrinsic components may or may not be sourced from domestic sources.

Thats how it works.

It's a global economy, like it or not. Players like China and Pacific Rim countries are key players, my issue is, if I can avoid purchasing any product made in some sweat shop in a third world hove where the workers are making peanutsl and imported by some greedy, profit oriented company and marked up ten fold, I'm going to do it (not buy those products).

It can't always play that way but if it can, I'm all for it and I don't mind paying a premium price to support American workers.

Yes, I have those anti-fatigue mats in my shop. I must say they work well. Much better than standing on concrete.

The phrase 'Buy American' is easy to say but hard to practice.

 

[Trickymissfit]

this is what I've found when buying steel. Europe was famous years back for stainless steels and select heat treating processes due to the heavy use of coal. Over the last fifteen years (maybe twenty five years) their quality has plunged. We saw this with the Sako blow ups. But folks that bought steels already knew this the hard way. Their CRS steels came in about 20% to 30% cheaper, but you ended up scrapping 33% of the lot you bought due to delamination issues alone. I well remember calling in a single source supplier (some will know the name as it starts with the letter "A"), and showing him what he sent us. Now we're looking at about 30,000lb. of steel, and I made him take it back. That steel came out of Austria and Norway. They sent in another truck load, and it was only slightly better as it wasn't strait, or slightly close to size. That came out of Korea. Why CRS? You use it a lot in welded construction as it saves machine time. I often found myself crawling thru stacks of hot rolled plate looking for something to replace what we'd bought. Finally the boss and I called a meeting with the supplier(s), and told them what we had to have. If they couldn't supply it, then we'd find somebody that would.

Prototype parts for a new product line usually are sourced from domestic mills as a certified lot. This is deemed critical, and before it can be off loaded the paper work must be handed over. Then when that part goes into production the steel is purchased via a different group. More often than you think, the raw material was deemed junk. You really see this in bar feed cutting systems, and somebody said they had tons and tons of bad steel laying around. Timken ended up be the new source at about 33% more money. Time saved was well over 40%, they ended up actually saving money in the end. Before the machine operator spent a huge amount of time sorting stock for straightness alone. A crooked piece of steel won't feed thru a collet that only expands sixty thousandths. Plus you can buy bar steel with less extra stock to machine off it, and this really saves money. I might add that the Timken steels heat treat better, and are way out front when machining involute spines.

One place that is extremely critical is forgings. I've seen them done from all over the place, and they always come back to the Midwest in the end. I've seen more than one person loose their job over a cost saving move. You get what you pay for!

Now we've watched the Asians pretty take over the machine tool markets, and once again you got what you paid for. Most are junk before they take them off the shipping pallet. Some are pretty good (mostly gear grinders), but still no better than the competition. The machine centers and lathes simply suck! Once again, I've seen more than one process engineer clean out his desk of buying this junk.
gary