Manufacturing in the USA
As a matter of business finance, one of the most critical decisions a CEO can make is where product will be manufactured. It’s easy for patriotic consumers to say “bring your manufacturing back to American soil and we will buy more from you,” but the reality is something more of a gray area. During a recent documentary on this topic on directv, one of the biggest high tech sector corporations in America, Apple, Inc., came under fire due to the rumored mistreatment of its workers in sweat shops in China, and the fact that their profit margins are probably high enough to support homeland manufacturing. The pressure is on for such companies to improve their operations and logistics and move those jobs back home, so that American workers can assemble products designed here.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of very big companies manufacturing small, non-tech items that would be fairly easy to produce domestically in foreign countries, not as a matter of perceived necessity, but out of probably greed. Many of the items you may have suspected were always produced here are in fact made in similar foreign sweat shops by workers who accept pay that American workers could not afford to work for. Examine the infographic below, for example, to see some surprising things we bet you never knew were not Made in America:
