Letter to the Editor: Take a Lesson from the Foundry Industry

I am a new subscriber to your newsletter, but I’m not new to manufacturing. Most of my career was spent working at a medium-sized machining company located in the Southeast, which specialized in production machining mainly to support automotive companies and other assembly plants in the United States. Over the past three decades, I have witnessed firsthand what unfair trade practice does to domestic companies.

At the company where I worked, the majority of the iron and aluminum die castings were purchased domestically. However, over the last decade or so, foundries have dwindled in this country to a sad state all because of unfair trade practices by China. And it happened so subtly that no one realized until it was too late. The big corporations were so much about getting cheaper prices in order to boost their profits that they turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to what would happen in the long run. The prices of cars didn’t decrease nor did the wages of the employees increase. But what did increase were the salaries of the CEOs/Presidents (which is a huge spread from what it was years ago), executive bonuses and higher returns for stockholders. As long as this was occurring, there was no reason to question anything. Pure and simple…it’s called GREED.