Google To Close Its American Moto X Factory 154
An anonymous reader writes "After only one year in operation, Google's Moto X factory in Fort Worth, TX, is scheduled to close at the end of 2014. The decision to close apparently has nothing to do with Google's decision to sell Motorola Mobility to Lenovo and everything to do with poor sales numbers and high labor and shipping costs in the U.S. The factory had, at one point, employed 3,800 people. Their ranks now number at about 700. Moto E and Moto G, newer and cheaper iterations of Moto X, have sold in more profitable numbers overseas, so Google's original rationale of building phones nearer to the largest customer base to decrease time between assembly and delivery to end user will unsurprisingly force the closure of the U.S.-based factory and transfer labor overseas as well."
Re:remove Health Care from jobs and then labor cos (Score:5, Insightful)
remove Health Care from jobs and then labor costs will come down. Out side of the usa your job does not control your Health Care
Someone has to pay for the health care. Remove insurance from health care and then health care costs will come down. Outside of the USA, an insurance company does not need to profit for you to get health care.
Re:remove Health Care from jobs and then labor cos (Score:5, Insightful)
Not until the paramedics check your credit history before they check your vital signs will America be truly great again!
Re:remove Health Care from jobs and then labor cos (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, make health care a social right and decouple it from employment and income. It would be interesting to see what the CEOs come up with to blame for the next rounds of layoffs.
Re:As someone who... (Score:2, Insightful)
Its not the wages... its the regulations, the taxes, the insurance, etc.
The manufacturing companies can operate just fine in the US paying US wages... its the other stuff that is intolerable.
And no, I'm not talking about income tax on business since that's obviously about nothing when all is said and done. No, the issue is the fees.
The companies get nickle and dimed for stuff that adds up to a big percentage of their total operating costs. Some heavy industries in the US pay more in these fees every year then they do in wages and employee insurance COMBINED.
the whole thing needs to be rationalized and then limited to some maximum percentage that is tolerable.
The usual disinformation (Score:2, Insightful)
Such laws (banning or regulating various "sin" related things like sex toys, porn, alcohol, etc) were common throughout the US for decades. Each state has changed or deleted these types of regulations and bans over time at their own pace (so in each instance SOME state is going to be last). The repeals have often been MANY years after they stopped enforcing them and most people forgot they were even on the books (lookup local laws related to transportation or pesky animals for some laughs). In this particular case, these laws were put in place with wording that would make them unlikely to hurt individuals but would be problematic for "sex shops" (which have generally be considered "undesireable" neighors) while not using language that specifically targeted those shops (making them more-easily struck down by virtue of being targeted legislation). The There are still thousands of crazy-sounding laws on the books all across the country - many in places like CA and NY which so many people consider "progressive".
It's a great political tactic to sling something like this into a conversation as a quasi-clever sleight to Texas (and by implication right-wingers) but the effect is lost on those of us with an education.
Re:High labor cost in US, why ? (Score:3, Insightful)
In Republican controlled Texas?
It doesn't matter. Unions are a right-wing bogeyman that gets blamed regardless of any rational analysis of their effect, or even whether they exist. For table thumping rhetoric, a really good bogeyman needn't b real. All you have to do is get a few million people to reflexively parrot it. This avoids the trouble of actually thinking, which makes some people's heads hurt.
Re:They became tied to jobs in the US when (Score:4, Insightful)
Democrat president Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to control the economy; During WWII he froze wages.
What's more important, defeating Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire, or worshiping the Market God? I think we won that war, in large part because the Arsenal of Democracy produced war materiel at a rate made the few rational people amongst the enemy scared shitless. Wage and price controls, and rationing, meant that we didn't have the sort of inflation that trashed the American economy after other wars. The War Production Board (a/k/a the control in a controlled economy) was disbanded after the war.
As for the short-sightedness of FDR (I wonder if anything other than market distortions was on his mind between say 1941 and 1945?), which helped lead to widespread employer paid health insurance, another liberal Democrat by the name of Truman tried to fix that after the war. He pushed for universal health care, but was defeated by the Republicans.