FORD SHUT DOWN OF MANUFACTURING IN AUSTRALIA

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pickles2

It's got NOTHING to do with the yanks....NOTHING.
Think about our COSTS...COSTS of manufacturing...Holden GM said last week.....65% (SIXTY FIVE PER CENT) of manufacturing costs of manufacturing the Commodore was WAGES....that is the problem....they're too high....unless people regognize that....we will continue to go......downhill.
Ya want some examples...tradies making $160K P.A. (desalination plant)PLUS living away from home allowance...etc etc etc....and there's HEAPS more examples.
Building site...a guy opens the gates in the morning, cleans the toilets during the day, shuts the gates at night....$100K P.A.....and the last example was a few years ago.....then of course ya've got 18 day months, water on site..can't work....ah it's over 32C..can't work, parental leave, baby bonus, MASSIVE 1st home buyer's scheme...ra ra ra ra....who's gonna pay?......and ya wonder why we can't compete?
Cheers, Pickles.

---

The desal plant is not a good example. There are very few projects like that about.
Government funded gravy train.

You are right about high wages when you quote figures as you have done.
However, you should also be looking at history, comparison and context.
We live in a country which has a very high if not the highest cost of living in the world. Our utilities (gas, electricity water, council rates and telephone/internet) are amongst the most expensive in the world. This drives up the costs of other things such as food and anything manufactured in Australia When you couple this with the high AU$, that drives up the cost of exports and drives down the price of imports.
Comparing wages in AU$ to wages in US$ is not a fair comparison. If you compared AU houses to US houses, you'd probably find Australian houses are ten times more expensive than US houses. A friend is in constant contact with people in the US. They constantly compare prices. A good example in vending machine drinks. I have been noting the cost of a can of Coke from vending machines in Victoria. They are usually around the $4 mark. In the US, 80c.

Another thing that should be considered is supply and demand. If there is short supply of skills and demand is high, that drives wages up. Once the wages are up and demand drops, people are retrenched.
This has happened to me. For the past five or six years I have been in a job that has been paying me about three times what my job overseas would pay. (Bear in mind I was working for a multinational company in the global market competing with US, Europe and Asia.) What kept us competitive was we worked so much smarter than overseas companies. When the AU$ went up, we ceased to represent value for money and available projects dried up.

The problem is too complex just to blame high wages and unions. You also have to blame government policy, the money changers (i.e. stock market and banks), and numerous other parties that have their snout in the trough.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by mikehzz

A mate is getting a computer programming job done for his business. It's 28 days work full on and will cost him $800 all up in China. It would nearly cost him $800 a day here.

---

And what you will find is the person in Australia doing the work is on a contract for $25p/h inclusive of super.
The other $75p/h will be going to the lower, middle and upper management of the company he is contracted to, the lower, middle and upper management of the company they are contracted to and the lower, middle and upper management of the company your mate got the quote from.
Don't believe me? Take a closer look at how the NBN project is being handled.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pickles2

Hello sparksdisco.
I worked in a Bank for 39 years before I retired. Nothing special, just middle management....no big income or anything like that...just a worker, and I was a Union Member for the whole time.
Talking about wages/costs etc, being an ex-Banker, I'm used to people having a go at me about "Huge Bank Profits"etc etc......but they're not "Huge" really...it's just that the banks are very large organizations, so their "Profit" is, in number/dollar terms, are also large, but their return on equity is the same as any other successful business.
However, one aspect of Banks that I do find obscene, is the "Salary" of the C.E.O's...NO-ONE is worth $15M P/A.
Cheers, Pickles.

---

I do empathize about people saying about the company you work for having huge profits so you should be on huge wages.

I work for the big mining company up north, and granted that i earn good wages.

However the sacrifices that i make to earn these high wages have a greater impact on my life than you think.

I'm not a FIFO worker that comes in makes the big money and flies back to there home that they grew up in. They have major issues also. I live in the town that has next to no facilities, A large issue of (I will try to be politically correct) Aboriginal issues, with 2 small children that see antisocial behavior daily and doing all of this while i work a 12 rotating shift roster with no support from family.

The cost of living up here is very expensive and the drain on resources with FIFO workers is criminal.

the council has it's own adgender when it comes to releasing land and making it more affordable to live here.

Government don't spent the money in the towns that make the economy run yet spent it's money in the city's and on keeping the unemployed.

The town I live in should be a thriving city but is being crippled because of lack of vision and the willingness to build public infrastructure.

I daily weigh up weather it's worth staying or going back home to Victoria.

I am a tradesman and I earn good money if i was on the wage I am on back in Victoria

But the sacrifices that i make would leave me at about the same in the terms of living.

I'ts easy to sit back in the city and look at me and say I must be rich but it's not as simple as that.

i am drifting off subject at the moment as i have just done a 12 hour night shift and have come home to keep an eye on my 2 little ones while the wife is sitting at the doctors to sort out her ear infection. hopefully it's been a quiet night in terms of drunks fighting each other so the line should be shorter.

It's not a easy thing to sort out the social and economic welfare of Australia

My 2 cent's anyway

Cheers

Mate, I spent 10 years working as a contract computer programmer on around $60-100 and hour, great money, overpaid to hell in my opinion but I wasn't going to knock it back. At one stage a company that sub contracted me was charging the client around $200 an hour. It was year 2K time so programmers were scarce. That $775 you quoted is per day not per hour by the way.

sparksdisco...Good post mate.
I have never done that sort of work, but a friend of mine has a son whose "in the mines" looking after big machinery. Good money, but pretty tough conditions.....but the young man is not silly.....he's putting the money away....and he's actually met a nice young lady up there.
My "working" conditions were nothing like yours of course, but lots of people think Bankers & the like just work 9-5........NOT TRUE...that is, if ya wanna get on. For the last period of my working life, I was in at work before 7.00AM, working all sorts of hours.....40 hrs a week would have been great, but unforunately, no way!
Cheers, Pickles.

Overall - Australian Industry has been slow to restructure in response to globalisation. Low ago we did start to move out of the secondary sector into the tertiary sector where our real strengths lie but a few industies like the car industry which really have never been profitable in Aust have survived with government assistance but really had to come to an end sooner or later.

Countries should only be in industries where they have a competitive advantage - for the second and third worlds with is labour intensive industry - for the first world it is move out of labour intensive manufacturing into the service and technology industries or manufacturing where technology not humans make the products - this is where Australia is now but we still need to get rid of a couple of dinosaurs like the car industry. Niches however are an exception.

Japan is the classic example of the life cycle of a typical modern economy.

After the war it was a labour based economy making crap goods - as expertise grew it moved to making better but cheaper goods and salaries began to grow. It then became an innovator and began to make better quality goods that started to get a quality reputation but prices began to escalate, fast forward to now where the actual Japanese economy is based very much in the tertiary sector - yes they still produce many secondaty sector goods but because of costs of production many of these manufactured products are made off shore as they are too expensive to make them in Japan.

Have you noticed that South Korea is a couple of decades behind Japan - Korea is now starting to make their cars offshore - some in Eastern Europe. Countries like Malaysia, China and India started this process much later but are progressing along the same timeline.

Aust is no different - once we could support mainstream manufacturing but can no longer do so - when we have tariffs the quality of our goods was crap - competition when they were removed fixed that but set us up to be technology innovators not makers of things. While I do not support tarrifs on imported goods I do believe in a level playing field and do support tariffs on imported goods that have been subsidised or are being dumped in Aust.

We need to move on - stop sinking Govt money into these industries and put this money into innovation.

And stop selling our dirt at bargain basement prices and do at least one level of value adding to primary/mining industry goods we sell. Also stop growing things that are not suited to our climate and are resource intensive and switch to things less traditional and more suited to our country.

As the world becomes more globalised we need to become more global in our thinking and in our industries.

Garry

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by garrycol

And stop selling our dirt at bargain basement prices and do at least one level of value adding to primary/mining industry goods we sell.

Garry

---

Good Idea but that horse has long bolted.

Port Hedland had a HBI plant (hot-briquetted iron) but lack of knowledge and experience caused a lot of deaths and it shutdown. and look at our steel industry

there should be a lot of local players in the ore business not 1 or 2 company's funded by overseas company's.

We should also stop overseas buying our farming land as i se the next thing in great demand will be food for Asian countries

Its not just our manufacturing sector thats disappearing offshore.

The global engineering company I work have just won a large job in the middle east to design roads and bridge infrastucture. The bosses tell me that as we had to cut our price so much to win the job its necessary for our Manila office to do a larger percentage of the work than they otherwise would have.
So all the designers we have recently retrenched will have to stay on the dole queue.
As we train our overseas staff we are actually doing ourselves out of a job.

My wife unfortunately works in a similar field and she has been out of work for 5 months now with little prospects of getting a jog in engineering. We are lucking in having one wage for the timebeing though.

I also have some friends (husband/wife)who run an ebay business. They outsource all the computing/graphics work to india or Manila. From what they have told me, it would not be worth doing it if they used local labour.

John D - Defender 110 2.4

Gary...it is a difficult & complex problem no doubt.
So, my solution is, if I was able to drive your V12 E Type, I wouldn't have to think about it so much!!
Lovely car, lovely engine...would you care to speak about its history etc...any pics?
I LOVE "big" engines...our other car is a C63.
Cheers, Pickles.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pickles2

Lovely car, lovely engine...would you care to speak about its history etc...any pics?

---

When I get around to it I will add something in this thread http://www.aulro.com/afvb/members-ri...wins-they.html so as not to divert attention away from the Australian Industry Structure and its slowness to adapt to changes in the world and its squealing as a result.