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No
More Excuses! Everything You Wear Every Day Can Be Made in USA.
Is it really difficult to find
American-made apparel? How about Union-made, American made-apparel? One
visit to Union Jean & Apparel Company’s website at
www.unionjeanco.com
and you’ll see that the answer is definitely “no.”
Of course it isn’t easy for
American companies to employ 100% of their workforce in the United States,
especially for the garment industry, but that is exactly what Union Jean &
Apparel has done. And it especially isn’t easy when companies pay union
wages, which are usually higher than non-union wages. Paying higher wages,
union and non-union both, should be considered an asset rather than a
liability for the country as a whole since Americans can only be affluent as
consumers to the degree that they are also wage-earners.
Co-founder Lawson Nickol says
that “Surviving in the union garment business is a real challenge today and
sometimes we feel like David taking on Goliath.” Union Jean & Apparel is
taking on Goliath with not just a unionized manufacturing workforce. The
entire company is unionized from manufacturing to distribution, sales,
administration and management.
>From denim jeans to denim
shirts and jackets, canvas/duck coveralls, fleece vests and sweatshirts,
sports sweatshirts and sweatpants, windbreakers and classy twill long sleeve
shirts, Union Jean & Apparel has them all and more. And they’re very
reasonably priced. Did you ever imagine you could buy a high quality pair of
jeans for $24.00 – union made in the USA? If Americans can’t afford prices
like this to buy made in USA, we are in real trouble folks. I doubt you
could make a valid argument that we must have the availability of supposedly
cheaper Chinese-made apparel to save the consumer money in this case. How
much money could we actually save? I firmly believe that if we as a people
stopped buying so many of the Chinese imports that we really don’t need
anyway, we would have enough money left over to buy more made in USA goods
when they do cost more.
Sometimes it’s nice to look at
some quotes from the past to get a fresh perspective for the present and the
future. When President Warren Harding was challenged by the argument that
consumers benefit from cheaper imports, he replied "One who values American
prosperity and . . . American standards of wage[s] and living can have no
sympathy with the proposal that easy entry and a flood of imports will
cheapen our cost of living. It is more likely to destroy our capacity to
buy."
Please take time to visit
www.unionjeanco.com
and take a look at their large and diverse selection of American-made
products. Help the David’s in America survive and win against the Goliath’s
of the global economy. Order American-made apparel from Union Jean & Apparel
Company today. Buying American made this Christmas would truly be a gift to
all of us.
Roger Simmermaker, Author
How Americans Can Buy American
www.howtobuyamerican.com
Can’t We Just Outsource Those Who Advocate Outsourcing?
First white-collar workers stood idly by and watched blue-collar
workers as they were sacrificed to satisfy the realities of the global
economy. Although I’m sure that many white-collar workers sympathized with
other Americans who were getting the axe, many more shrugged it off as what
was supposed to be a necessary sacrifice to maintain a prosperous economy.
Sure, we were told, there is short-term pain before the long-term gain, but
free trade and an increasingly globalized economy go hand in hand and are
just what America needs.
Now some of those very same white-collar workers are getting the
axe. Just north of Orlando in Lake Mary, Florida, German-owned Siemens
Corporation required soon-to-be former employees to train their imported
replacements from India. Similar situations have been and still are being
played out all across America. Other companies, rather than bringing in
foreign workers, put American workers in unemployment lines and hired
foreign workers in their homeland instead. One thing is for sure: Americans
in unemployment lines are not going to be standing in retail checkout lines.
Free traders surely understand this, even though they emphasize that
two-thirds of the nation’s economic activity is dependent upon consumer
spending.
Illegal immigration is also an inter-related problem in dealing
with the outright theft of jobs that should be reserved for Americans. But
these days, I wonder if it would be better to spend our energy rounding up
illegal immigrants for deportation or concentrate more on outsourcing those
Americans who feel offshore outsourcing of American jobs is a “good thing.”
It’s worth pondering which group of people – illegal immigrants or
government officials who advocate outsourcing – is a bigger threat to
America. It could very well be the elected representatives or appointed
officials that publicly support offshore outsourcing of American jobs since
they have more influence in the direction of the economy.
Of course the pro-outsourcing comments of the Bush administration’s
appointed chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Mr. Gregory Mankiw,
were particularly appalling, but this wasn’t the first of such objectionable
statements. Back in May of 2003, Congressman Jay Inslee stated that "for any
economic growth to occur, a country needs to add more value to its products
without increasing the cost and outsourcing to India helps U.S. companies do
exactly that." What an idiotic thing to say. The representatives that
immediately called for Mankiw’s resignation were right on target, and Rep.
Jay Inslee should be removed from office as well.
If our elected officials are so concerned about rising productivity
in this country, exactly how are American workers supposed to be encouraged
to stay productive in a cut-throat economy where the atmosphere is polluted
with mass layoffs, forced downsizing and offshoring of many of our country’s
brightest and best-educated citizens? Before the American economy can “turn
the corner” and realize true prosperity, our elected officials and American
companies must look at American workers as potential contributors to future
prosperity rather than labor cost problems to be dealt with.
Taxpayer funded job retraining programs for existing workers are
not the answer. For one, nobody has been able to describe exactly what the
reserved future jobs for Americans will be as we deliberately slaughter the
old jobs. Secondly, with budget deficits in nearly every state in the Union,
and with the federal government unable to kick in retraining dollars to help
cash-strapped states since our national account is in red ink as well, how
will the training programs for new jobs be successfully funded? State
college tuitions are rising while aid to college financial budgets is
falling. And according to Microsoft CEO Steven A. Ballmer “the United States
is No. 3 now in the world and falling behind quickly No. 1 [India] and No. 2
[China] in terms of computer-science graduates.” How many more versions of
the “New Economy” can American withstand?
Can we look to smaller companies to prop up America’s economy?
After all, we are told, small businesses are the backbone of America’s
economy and employ more Americans than the big, multinational businesses
like GE and Microsoft. But more American businesses with less than 500
employees were closed in 2001 and 2002 than were started. According to the
Small Business Administration, such negative job growth hasn’t occurred in
more than a decade. And GE reluctantly announced recently that they
knowingly are transferring technology to China to win contracts to sell to
the growing Chinese market. Such fixation on short-term strategies that
knowingly put our best and biggest companies at a disadvantage in the long
term is just plain bad economics, I don’t care what economics textbook
you’re reading. American companies have invested billions of dollars in
research over the years, only to give our foreign competitors a free ride in
the end. Of course if American companies ever got a free ride or most
favored status, calls of isolationism would be sounded and accusations of
walling off America’s borders would fly.
The thinking of those who advocate free trade (who were ridiculed
by our founding fathers in their day, by the way) and offshoring of American
jobs is pretty clear. They don’t see a problem with the layoffs of fellow
Americans so that they, who are still employed, can better-afford the good
or service once produced or performed by newly unemployed American workers.
Until these people see their own job-titles declared losers in the American
economy will they realize that all along they should have been advocating
what was best for America rather than what was best only for themselves.
One thing that still divides our country today is that too many people are
fixated only on their own special interests, willing to endorse policies
that benefit their own industry even though other American industries would
be sacrificed. For instance, farmers shouldn’t endorse trade deals that
increase their export potential while manufacturers get swamped with imports
in the same trade deal, and vice-versa. Every American industry needs to
support the other to the extent possible. It’s united we stand and divided
we fall, and outsourcing is merely the latest method of American job
destruction that threatens to divide us all.
Roger Simmermaker, Author
How Americans Can Buy American
www.howtobuyamerican.com
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