Job None

Are you prepared to buy a Chinese made private automobile? You might not be, but your frugal neighbors are.

Americans decided long ago that we didn't give a shit about quality. Remember Ford's old slogan from 1981 "Quality is Job 1?" Remember the Ford Tempo? That car was built to fuckin' last, wasn't it? There are still hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of them plying our roadways today...a rolling testament to our quality efforts of the '80s.

Yeah, right.

No, we paid lip service to good tools, good cars, good machines, and good motors, but we failed to pay American laborers living wages to build them. These jobs first migrated to Japan, but as Japanese workers demand higher wages, manufacturers today are migrating to South Korea, and tomorrow they'll migrate to Vietnam, Bangladesh...or China!

China! Land of the cheapest labor. Land of the cheapest materials, cheapest quality controls, cheapest environmental policies...but the average American won't give a shit about any of that if they can buy a new car for $5,400! Wa-hey! We decided decades ago that the cheapest price now is all that matters -- hence the rise of big box retailers, wholesale merchandisers, and depot-sized home improvement centers, where you can buy mayonnaise by the five gallon tub and a nifty new tool can transform the weekend homeowner into an instant journeyman carpenter. No need to pay for skilled labor anymore. Stuff that mayo tub into the third refrigerator in the basement.

Ford may have successfully used the slogan Quality is Job One, but today their workers are lining up at the EDD, looking for Job None. There will come a time, in the very near future, that a daughter of a former Ford employee in St. Paul, MN will drive her new Chery S12 to state college as an Apparel Marketing major and thumb her nose past the decrepit factory her father worked at to get her there.