Steve Ersinghaus's List: Scholarship

• The United States has been losing manufacturing jobs at a stunning rate: 16% of the jobs disappeared in just the three years between 2000 and 2003, with a further decline of almost 4% since 2003. In all, the nation has lost 4 million manufacturing jobs in just more than 8 years. This was some of the best-paying work in the country: The average manufacturing worker earns a weekly wage of $725, about 20% higher than the national average.
• The United States could build a high-productivity, high-wage manufacturing sector that also contributes to meeting national goals such as combating climate change and rebuilding sagging infrastructure. The country can do this by adopting a “high-road” production system that harnesses everyone’s knowledge—from production workers to top executives—to produce high-quality innovative products.

  • A classic thesis: use both to introduce and to weave against Gossain in an idea driven essay on outsourcing.
• Promoting high-road strategies will strengthen manufacturing and the U.S. economy as a whole. Through coordination with highly skilled workers and suppliers, firms achieve high rates of innovation, quality, and fast response to unexpected situations. The resulting high productivity allows firms to pay fair wages to workers and fair prices to suppliers while still making fair profits.

  • Extended thesis provides arguments in solution/advantage arrangement
• Two main forces have caused U.S. manufacturing employment to fall: the growth of productivity during a period of stagnant demand and the offshoring of work to other nations, especially China. Economists differ as to the relative contribution of the two forces, but as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman argued in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, there is growing consensus that both are important.

  • Goes to the notion of cause, important for providing context and the author's focus.

• Two groups of policy analysts argue that nothing should be done about the stunning fall in manufacturing employment, but for opposite reasons. One group, exemplified by a 2007 study by Daniel Ikenson of the Cato Institute, argues that the employment decline is a sign of soaring productivity, and that manufacturing is actually “thriving.” Another view, exemplified by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, says it is simply impossible to compete with countries whose wages are so much lower than ours. It is inevitable, he argues, that manufacturing will go the way of agriculture, employing a tiny fraction of the workforce.

    

  Neither of these views is correct. Although U.S. manufacturing is not thriving, with appropriate policies it could be. First, there are problems with the Cato study’s statistical analysis. Second, a significant number of firms are holding their own, and more could do so with appropriate policies.

  • Here Helper goes after fallacious claims about solutions. In other words, her position is that high road will work. Thus both Friedman and Ikenson need to be addressed.
• The Cato study says

  • Helper goes into an examination of those aspects of Cato and Friedman she finds incorrect or improper.
• A 2006 study by the Performance

  • Her opinion is backed by other sources. She draws from . . .

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• The shift marks a minor victory for Stringer. After more than three years at the helm, Stringer finally appears to be breaking the company's addiction to manufacturing, and to be channeling ever more resources into developing and designing products that users crave. To show he now really means business, the Welsh-born American CEO has said he will close five or six of the company's 57 plants globally and slash the company's budget for factories and chipmaking equipment by a third over the next fiscal year, ending March 2010. "There is no aspect of Sony that isn't being examined right now," Stringer told journalists in Tokyo last week. "We have to move very, very quickly and control our costs."

  • Stringer's plan
• In contrast, Sony, like many Japanese tech manufacturers, still makes many of its own products in-house, a process known as vertical integration, which "tends to lead to higher overall costs because you need extra layers of management to coordinate all the activities," says Robert Kennedy, a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and author of The Services Shift.

  • In contrast to competitors. Draws from authority on vertical integration.