judd's blog

The unions are coming! The unions are coming! To China. Or so Foxconn would like to have us believe. Maybe they're taking a page from Apple's crisis communication playbook or just spewing idle chatter signifying nothing?

Candidate Obama spent hundreds of millions of dollars slamming Mitt Romney for outsourcing American jobs. But President Obama is pushing another so-called ‘trade’ deal that will close more American plants and send more American jobs overseas.

With a new congressional session under day, New York's junior senator has thrown legislation into the hopper designed to encourage U.S. manufacturers to keep jobs in the United States or bring them back from overseas. A new year, new hope for American workers? Think happy thoughts. 

If you're one of the few and proud women who attend manufacturing conferences, you never have to wait in line outside the women's bathroom because the fairer sex is few and far between. In a society where women are more likely than men to go to college, it's a crying shame that more aren't trying to break into the mostly-boys-club manufacturing industry and missed opportunity for the sector to tap into a growing well of talent. 

Who says you can't make your fortune on floor mats? Just ask Dave MacNeil, the man behind the Illinois-based WeatherTech, who parlayed an obsession with cars and Made- in-America spirit into an $80-million-a-year business. 

Linus, of Peanuts fame, could never part with his beloved blue blanket. Just imagine if it were made in China? It would have been reduced to rags well before he had to develop an attachment with it.  A fairly new company in Massachusetts wants to ensure that all American children's blankies stand the test of time -- Made in America. 

President Obama's recent inaugural address hit a lot high notes by focusing attention on the need for all of society's sectors to unite in the age of globalization to ensure a brighter future for America but failed to mention how much easier that would be with a vibrant dynamic economy, according to American Jobs Alliance board member Clyde Prestowitz.

It's official. Foxconn doesn't know the difference between the word "denial" and a river in Egypt. Apple recently discovered that its favorite uber-supplier has been employing underaged labor, despites claims to the contrary, according to an internal report. Now that corporations are considered people, does that mean the Taiwan-based company is the ultimate corporate playboy?

During the 2000s, U.S. manufacturing, still the largest sector of its type worldwide, took a gargantuan hit, thanks in part to globalization (China's entry into the WTO). But it managed to rebound a bit in the early 2010s, helping lead the nation out of the Great Recession of 2008. That renaissance, however, may be short-lived.

Conservative pundit Phyliss Schlafly has several bones to pick with President Barack Obama over his administration's championing of recent free trade agreements. She contends they do little to advance the creation of more U.S. jobs to put the estimated 23 million out-of-work Americans into full-time employment.