Walmart plans to provide 10 million dollars in grants to endorse
American manufacturing. This money will be spread out in five years. Another
company
Kent International has decided to move production from
overseas into the U.S. specifically into South Carolina.
With all of
this talk about creating more jobs in the U.S. it is creating some dispute over
minimum wage. There has been talk about increasing the minimum wage from $7.25
to $10.10 an hour. The problem with all of these changes occurring at the same
time is that with a higher minimum wage, companies would have to have fewer
employees. However, because the U.S. companies are planning to move manufacturing
practices to the U.S. to create more jobs that is not a viable option. The other
viable options the companies have is to increase the prices of their products.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/business/walmart-creates-10-million-fund-to-stimulate-american-manufacturing.html?ref=economy
During Obama's state of the union speech in 2012, he spoke of bringing back more US manufacturing jobs. So far, this has been unsuccessful. It is cheaper to produce goods overseas due to low wages and cheaper material costs. The only goal of a firm, Wal Mart, is to make a profit and as a large a profit as possible. While this will good news for Americans, Walmart will not bring back many manufacturing jobs because having profit is the main self-interest.
ReplyDeleteFor me I think this is just a ploy for Walmart to gain support from the American public. The recession has had devastating results for small businesses across the United States. That being said it has changed many American's views on large corporations pushing them to support small local business. There is also the push to purchases goods made solely in the United States. This puts Walmart in a bad light given that they are a huge corporation and many off the goods they provide are manufactured overseas. By bringing some of these jobs back to the States they are inevitably going to lose some money however it will be an image booster.
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