Welfare myths

[dizzyblonde]

Costs a lot to produce stuff in the UK. Worked for Nestle for many years, was always a constant rumour as to.when they would shut the home of Quality Street and move to Poland.

[yorkie_chris]

Depends if you want quality, we are really busy in anything to do with turbochargers.

[NTECUK]

Cost allot to make things in gurmany?
We can and do make quality cars. And not just expensive ones too.
We can if we try to buy British help our selves .

[timwilky]

I work for a large multinational, in years gone by we employed over 50,000 in the UK. Now it is less than 4000. The vast majority of these jobs are either professional or clerical. Most of our factories have shut, We have opened new factories in "low wage" countries India and China etc.

Interestingly our customers (in china) have because of bad experience of new products manufactured in eastern Europe asked for our traditional UK manufactured equipment (10s of millions worth of kit) and been told sorry no can do.

Technical stuff like design and development is still done in the UK, but metal cutting is too expensive. If we can teach the cheap staff to innovate we are truely screwed. They can regurgitate the crap out there all they want, but cannot think on their feet. So ideal script monkeys etc.

[maviczap]

Originally Posted by timwilky

Interestingly our customers (in china) have because of bad experience of new products manufactured in eastern Europe asked for our traditional UK manufactured equipment (10s of millions worth of kit) and been told sorry no can do.

What worries me is that they want to get their hands on the good quality stuff to see how its made and do it themselves?

Originally Posted by timwilky

Technical stuff like design and development is still done in the UK, but metal cutting is too expensive. If we can teach the cheap staff to innovate we are truely screwed. They can regurgitate the crap out there all they want, but cannot think on their feet. So ideal script monkeys etc.

Our last big factory Crane fluid systems shut down a couple of years ago, all the production is done in the Far East now, just the admin & technical side left. They held out as long as they could, where they were is a Waitrose & John Lewis.

They Chinese will learn how to reproduce all this stuff and we will be over a barrel

[garynortheast]

It's known as "competition" and what we are seeing is an inevitable consequence of that particular philosophy. You want coal as cheaply as the south Americans produce it? Send 12 year old kids down the mine. Want iPhones produced at the same price as China makes them? Produce them like this.
I suppose it all comes down to just how "competitive" people in Britain are prepared to be, and whether they are prepared to pay what it costs to produce goods made by people who are not subjected to some ****ing unpleasantly exploitative regime.

[maviczap]

True, but we used to have trade barriers to restrict cheap imports from undermining our home products.

With the creation of the EU and the outside Europe trade barriers being negotiated away we can't protect our home industry from outside competition like we used to.

[yorkie_chris]

Originally Posted by maviczap

They Chinese will learn how to reproduce all this stuff and we will be over a barrel

That's what you get for letting washing machine spanner monkeys call themselves engineers.

[Biker Biggles]

Perhaps we should revisit trade barriers.We already do it on environmental grounds so you cant import unsustainable hardwoods or Rhino horn and many other types of goods.Possibly we have been too slow to question the given mantra that looking after the home economy is a bad thing?

[NTECUK]

Does anyone know how the Germans do it.
Can we copy them ?.