"Where are the jobs?"

Within a post on EETimes, one has the text:

Call me jaded, but in the global electronics industry which EE Times has been covering for almost 40 years, we’ve all witnessed the mass exodus of manufacturing facilities overseas, thus attracting [and hiring] talented design engineers abroad. Operations offshore certainly haven’t stopped at mere “manufacturing.” Production offshore has also led to innovation abroad, with many companies investing in more design centers and R&D facilities outside the United States.

When a high-tech company sees more revenue from overseas markets, the company can’t help but feel justified in trimming its United States workforce. The explanation is always the same: “We need to be there [abroad] to understand the local market’s needs. We are a global company; we need to design locally and manufacture locally.”

That “global” label is your get-out-of-jail-free card. You are beholden to your customers in the “global” markets and to your shareholders in the United States; but not to workers and engineers in the United States, even though you are a U.S.-based company.

Reading these three paragraphs gives more insight than one received in the 20 or so minutes of Lesley Stahl's interview of GE's Immelt on October 9, 2011 on "60 Minutes." Watching the interview, one might have wondered how Mike Wallace, or even Tim Russert, would have handled the questioning.

The EETimes also quoted MIT's Hockfield:

“The United States became the world’s largest economy because we invented products and then made them with new processes. With design and fabrication side by side, insights from the factory floor flowed back to the drawing board. Today, our most important task is to restart this virtuous cycle of invention and manufacturing.”


link for interview

The Jobs Czar: General Electric's Jeffrey Immelt

AND
CBS "60 Minutes" on October 9, 2011