Well….have been trying all day to find a topic that I wanted to, or needed to write about…haven’t been successful but I do have some thoughts that I need to get down….i wanted to go on about the old, unemployed guy, but even I am bored with that so I won’t subject you to more of that…at least right now…maybe over the weekend. There was a story this week that I did want to comment on…and that is the the further decline of a once-great company from these parts…Steelcase…this week, they announced that they are basically shutting down the manufacturing of office furniture in the US to chase lower labor costs in Mexico. One of the things that has struck me as false in all of this outsourcing is the idea that labor costs are driving these moves….it’s just not true. As an engineer for the company…it was my job to know what these costs were…and, on average, the labor costs as a percentage of the selling price was never more than 10%. Yep, that’s right, even if they cut out all of the labor costs..it would amount to no more than a 10% savings for the company. But that’s not the least of it…the current CEO, who was the CEO when I was there, has been paid millions of dollars to shrink the company form 9K workers to 3K workers…something that does not take a visionary to do…a fricking monkey can just cut, cut, cut…but I think that is the problem with business in America these days….conventional wisdom has become dogma even when it’s not true…the rest of the furniture companies and the auto companies can make money with American labor, why can’t Steelcase? Geez….and yeah, this is a little sour grapes…it bugs the hell out of me when everyone but the big shots pay for their mistakes…they just GET paid…