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"Moving back to the "free trade" and "imported products only" at the big box stores (and the other complaints about nothing being made in the USA), remember this: you'll never find a union that went to the company and said "please move the factory and the jobs to China, Mexico or Vietnam."
I worked for International Harvester for several years so I'm well familiar with unions the UAW in particlar so I beg to disagree with the above statement.
Every time the UAW got more unreasonable benefits and made American manufactures less competitive that's the implicit message the company received. "Please move your factory----" There was/is a $600 vehicle labor cost differential between a vehicle built in Japan and one built here the last I knew which is a tremendous differential.
Here is an example of union benefits: If you were a Labor Grade 10 and your job was eliminated and there wasn't another LG 10 position available you could take layoff in lieu of transfer instead. This meant that you would receive 90% of you pay for up to a year for staying home.
While IH never built plants overseas they lost a lot of business to Japanese outfits like Komatsu and came very close to bankruptcy.
IH survived as Navastar but it is a mere shadow of what it once was.
I'm pretty sure everyone on this forum who is familiar with Winchester knows that the classic Model 70 rifle and Model 12 shotgun both had to be eliminated due to skyrocketing labor costs.
Jim
