Gotta love outsourcing to China...

This is todays biggest problem with companies all over the world. I work for GE Healthcare in Madison,WI. We manufacture anesthesia machines for hospitals and clinics all over the world. Our only competitor is Drager based out of Germany. Last week Friday they pulled all of our circuit boards off all our lines because of board defects. They just recently started having the Chinese make these a few months ago, before they were made in Europe, I just cant remember the country they came from off hand. They are talking it could take 10 weeks to get new boards so they are talking maybe a plant shutdown during this time. Companies always talk about cutting the cost of manufacturing products made in the USA. Of course saving money is always good but at what price? How much money are they going to save now? Hospitals are getting pissed off now because they cant get new machines. Will they switch to Drager? These machines have a high failure rate, and they are cheaper in design and parts than ours. Ours are high end machines that cost between $20,000 and $80,000 a unit. A person gets tired of hearing all the BS about "Have to make the share holders happy." We opened a plant in china a few years ago to make cheaper machines, but they can only sell them in China and 3rd world countries. Hospitals in the USA and Europe told GE that they will only buy machines made in the USA, they will not buy machines made in China, they would switch over to Drager before this happens. So anyways just venting here, I may have the summer off so maybe I can get to the rank of 50 before Battlefield 3 comes out, WOOT! Oh and when we do get good parts finally, we will be probably working 7 days a week up to 12 hours a day. This is alright with me because our overtime is VOLUNTARY not mandatory. I guess it pays to have a really good union here and the funny thing about that is the union and management get along really well together.

Do you know what 's good about it "your job is safe".

this problem comes up in the programming and customer service industries as well, I've seen outsourcing call centers and programming work to India turn out disastrous for companies before too.... seems that slave labor is worth what companies pay for it. Even Apple has caught some flak for it recently too... yay "Free Trade" with countries that employ children and slave wages.

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

Everyone knows I worked for Bank of India for 21 years.. that's all I want to say about this as I signed something saying I couldn't be negative....

Boo_Yaa, I too have worked for GE. But I worked for GE Energy and it has been about 4 years since I left. In that time the town of 2000~ that relied on the two GE factories has since went to the crapper. The shutdown the big factory that employed most of the town to send it overseas and cut most of the other factory down to two shifts.
When I worked there we made teflon membrane, laminated it too fabrics of all sorts, and the hepa fabric was cut and made into vacuum bags on location. While working there I noticed a change in the hepa fabric because it was the fabric my machine ran the most. It had crappy consistency and teflon was a pain in the butt to bond to it. Then I find out that we started getting materials from a place in Mexico instead of the place we were getting it from in the US. The amount of material we lost alone would be enough to switch back to the american made product but as is GE, the management has no clue what they're doing or how to do it. The distance between upper management and the workers is SO SO GREAT that I alone could have saved the company at least thousands for a few simple issues I identified while I was there. None of these issues were complex either! Simple observations! Fabric from Mexico doesn't bond well to membrane, membrane for glass doesn't bond well at all from certain batches (problem all machine runners identified and expressed to management), and lastly the newest machine they had built wasn't squared up by two inches in one spot so the fabric would wrinkle.
Lastly, while I was there they had people coming from a GE plant in China to look over everything. It obviously had everyone in an uproar seeing as factories are like high schools. They told us it would be "too expensive" to make fabric over there and ship it back. Obviously not. There are at least 600 people that went jobless to vouch for that.