Writing in The Wall Street Journal recently, Gabriel Kaplan described how New Balance Athletic Shoe Inc. has spent millions of dollars in legal fees, and lost millions more in sales and brand image, when one of its suppliers in China allegedly began selling New Balance shoes on its own, and undercutting the established price.
Outsourcing jobs is a major sore point between management and labor, of course. It would be hard to find a more succinct example of the disparate views on outsourcing and shifting jobs overseas than those reported by Richard McCormack, editor of Manufacturing News, from an interview that he conducted recently with four members of the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry. Asked whether outsourcing jobs to China contributes to aerospace industry problems, John Douglass, president and CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, says "The Chinese aerospace industry is embryonic at best and when we do a deal with China that creates 3,000 jobs, we give them 300 of them. This is not contracting everything out to China."