David Perdue has made his decades of international business experience the centerpiece of his Senate campaign, the main reason voters should send him to Washington.
Perdue’s campaign website, for example, touts his work as an executive at companies such as Sara Lee, Haggar, Reebok and Dollar General. “He quickly learned that his best ideas came from working on the factory floor and talking with employees,” the website says. “This personal, hands-on approach was more effective than anything Perdue learned from a textbook. He developed a deep understanding of manufacturing, a genuine connection with co-workers, and the ability to utilize those strengths anywhere in the world.”
Reading that, you’re supposed to draw an image of Perdue as a friendly, caring boss, walking through the plant, shirts sleeves rolled up, saying “Hi” to Bob and Doris and asking Edgar how his kids are doing. But in a 2005 court deposition, Perdue described his career in very different terms.
When asked whether he had experience with outsourcing — shipping jobs done by Bob, Doris and Edgar overseas, where they could be done more cheaply, Perdue replied “Yeah, I spent most of my career doing that.” He then went on to describe outsourcing production to Taiwan, Korea, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Kenya, Dubai, Pakistan and other far-flung places. He also noted that his expertise in outsourcing helped land him the CEO job at Pillowtex, a North Carolina textile company that was attempting to move production overseas.
Let’s not be naive: Outsourcing is a cruel reality of the modern economy. For business, it has offered a way to slash production costs to the bone and in the process lower costs for consumers. But there’s also no question that it has gutted much of this nation’s industrial base, driven wages down and left a lot of communities without an economic core or even reason for existence.
But if the process has been traumatic for many, Perdue and others who have helped manage outsourcing have profited from it handsomely. They tend to view it as a cold-blooded business decision, as a matter of dollars saved, margins improved and quarterly profits exceeding Wall Street estimates.
Certainly, you hear that dispassionate mindset as Perdue recounts his career in his deposition, and you also hear it in his response this week to questions about his career in outsourcing. “Defend it? I’m proud of it,” he said to reporters Monday. “This is a part of American business, part of any business. Outsourcing is the procurement of products and services to help your business run. People do that all day.”
Unfortunately, he’s right. In Georgia alone, we’ve lost 183,000 manufacturing jobs in the past 15 years, a decline of 33 percent in our industrial job base. And while Perdue blames that loss on things such as taxes and regulation, the far larger driver is wage differential. The average full-time worker in China has an annual income of just $4,700, and even at that level, companies have begun moving production out of China in search of a workforce that can be paid even less.
There’s no loyalty — not to worker, not to community, not to country, not to anything but the bottom line.
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