When You're Catching Up, You're Ahead.

With the world becoming seemingly smaller everyday with faster means of transportation and constant ways to stay in contact with people all over the world, it's not a surprise that globalization separates the boys and girl from the men and women in the business world. Globalization is vital in today's competitive markets, and outsourcing is no exception. The food and tobacco industry is moving a massive amount of their factories, and with them the manufacturing jobs, to developing economies such as those in Brazil, India, and China. Coke has recently announced that they will be investing $2 billion in manufacturing in India over the next five years, which will add to the already existing 25,000 Coke employees in India already. Pepsi and the makers of Sprite also have both stated that they would be building new plants over in India over the next couple of years. India's fast growing catch up economy is appealing to manufacturing companies because the labor is not as expensive and also the growing middle class is causing a large demand for jobs. These developing nations are reminiscent of America in the 40's and 50's with satisfaction and speedy economic growth coming from a large manufacturing sector. Of course, once these catch up economies do, in fact, catch up, it will be interesting to see if they too follow the course of America and begin to focus more on specialized career choice and switch over to a service economy. For the time being, however, there are little signs of slowed growth and manufacturing jobs will continue to be provided there.

With all these manufacturing jobs going overseas, plants are being closed here. Mass job loss has been experienced in the United States over the past couple of years as plants of all varieties have been closing, leaving thousands jobless. Smithfield Foods is now planning on closing it's largest plant early in 2013, affecting more than 425 employees. With all these manufacturing jobs leaving the country, new jobs are becoming available. Not quite enough to make up for the massive job loss, but more than nothing. As America continues its love affair with higher education, specialized research jobs are becoming available in the industry. Research on how to increase shelf life, on how to reduce waste emissions, on how to reduce packaging costs, etc is opening up job opportunities around the country as innovation becomes vital to a corporation's success over its competitors.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20111114-708617.html

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