Senate Candidate: Sending Jobs Overseas Is The American Way

But while offshoring jobs may have been the norm when Perdue headed up Pillowtex in 2003, a growing number of American companies are now planning to bring back production to the U.S.

For instance, in 2003, 150,000 manufacturing jobs went to China and just 2,000 came back into America. Ten years later, analysts are describing the trend as “a wash.” Thirty thousand to 50,000 jobs left America for China in 2013, but “30,000 to 40,000 left China for the United States” and large businesses are increasingly focused on bringing jobs back into the country. A survey by Boston Consulting Group found that more than “50 percent of $1 billion-plus U.S. companies with operations in China are considering bringing all or part of their production to American shores,” double the number in 2012.

Over the last several years, “more than 200 companies, mostly U.S.-based, have brought back production they had sent out of the country,” including Apple, Lenovo, and GE, creating production and assembly lines in states like North Carolina and Kentucky. A constellation of economic factors are contributing to the wave of “onshoring,” such as rising wages and oil prices in Asian countries and the desire to reduce shipping costs back into the United States.

In defending his record of sending jobs overseas, Perdue blamed the federal government: “This is because of bad government policies: tax policy, regulation, even compliance requirements. It puts us at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the world.” But many of Perdue’s fellow businessmen disagree with that analysis.

“In previous decades, investment mainly went to Asia where wages were low,” Greg Hall, a senior vice president of Walmart, told Site Selection magazine. “The price of oil was low. … [Today] labor costs in Asia are rising. Oil and transportation costs are high and increasingly uncertain.” Walmart will shift $50 billion in manufacturing back to the United States.

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This has been reposted from Think Progress.