#offshoring

[saywhat-politics]

Billionaire Trump donor and tariff advocate is moving his Ohio manufacturing plant to China: report

Brendan Rascius

Mon, 16 February 2026 at 2:22 pm GMT-7

Cue the sad trombone: Hedge fund billionaire John Paulson — a major Trump donor and advocate of tariffs — is shuttering his Ohio brass instrument plant and offshoring work to China, according to a new report.

Paulson’s company Conn Selmer, the nation's top maker of orchestral and brass instruments, notified employees it will shift most of its East Lake plant operations to Asia by July, triggering about 150 layoffs, The Guardian reported.

Employees were informed of the decision last month, when they expected to negotiate a new union contract, according to United Auto Workers Local 2359, which represents the workers.

The employees said the company unveiled a new plant in China in 2025, and that work has slowly shifted to that location. However, workers in Ohio had previously been told their jobs were not in jeopardy.

Workers there expressed deep dissatisfaction with the decision, with one saying, “It really pisses me off,” while another said they felt “betrayed.”

[hayleylovesjessica]

I'm on a Discord for alumni of the company that laid me off last year (and for which I now work as a contractor). The company laid off the last of the U.S.-based client services team yesterday, as well as a really important small team of internal process specialists. The company was bought last year by a conglomerate in India, and it really looks like it's offshoring almost the entirety of operations and admin to cheap labor there in south Asia. I mean, from a business perspective, I guess I get it, but I feel so bad for everyone who was let go. Moreover, there is absolutely zero question in my mind that customers are going to see the difference, not only in terms of interaction with the company on the client side but also in terms of overall product quality and customer experience. It's a race to the bottom, people!

[azspot]

Keep in mind that for most manufactured goods, direct factory labor is 3% to 7% of total product cost, typically 3% to 5%. Offshoring is best though of as not a cost savings but a transfer from direct factory labor to higher executives, middle managers, and to a lesser degree, various outside parties (lawyers, outsouring consultants), all of whom have more to do in devising and minding a more complex and fragile business system.

The Bogus Justification for AI Uptake and the Real Reason for the Scam

[twitterexile]

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

'This Is Tax Evasion': Richest 1% of US Households Don't Report 21% of Their Income, Analysis Finds

"We estimate that 36% of federal income taxes unpaid are owed by the top 1%."

A new analysis by IRS researchers and academics published Monday morning estimates that the richest 1% of U.S. households don't report around 21% of their income, often using complex tax avoidance strategies that allow them to outmaneuver the federal government's increasingly rare audits of the wealthy.

Led by two IRS researchers as well as Daniel Reck of the London School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, the new paper (pdf) finds that 6 percentage points of the richest households' unreported income "correspond to undetected sophisticated evasion" such as offshoring, pass-through businesses, and other avoidance tactics.

"From a policy perspective, our results highlight that there is substantial evasion at the top which requires administrative resources to detect and deter," the authors write. "We estimate that 36% of federal income taxes unpaid are owed by the top 1% and that collecting all unpaid federal income tax from this group would increase federal revenues by about $175 billion annually."

[radicalchicposts]

Just watched China Blue & now can no longer participate in fast fashion

Sustainable, vegan, ethical, slow, this is how it’s going to go

[berniesrevolution]

Recently a trend toward “reshoring” of manufacturing has taken hold, while offshoring has fallen short so that in 2014, reshored jobs plus those resulting from inward foreign direct investment grew by sixty thousand, surpassing offshored jobs by ten thousand by one estimate. The reasons for this trend can be found in the rapidly rising wages and high levels of strike activity in China, as well as slow and uncertain freight traffic that often disrupts “just-in-time” delivery systems.

On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping The Battleground of Class War, by Kim Moody