I wonder whatever became of them:
Nissan, the first of many foreign automakers to set up shop in Tennessee, is leading a trend. Companies from Amazon to Asurion to Dell have outsourced their warehouses and call centers to the hundreds of staffing agencies that have cropped up in the region. Tennessee went from having 51,867 temporary workers in 2009 to 80,990 in 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics---while median wages have stayed flat. That accounts for nearly all of Tennessee's job growth since the recession, and makes up 3.61 percent of all jobs in the state, second only to South Carolina. In Tennessee's burgeoning manufacturing industry, it's even higher, going from 15 percent of all jobs in 2002 to 26 percent in 2012.
In a way, it's the workers' own damn fault since they've had the opportunity to unionize, and foolishly turned it down. But it reminds us, too, why our current system of capitalism is ultimately doomed to collapse: you keep impoverishing people, sooner or later you're going to run out of customers who can afford to buy your products. Henry Ford understood this. Why doesn't Nissan?
---Baron V
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