By: Paul J. Heney, Design World I’ve been writing about the problems with offshoring—and the welcome springing back of the reshoring phenomenon for quite some time. Lately, it has been very interesting to watch how the trend is affecting more than just the manufacturing sector. The big story as of late has involved the new Bay Bridge being constructed in the Bay Area of California. Having lived there, I know the bridge well and have followed the design and construction of this mammoth project. The Bay Bridge is actually comprised of two bridges that cross the water from San Francisco to Oakland. A tunnel through Yerba Buena Island in the middle connects the western span—the well-known, four-towered suspension bridge—and the eastern span—a thoroughly uninspiring truss structure that is rarely seen in postcards. I always laughed that poor Oakland got a bum deal in the spanning of the Bay. Ever since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the California Department of Transportation has been working to further earthquake-proof the region’s bridges. In the mid-1990s, it was determined that the eastern span of the Bay Bridge needed so much work that complete replacement was a better solution. The design for the new span is for a graceful cablestayed design that features a single iconic tower near Yerba Buena Island. But cost concerns became an issue in the mid-2000s. The lone bid came in twice what was expected and then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger essentially offshored part of the project to China. While federal laws wouldn’t allow using a Chinese company to be used to produce the steel and deck components for the project, Schwarzenegger played by the letter and not the spirit of the law. The job was essentially split so the state funds paid for one part of the bridge and federal funds paid for another portion. This allowed him to outsource the “state” portion to Chinese manufacturers. The state of California says the decision saved taxpayers money—and insists that the infrastructure to fabricate the bridge pieces wasn’t available here. But almost a decade later, the project has ballooned from $1.3 billion to at least $6.4 billion. It’s not clear what percentage of that is due to the...

By: James A. (Jim) Smith Ph.D. ABD, Assembly magazine Working conditions continue to be an issue at the Foxconn factories in China where Apple makes its best-selling electronic gadgets. On June 19, a young man who worked at one factory jumped to his death from a neighboring apartment building. Shockingly, it was the 19th such suicide since January 2010. Opinions on the issue fall into two camps. Human rights activists condemn Foxconn for exploiting workers. Globalization apologists claim life would be harder in China without all the jobs that have been outsourced from the West. However, neither camp has addressed the issue of what offshoring has meant back here. I have had my fill of the sanctification of Steve Jobs who, after all, merely gave us shinier toys and bad manners. To be fair, however, offshoring isn’t entirely an Apple story. If it’s electronic and produced in batches of more than a few thousand units, odds are it came out of a factory in Asia. Apple didn’t invent outsourcing to China, but it did make the practice chic, and Apple has made Foxconn what it is today (and what it is, isn’t pretty). There’s a noteworthy passage in Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography of Jobs that recounts an exchange between the Apple CEO and President Obama: “Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, he [Jobs] said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. ‘You can’t find that many in America to hire,’ he said. These factory engineers did not have to be Ph.D.s or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges, or trade schools could train them. ‘If you could educate those engineers,’ he said, ‘we could move more manufacturing plants here.’” That’s more than a little disingenuous. It’s more truthful to say that America doesn’t have 30,000 engineers and 700,000 factory workers who are willing to work more than 60 hours a week, live in squalid dormitories, get pulled out of bed in the middle of the night to change a critical part, and earn $3,000 or less a year. And we shouldn’t have. We do have thousands of...