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Originally Posted by gary_580
There is always going to be someone that can do it cheaper than the UK, it costs more to live in the UK than Vietnam! They only edge the UK can have is level of service and iginuity. Once the Far east and eastern block countries get that sorted we might as well all retire (assuming there is a retirement fund!!)
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One of the reasons that the UK is expensive is that we were too slow to move into the twentieth century. Unions concentrated on preserving jobs to such an extent that we were paying well over the odds for many products and demanded higher and higher wages to pay for them. Being born and brought up in West Yorkshire I saw the demise of the textile industries there that was largely brought about by unions protecting the conditions of their members to the extent that unit costs of producing goods were several times the cost of importing the same items from developed countries, not third world sweatshops. A spinning plant at a local carpet manufacturing company where many of my family worked employed 126 people whereas a similar plant ten times the size in America employed 66. I worked for several years with the newspaper industry and it was unbelievable how overmanned and behind the times this was until Eddie Shah came on the scene.