Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Culprit: Capitalism run amok
American drug companies do not outsource production to foreign countries because of weaker standards. This is a by-product of the industrial engineer’s greatest wet dream: “lean” manufacturing.
While some people have figured out how to get incredibly rich by writing up an elaborate schematic for what most people know as common sense (i.e. Six Sigma et al) of which companies subscribe to at an epidemic rate, corporate engineering has brought to fruition a way of inducing career suicide in the rank and file – by utilizing the very employees to carry out this expediency. With job titles such as “champion” and “green belts” or “black belts” your simple pharma plant has now transformed itself into a Bizarro dojo where your sparring partner turns into yourself and you manage to kick your own ass out of a job that will now relocate to India. All in the name of maintaining “quality.”
Last year I bought one of the small packs of Excedrin you see at the counter of the convenience store to knock out a headache before a road trip in Raleigh. An hour later, still with a headache, I picked up the wrapper and read “Repackaged by Company X in China with permission from Schering-Plough.” The problem is...Bristol-Myers makes Excedrin. We had a better chance of knowing what we were ingesting 50 years ago.
But the Feds want to outsource too. Unfortunately, instead of utilizing the myriad of individuals who have been victimized by this continual “fat-trimming” through privatization, Congress still maintains the illusion that we can hope overseas companies are willing to police themselves. Note to Congress: after they take our patents, money and jobs, if we think we’re going to get anything other than well-packaged mysteries from afar then we might as well look into lowering visa qualifications for certified witch-doctors as well.
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