Seattle Times story about Mexican outsourcing hapless in its bigoted hypocrisy

“Boeing invites suppliers to conference on outsourcing to Mexico” blares the headline in the Seattle Times. If you know the Times like I do, most of its stories that have anything to do with Latinos here or abroad are designed to provoke negative reactions, whether “intended” or not. Illegal immigration, alleged burdening of the social welfare system, drugs, violence and mayhem, and Froma Harrop’s nativist rants constitute about 95 percent of what the Times devotes on the subject of Latinos. The comment sections of the Times’ website accompanying these stories are full of xenophobic rage, which only gets worse when a reader detects anything that can be in the slightest construed “sympathetic.” Of course, just the headline of the aforementioned story brings rage at those “Mexicans” stealing American jobs; you don’t need to read further. 

And, quite frankly, you don’t need to. The first paragraph in Times’ reporter Dominic Gates’ story constitutes one simple declarative statement:

“Boeing is actively encouraging its suppliers to outsource work to Mexico.” 

If Gates was hoping to excite outrage from the natives, he certainly managed that. You would think that with all the complaints of illegal immigrants coming here to look for, people would be “happy” that some effort is being made to keep some of those workers over there, especially since one of the dirty little secrets about NAFTA is that many poor Mexican farmers have been devastated by the agreement’s protection clauses for U.S. produce, and forced to abandon their farms and look for work elsewhere. But the Times and the right-wing readers it has actively tried to court don’t want to know about any of that. The lower cost of doing business in Mexico, is of course, also a “bad” thing, and Gates allows his opinion to permeate the story, which can be further deduced by such statements as 

“(Jim) Mullen (a Boeing supplier) argued, counter-intuitively, that his firm's outsourcing created additional work in Washington state.”

Under the heading “pros and cons,” this is the only thing Gates’ offered as a “con.” This is obviously his personal opinion, because he doesn’t offer anything of substance to refute Mullen’s assertion that giving Mexico the “lower-level” work allows his company to concentrate on the more lucrative aspects of his business. The conceit of American attitudes towards Mexico and Mexicans on the subject of trade is amply demonstrated in the following table of U.S. trade this year through August 2012, with select countries, in millions of dollars:

China:      Exports $69,999.5  Imports $273,121.0

Japan:       Exports $46,508.6 Imports $99,092.6

Germany:  Exports $32,850.5  Imports $70,350.1

Mexico:    Exports $143,193.2  Imports $186,624.5 

Regardless of how one feels about NAFTA, it is clear that complaints about Mexico are at best ignorant, and at worst, racist. The supreme irony is that complaints about outsourcing jobs to Mexico is pathetic when one contemplates the manufacture of Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner. Here is a list of some of the subcontractors involved, according to Wikipedia:

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Japan: wing manufacture

Alenia Aeronautica, Italy: central wing box

Korea Aerospace Industries, South Korea: horizontal stabilizers

Global Aeronautica, Italy; Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Japan; Korean Air, South Korea: fuselage sections   

Latécoère, France: passenger doors

Saab AB, Sweden: cargo doors, access doors, and crew escape door

HCL Enterprise India: software development

TAL Manufacturing Solutions Limited, India: floor beams

Labinal, France: wiring

Korean Air, South Korea: wing-tips, flap support fairings, wheel well bulkhead, and longerons

Messier-Dowty, UK/France: landing gear

And Gates and the Times are whining about Mexico for what amounts to nuts and bolts? Japan alone constructs 35 percent of the 787. What is the American workforce left to do? “Assembly.” In a story the other day, Boeing boasted of its faster delivery capabilities—but not, of course, of the 787. After claiming that a new plane would take just two days to “assemble,” years of delays and poor quality control finds the 787 continuing to be plagued by delays. Reportedly dozens of these planes are “stacked-up” in Boeing’s Everett facility, in need of various “fixes.” Thus far, this has been a monumental botch-job of outsourcing, yet in a 2005 story, Gates was overwhelmed with wonder over “our global partners” and “spectacular” 747s with “bulbous tops” transporting parts from all over the world, marveling how “they ferry in giant pieces of the 787 for assembly.” Nothing, curiously, about all those lost high-paying jobs for U.S. citizens.

So, as Big Daddy might say, mendacity, mendacity—always mendacity with xenophobes.