We must have been asleep at the switch, or maybe the New York Times did not see fit to include this news item in its national edition, but somehow a fascinating news item slipped past us. Check out David Barboza, Bridge Comes to San Francisco With a Made-in-China Label, N.Y. Times, June 25, 2011.
It informs us that the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge that is being constructed to replace the old bridge that was badly damaged in the 1989 Bay Area earthquake, is being built — are you ready? — in China. That’s what it says, and while we have seen some pretty strange opinions in the pages of the New York Times, generally, you can rely on its factual reportage.
Modern technology allows the construction of a major bridge on the other side of the world, where the bridge sections are fabricated, loaded onto ships, transported across the Pacific, and assembled on site in good ol’ Baghdad-by-the-Bay. All this, with the exception of assembly of the bridge sections, is done with dirt cheap Chinese labor while American workers stand in line at the unemployment office. How cheap, you ask? A mere $12 per day, up from $9 per day.
An undertaking of that magnitude requires a lot of skilled labor, and indeed the Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Company that is doing this work over there “put 3000 employees to work on the project: steel-cutters, welders, polishers and engineers. The [Zhenhua] company built the main bridge tower, which was shipped in mid-2009, and a total of 28 bridge decks — the massive triangular steel structures that will serve as the roadway platform.”
Couldn’t we do that over here, particularly given the high levels of unemployment in California? Actually, no. So says a project director for the American Bridge/Fluor Enterprises who is quoted by the Times as saying: “I don’t think the U.S. fabrication industry could put a project like this together.”. . . “Most U.S. companies don’t have these types of warehouses, equipment or the cash flow. The Chinese load the ships, and its their ships that deliver to our piers.”
For once, we are struck dumb in our search for something appropriate to say. Not only that, the Times informs us that our former Governator, Arnold Schwartzenegger himself has “strongly backed the project” and and even visited Zhenhua’s plant last September, praising “the workers that are building our Bay Bridge.” That musta been right before he came back to California to deliver a speech about how, given the dire unemployment situation at home, we must create more jobs, jobs, jobs over here.