Job Busting the San Francisco Way

Of all the liberal cities in America, none exceeds San Francisco in their collective adherence to the liberal ideology of union supporting. San Francisco also constantly takes the prize in smarminess when it comes to advocating for the rights of gays, minorities and the poor.

That's why I find this to be just the latest example of hypocrisy:

At a sprawling manufacturing complex here, hundreds of Chinese laborers are now completing work on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

Next month, the last four of more than two dozen giant steel modules — each with a roadbed segment about half the size of a football field — will be loaded onto a huge ship and transported 6,500 miles to Oakland. There, they will be assembled to fit into the eastern span of the new Bay Bridge.

The project is part of China’s continual move up the global economic value chain — from cheap toys to Apple iPads to commercial jetliners — as it aims to become the world’s civil engineer.

The assembly work in California, and the pouring of the concrete road surface, will be done by Americans. But construction of the bridge decks and the materials that went into them are a Made in China affair. California officials say the state saved hundreds of millions of dollars by turning to China.

Let's look at this a bit more in-depth. A bridge is being built that requires massive amounts of labor, steel and energy. California has a seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 11.7%, well above the national average and far exceeding the average over the last half century and needs new jobs created just to keep the local workforce from shrinking more.

Instead of keeping these jobs in the US, they farm it out to a nation that has such a shoddy quality record that children's toys contaminated with lead were shipped here. Mechanism's in the US used to find poor workmanship are not used and the steel they utilize has been shown to be of inferior quality than manufactured in the US.

But aside from the physical building of the bridge components, how can San Fran Nan's hometown rationalize sending money to a regime that has one of the worst human rights records in the world today? Sure they can build it cheaper as could we if we had no safety, minimum wage, environmental, healthcare or working age laws. How many of those workers are gay and do they get to marry in China? How many people working for little money ($12 per day) will help build that bridge and not be able to support their families because they are essentially slaves? How much carbon was put into the air since China's air quality regulations are not even 1/100th as strict as in America?

Now how many American workers could have been employed, thus removing them from the welfare rolls and making them effective, tax-paying citizens once again? From the steel mills to the welders and ancillary support companies, the amount of people put back to work could have been enormous but alas, the San Francisco liberals show just how hypocritical they are once again.

And no liberals, you can't blame George Bush for this one, it was California money since they knew that using federal funds would have required them to use more American steel and more American work would have been created.