[wkand]

Out here in the Pacific Northwest, the same thing happened to a Hewlett - Packard plant devoted to test instruments. They built the thing in 1979-81f in a suburb of Everett, WA, Lake Stevens. I was working for a small telecommunications company, now defunct, called Teltone, as an electronics tech. We ALL wanted to work at HP due to the worker ethics that at the time, and as far as I know, still do exist under the Agilent label. HP kept the plant going for about 10 years before moving to another new plant at another small city near Everett. Sometime between then and now, the test division was renamed Agilent, and the plant moved a second time to another small nearby city, Mukilteo, where it still exists. The original plant in Lake Stevens, after a long period of under-occupancy, was demolished, and a condo development took its place.

I know that HP suffered from unfair foreign competition as did RCA, Zenith, Motorola, Admiral, Curtis Mathis, Wells-Gardner, Warwick (did I miss anybody?). I'm not sure it was as severe for HP as for the others.

By unfair competition, I mean the reduction of costs and favoritism granted to a foreign entity that are/were not offered to US producers. Investment in China was ENCOURAGED by the US government starting in the 1980's. In the 1970's US TV producers petitioned the Congress for relief from foreign manufacturers' practice of dumping televisions at equal to or less than their cost. That's what I mean by unfair, not labor rates, or other short term advantages that foreign producers held.

Today, China can ship goods to individual buyers at near zero cost due to an agreement with the US Postal Service. That practice continues a government sponsored disadvantage to US production.