Research Paper on:
Moving ATandT Consumer Products to Mexico?

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
manufacturing had become fat and lazy between the decades of the 1960s and the 1980s. Union presence was strong in most industries, and manufacturers labor costs continued to increase  dramatically. US manufacturing had begun to learn lessons, however, in the aftermath of the worldwide oil crisis of 1973-74, when gasoline prices in the US increased from $0.25 a  gallon to well over $1.00. Japanese imports had been available in the US for some time, but few American car buyers took the  products seriously. We still bought and fueled our land boats, and those Japanese cars were just so tiny. Additionally, Japanese products still had the illusion of the kind  of cheap product that the phrase "made in Japan" formerly had carried. US car makers felt the pinch first; eventually there were questions  of whether Chrysler could survive. Only GMs vast size allowed it to continue in business while regularly losing more than $1 billion annually. The electronics industry was next  as Americans discovered the surprise of Japanese quality combined with much lower price. Eventually all consumer products were expected to provide both value and quality, and manufacturers were obliged  to achieve the greatest manufacturing cost efficiencies possible. AT&Ts Dilemma AT&T Consumer Products shared in  this trend while also facing another significant challenge. The giant AT&T had been broken up in antitrust action into several smaller, more targeted companies in the early- and mid-1980s.  All of AT&Ts manufacturing operations had been within the US, and all manufacturing facilities were unionized. This labor organization prevented AT&T from taking the steps necessary to bring