Your speed parts being made off-shore.

From distributor to intake manifolds, your muscle car performance products are being made overseas. Should it matter to you?

Global economy, off-shoring, and free trade are all terms generating intense debate these days. While they seem to be the headaches of big auto manufacturers, dot-coms, and software companies, you might be surprised to learn that businesses in our own hobby are right in the mix of this economic evolution.

You need look no further than your own project car. More and more performance, restoration, and replacement parts are being produced in places like China, Mexico and the Phillipines. From bumpers to cylinder heads your project could contain just as many parts manufactured by foreign labor as those built by American workers. Is that necessarily a problem?

Bill Ford Jr. recently commented that is simply not realistic to manufacturer a new vehicle entirely in the United States. Various parts, from electronics to interior fabrics, must be sourced from overseas in order to take advantage of cheaper labor and materials pricing. This is often the only way a domestic company can produce the product the market wants at the price it is willing to bear.

The fact that American companies can source goods and services from all over the world is arguably the very definition of America’s free market economy. While we may dislike the idea of products once sourced within our own borders that are now being purchased overseas, we have to respect that this is indeed what capitalism is all about. In the short term the loss of American blue collar jobs seems to be a problem, however, many economists and sociologists surmise that in the long run the net impact on American jobs will be nill. Factory workers who are displaced will be inclined to learn new skills. Today’s iron worker may be tomorrow’s CAD designer. Clearly a new breed of “blue collar” worker will evolve.

Read the entire Editor’s Corner story Port Job and come back and tell us where you stand on this issue.