I believe 2010 will go down as the year the wage discrepancy between public and private employees began to narrow. According to a recent article in USA Today, the average yearly pay including benefits for a federal government worker is $81,000 compared to $51,000 for a private business employee. Cadillac health plans and defined benefit pension programs have bloated federal payrolls. State and municipal payouts have kept up with or sometimes surpassed those of the federal. The tide is changing. The dike of unchallenged government pay and benefits is showing leaks. California is broke and politically stalemated, but furloughs are…
Author: Lloyd Graff
By Lloyd and Noah Graff LG: I’m curious about growing up in Detroit in a union family and what memories you have about dinner table conversations. JH: I had a wonderful childhood. I had a wonderful father, a wonderful mother, great sister. My sister is a circuit judge in St. Louis. My early memories are talking union over the table, but also I remember in the ‘50s the whole family getting in the car, going to eat dinner somewhere and then going for a Sunday drive. UAW used to have a radio program, and we’d listen to it in the…
By Lloyd Graff I just read a provocative book called The Walk by Richard Paul Evans. It’s hokey and a bit contrived, but I still recommend it, if just for the epilogue, which I will now recount. A master and his apprentice are traveling the countryside. The master sees a ramshackle hovel and commands his apprentice to knock on the door to ask for food, which he dutifully does. The poor peasant with five children answers the door and says, “I have meager food but I will spare what I can. Our little cow provides us with some milk. Here…
By Lloyd Graff The Honey Crisp apple season will begin with the Labor Day weekend. Honey Crisp is the apple that has overwhelmed the Golden Delicious, Macintosh, Pippin and Gala varieties in the hearts and palate of the applistas who frequent farmers’ markets in search of the perfect pomme. Count me as an apple knocker with credentials. I have traveled to the orchards of Wenatchee, Washington; Logan, Utah; Laporte, Indiana; and Honeoye Falls, New York, searching for apple succulence, but in the mountains of North Carolina I found my best Apple anecdote if not the tastiest fruit. I stopped at…
By Lloyd Graff August 29, is the second anniversary of the day I almost died. I hesitate to revisit it in this blog because I’ve already written about it extensively in the magazine. But I am of the philosophy that you should never let a good crisis (or the memory of one) go to waste, so I’m going to bring it up once more. IMTS 2008 was coming up, but I was feeling so crappy I didn’t care. I had spent two weeks pretending to vacation with my family in Michigan. I drove home with my daughter Sarah and remember…
By Lloyd Graff The lead story in the Sunday New York Times discussed the “striking” drop in the investment in common stocks. The article went on to talk about the widespread disillusionment with equities since the dot-com crash and the subprime demolition. The Dow Jones average is actually down over 1000 points since 2001. Personally, I think the widespread disgust with the stock market performance by individual investors derives from the “gaming” of the market by professional computer jockeys for whom long-term investing is holding a stock or an index for a week. The Quants, for whom the stock market…
By Lloyd Graff When you enter a machining firm which cuts millions of pounds of brass bar each year, you expect to find a line of New Britain screw machines or Davenports – bunches of almost identical automatics methodically turning out fittings. But at Marshall-Excelsior Corporation in Marshall, Michigan, the machinery assortment reflects the eclectic taste of its owner, Jeff Begg. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Warner-Swaseys, New Britains, Davenports, Wickmans, National Acmes; 5-spindle; 6-spindle; 8-spindle; a menagerie of screw machines bite at the brass rod, turning out Jeff’s variegated mixture of niche market non-ferrous…
By Lloyd Graff Thanks to reader Roger Meyers for sending me an informative article from Forward ONLINE about manufacturing coming back to the United States. One of the companies prominently mentioned in the piece is Wham-O Corporation, maker of Frisbees and Hula Hoops. Wham-O’s products are not exotic, but they take up a lot of container space per dollar value. With container costs from China up to $4500 from as low as $3000 at the bottom of the recession, Wham-O has rejected offshoring. Their products are not labor-intensive to produce, primarily using injection molding presses. They are cheap, light and…
By Lloyd Graff On Thursday, I had the opportunity to spend several hours with Mitch Liss of Edsal Manufacturing, a major producer of steel shelving and office furniture with sales of $200 million, based in Chicago. Mitch gave Noah and I an insider’s view of purchasing politics by big box retailers and huge catalog sellers. He said that within massive organizations like Wal-Mart or Grainger you find two distinct parties influencing purchasing decisions, the buyers and the global (strategic) sourcing groups. The shelving buyers who work closely with the sourcing people have the responsibility of making the final call about…
(From the Archives) The Chicago Bulls are playing the Cleveland Cavaliers in round one of the NBA playoffs, and I just cannot resist comparing Michael Jordan and Lebron James. Let’s break this down. 1. Defense: As a defender Jordan was a consistent all pro, but he was not a shot blocker. Lebron defends well and is a superb shot blocker when he wants to be. Advantage Lebron. 2. Rebounding: As a rebounder Jordan was instinctive in his positioning, thus ending up with numerous triple doubles. Lebron is taller but seemingly is out of rebounding position more than Jordan. Advantage Jordan.…