Of all the colourful characters who opposed unions in the past, Anglo-French multi-billionaire James Goldsmith was one of the most colourful. So there's probably nothing he and regular contributors to Unionbook would agree on, you'd think, and I did too until I came across this archive video of a 1994 interview he did on Bloomberg about the then imminent GATT agreements which really swept in the modern Globalisation era.

With quite astonishing prescience, Goldsmith hits out at globalisation, outsourcing, multinationals divorced from society, the domination of political elites, derivatives trading, and the need to look after all sectors of the population, especially working people in manufacturing. It's an hour long, but well worth it. As a billionaire, he clearly had nothing to lose from telling it like it was, and sadly, how it would indeed become. The video is at:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5064665078176641728&ei=OTYPS9zaDIGKqAP0mYDgDQ&q=sir+james+goldsmith+charlie+rose&hl=en&client=firefox-a#

It would make an ideal teaching resource for college students on all the above topics, and for unionists concerned at the bamboozlement of the public by the Free Trade agenda.

We're running the COOLXmas competition over at COOLXmas.org to get students more aware of the country of origin issues surrounding consumer goods. By getting them to focus on where all those electrical and electronic goods are coming from, we hope teachers will have an easier route into discussions about issues like outsourcing and the future of manufacturing industry, sustainable and balanced economies, working conditions and workers' rights, and CO2 priorities like transport and shipping. If you know a teacher who cares about these issues, why not tell them about the COOLXmas project?

There have been lots of studies and reports in the media over recent years about the ageing workforce and the need to replace it, but these largely came before the current economic crisis, and the competition for scarcer resources for investment. Yet this could be one of the biggest obstacles to manufacturing recovery unless it's confronted very soon and on the right scale. We can talk about productivity and rights until we're blue in the face, but these issues presuppose that there'll be enough workers in the factory in the first place.

A third of workers in the US with science or engineering degrees are likely to retire within 15 years at the latest, a demographic sucker punch that's going to be very hard to avoid, and that could knock out hopes to rebuild capacity for good. We can't wait until this fact swaggers across the ring. It's not much of a consolation that the consequences of China's One Child policy will hit it even harder at the same time. Because the figure refers to the highly qualified. There's also all the skilled workers who will quit at a similar time if they can afford it.

Now let's step back and look at where the replacements for all these people are going to come from. The younger generation has been sold the idea (by our generation) that the service sector and IT are the future, and they're now finding out that this argument was fundamentally flawed because new jobs could never have been provided at the same rate that manufacturing was allowed to lose them. There are probably still in some places the equivalents of the record-breaking Arfan brothers, but the change in culture to individualised consumerism and 'Get Rich Quick' celebrity-status chasing is profound. Many young people have more smartphones than smart ideas, and equate 'tools' with IT applications. Most think a torque wrench is a form of whiplash. They think a feel for materials is something you can develop in a fashion store. They can't walk round an old shed full of wood and steel offcuts because their sneakers will get dirty. They would rather be in a gang than a union. Many have turned the word 'respect' into an existential diversion from their total failure in high school. Okay, I'm half-joking, but you get the picture.

So we also have to re-create a desire in young people to make things, to want to invent, to physically change the world around them for the better. And the current obsession with IT in schools, on imported, expensive and endlessly upgraded equipment, with ever-expanding and costly IT network support staff, seems to have no role in that at all. For every computer you could have a real tool and a corner in a workshop to make something. You need to get your hands dirty, make mistakes and learn the benefits of accurate measurement the hard way. That's how you get young people interested in making things again. They all have computers in their bedrooms now- what's the point of having one at school? Cutting and pasting from Google results isn't thinking, and it isn't a real education. You can't cut and paste the skill to make a good 90 degree cut in wood or metal with a saw. It takes practise and excellent hand/eye co-ordination. Which you can't get from a mouse and a keyboard. Getting sufficient numbers of kids back into the right frame of mind to want to be useful in a factory, and to regain a sense that real self-esteem can come from 'doing a good job,' will take a couple of years. At the earliest.

Now it takes 3-4 years to get a good science or engineering degree. Then it takes several years to find your feet in a job, if you can find the job in the first place, before you can really make an impact on innovation and product development. That's a minimum of 7 years before there could be even relatively inexperienced replacements ready to learn from the workforce before they clock out for good. So you have to subtract that from the 15 years, and you get about 7-8 years to make a difference and avoid the sucker punch. But as we true believers in manufacturing agree, unless we act decisively soon current manufacturing capacity isn't going to be there to give them those jobs when they can start making a difference. So we have to invest in manufacturing now to give them the chance to take it forward.

To put in place a manufacturing workforce replacement scheme could take another couple of years. So overall it looks to me like we've got a lot less than five years to make a difference. In fact, if things aren't underway inside this current Presidential term, there may not be enough time, or resources, in the next one. Manufacturing is not Hollywood. Unless we get moving quickly, there might be no happy ending to this one and we may get counted out. Let's hope our corner men are good enough.

This is a revised version of an article first published at Mfgcrunch.ning.com. Graham Rankin is the founder of www.madeinnations.com, one of the first websites to take the country of origin of consumer goods seriously again.

As the US enters the arena of health care reform, where big bucks are going to be spent, they should take some advice from their increasingly impoverished friends across the Pond. Don't make the same mistakes.

The Health Service was always a slightly creaking institution but in general it got the job done at a reasonable cost and kept the workforce fit enough to work, when we also had a manufacturing base, of course. But then two groups of people arrived.

The first group, Management Consultants, set about tearing up all the existing procedures and imposing a target-driven performance culture instead, for everything they could think of. As usual, the targets became the reality and reality itself was locked in a cupboard. A let's-pretend world of management speak predominates now, and hospital workers and patients feel their world has been taken over by characters from a paranoid 50's Bodysnatchers film. Administrators go off on 'management courses' and when they come back they're not the same person.

Everywhere you look, a management consultant has inserted himself between quite normal procedures, which are then managerialised into the madness. Patients can hardly go to the bathroom without having their performance hitting targets measured.

The overly familiar first-cousins of management consultants, IT consultants, cause equal carnage in reality. Every last process has to be translated into Geek Speak, or be relentlessly modified until it can fit inside a computer. Every last square inch of space in a hospital is measured to see if it can fit a new flat-screen LCD Display.

In terms of pro-rata budgets, IT consultants make NASA scientists look like refugees. They have a constant desire to upgrade, fiddle and 'develop.' Being content with a system that does the job is never enough. Most may have had worms as children, and perhaps still do, as this would explain their restlessness and inability to leave things alone.

Let's put a cost on just one IT project, the scheme to computerise all patient records in a national system. Now, the old system relied on a paper record which couldn't be hacked, and could be sent by fax anywhere in the world within a minute. To me, that sounds perfect. It was cheap, cost-effective and above all, worked perfectly. So it was high on the IT Boys' agenda. So far, more than £12 BILLION has been spent on the IT alternative. Does it work? Of course not.

Now £12bn would have paid for an awful lot of R&D in the real world. It could have provided a lot of jobs in communities that need them. Which would have helped to keep a lot of people out of hospital in the first place.

So if you're reforming health care and the Management Consultants and the IT Consultants come knocking at the door, you know what to do. Hide behind the sofa and pretend you're not in.

Graham Rankin is the founder of www.madeinnations.com, and has a popular site on Twitter, @madeinnations. This article was first published at mfgcrunch.ning.com.

I e-mailed 300 UnionBook members yesterday about the Made In Nations project, and John Wood suggested I posted a blog here too. Thanks to everyone who replied so far.

The site tracks the country of origin of thousands of consumer goods, with the aim of getting back our freedom of choice over country of origin when buying products. We don't have to be globalised into passivity, we don't have to accept the outsourcing of everything, and we can act together to influence the future locations of factories, so we can start building more balanced economies. In a recession, every purchase counts, but you can't choose to buy more locally if you can't find out where things are made. And you also have the right not to buy from countries whose policies, especially towards unions, you disagree with.

I'd like to get a group of like-minded people together to help develop the site into an even better resource with tens of thousands of items on it. If you have any special hobbies or interests that fit with the product categories, why not help with that section as an advisor? There must be pro-union photographers, bikers, astronomers, cooks and so on out there somewhere! Of course, all advisors would be credited on the site. And if you're a teacher (I'm an ex-teacher), perhaps you could give the site a try-out in your school? It has lots of links to good articles to get young people thinking about where all this consumer stuff around them comes from.

If you want to help in some way, contact me at the site and I'll get back to you. Or if you can't spare any time but like where the project is leading, why not send me a couple of products with where they were made to put on the site? If you want to know more please visit the site itself or the UnionBook homepage. At the moment it's in English but we have plans for other languages in the coming months.

Thanks for reading.

Graham Rankin

www.madeinnations.com