Who to Blame for Our Supply Chain Problems

ULDC President Bob Elbich, Published 2/17/2022 Morning Call “Town Square”

Container ships at the Port of Savannah in Savannah, Ga., in September. Stephen B. Morton/AP
It is no great revelation when I state that the political and public policy discourse has deteriorated to dysfunctional word salads and vicious recriminations.

When I ran for public office, coming from a distinctly nonpolitical background, my guiding principle was to restore common sense to the dialogue. Therefore, it distresses me to see and hear all sorts of counterfactual and convoluted reasoning to rationalize why we are where we are as a society.

This theme can easily extend over many subjects, but I would like to provoke some reader introspection by focusing on a specific, timely issue from the perspective of many years of direct personal experiences.
These days, the narrative of choice for blame associated with our economic challenges centers on two words: supply chain.

Many people are blaming the federal administration for causing the shortages of goods and will want to exact punishment. I see and hear this narrative every day in the media: liberal, conservative, televised and print.

Nothing could be further from reality and common sense. In my career, I invested over 12 years working in large corporate manufacturing environments and over 35 years in small and startup manufacturing companies in the Lehigh Valley. I have seen at close range how the seeds of our supply chain issues were planted in the past.

Beginning in earnest in the 1970s, corporate management throughout the country turned their backs on our American workers and began to manufacture or buy cheaper products overseas. It was the lazy, easy path to higher profits and higher corporate salaries. Company executives’ personal incomes skyrocketed from 58 times the average worker in 1989 to more than 270 times the income of the average worker in 2018.

The trend also took jobs away from millions of hardworking Americans who were building a middle-class lifestyle and contributing to American prosperity. Little effort was made by these executives to find creative ways to keep the jobs here in America. Why bother when they could easily slash payroll costs and pocket much of the savings?

For years, things went swimmingly, except for those who lost good-paying jobs, while no one considered the extensive variety of risks that affect supply chains and would inevitably complicate our access to products made far from home.

The COVID-19 experience is only one manifestation of a supply chain built on multiple dimensions of potential failure. We are paying the price for such hubris.

As a small business owner, I was constantly encouraged to outsource our products to foreign sources for higher profits. The pressures were (and still are) enormous to simply offshore technology and skills and place the burden of supply on someone else. Instead, our team worked long and hard overcoming many challenges to keep manufacturing jobs in the Lehigh Valley. We wanted to supply our customers with quality products and swift response times without waiting and hoping for container ships to arrive.

Did other factors contribute to the corporate executives’ decisions to outsource products? The answer is yes, and therein lies the rub.

Besides being willing to sacrifice the American worker for stratospheric salaries, executives were also answering the free market demand for higher profits and cheaper products from anyone who wanted their 401(k) investments in these companies to grow as fast as possible and wanted to buy the cheapest products possible. After all, who among us does not look at our 401(k) or individual retirement account reports and search for the highest returns? And who among us, when shopping for products, does not look for the lowest-cost item, even though we know, deep in our hearts, that the quality is probably suspect and the service is nonexistent?

We Americans for these many years have been and still are complicit in and responsible for this journey to supply chain problems. As comic character Pogo stated in a parody of a famous quote, “We have met the enemy and he is us,” Not the federal government.

That, my friends, is the common sense of it.

Bob Elbich is a Lehigh County commissioner, a member of the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission and a retired manufacturing entrepreneur.