Tired of Reading About Outsourcing? These Companies Are Bringing Jobs Back to the U.S.

June 8, 2013

At the height of the recession, you couldn’t open a newspaper or click a link without reading a story about an American company that was sending jobs overseas. Even when the economy started to recover, the employment rate didn’t keeping pace with economic growth, in part because companies were opening factories in cheaper, less regulated locations abroad and closing factories here at home.

But now, finally, there’s a glimmer of hope. In the last three years, 50,000 jobs have been “reshored,” in the words of Harry Moser, president of Reshoring Initiative. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Moser explains that companies aren’t returning to the U.S. out of the goodness of their hearts. No, in fact, it’s cold, hard cash that’s lured them home.

“When companies actually sit down and take a hard look at the numbers they often realize that they failed to take into account all the costs of doing business offshore,” Moser says. “When they take things like inventory carrying cost, quality control, impact on innovation and protection of intellectual property into account, for example, they realize it’s sometimes better to keep things at home.”

Here are a few of the companies that have relocated jobs to home soil:

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1. Apple

CEO Tim Cook has pledged to create $100 million worth of business in the U.S., after the tech giant was criticized for conditions at some of its factories in China.

2. General Electric

GE created 400 jobs by moving manufacturing of some of its water heaters from China to Kentucky.

3. Caterpillar

The equipment manufacturer will keep its plant in Japan, but move some production to Texas. The decision is expected to create 500 jobs, in addition to the 3,000 jobs the company in a previous move from Japan to Athens, Georgia.

You can see more companies that are moving jobs back home, including car companies, furniture manufacturers, and the U.S.’s only homegrown source of rubber duckies, in the article on the Huffington Post.

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