But rather than set up production in a country with labour costs as high as Germany, Siemens could have entered into a joint-venture with an Asian manufacturer.
Employers and trade unions co-operated to keep a lid on labour costs.
To stop profits from falling, American companies must keep a tight lid on labour costs.
Instead nominal wages would rise a bit, real wages only a little and unit labour costs would then fall to more internationally competitive levels.
Romania, for example, whose currency dropped 20% last year, has seen a big rise in labour costs wipe out much of its price advantage.
Last year and this, most of these companies had reached a point at which only a reduction in their labour costs would support continued production on their home soil.
Corporate profits, he noted, have risen sharply since the third quarter of last year, thanks in part to a big jump in productivity and to a decline in unit labour costs.
With the exception of Ireland, which has achieved a worthwhile reduction in its unit labour costs (though after the biggest rise of all), you could hardly select a group of countries less able to make a success of internal devaluation.
With labour costs still a small fraction of the euro area's, the prospects for growth look good on the surface.
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Meanwhile, productivity has surged by 5% over the past year, resulting in a sharp drop in unit labour costs (see chart).
Bagehot recently met an intelligent Midlands car-dealer who believed that a Labour government planned his instant bankruptcy by importing German labour costs into Britain.
The most obvious benefit is lower labour costs: even when factoring in costs such as transport for employees, a maquiladora owner still pays less than he would for American labour.
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Some potential tenants have shunned the vacant pitches at Billingsgate because of the labour costs, says a City source.
Limits on working hours, mandatory holidays, and a host of protective laws raise labour costs by about 20%, according to the South African Institute of Race Relations.
The second was a show of deference to Hiroshi Okuda, Toyota's chairman, who heads the Keidanren, a powerful business federation, which stands for company management and is a vocal advocate of both lower labour costs and wage-bargaining reform.
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The Conservative GP Dr Phillip Lee has a ten minute rule bill on annual statements for healthcare costs, and then Labour continuers the health theme with a debate demanding the publication of the NHS risk register - the internal document listing the problems foreseen by officials with the government's proposals to reshape the NHS in England.
These workers are now in the front line of a campaign by big business to slash labour costs by 15-20%.
To make his case, Mr Levy points to unit-labour costs the dollar amount of labour required to produce a unit of output.
Within the euro, it has suffered a big loss of competitiveness as unit labour costs have shot up, largely because productivity has been stagnant or even fallen.
The combination of a 24% rise in the yuan against the dollar and a 21% increase in Chinese unit labour costs, relative to America's, explains the steep appreciation shown in the chart.
He wants bigger tax cuts, less public spending, a ceiling on welfare costs, more labour flexibility, reform of pensions, greater decentralisation, and the sale of more state companies in the competitive sector.
More than 60% of the world's rough diamonds come from Africa, he says, but a lack of expertise and relatively high labour costs means that the stones are usually shipped overseas, to countries such as India, for assessment and cutting.
That meant their margins took a double hit from rising raw materials and labour costs.
Although emerging-market players are increasingly powerful, it is a myth that their prime advantage is lower labour costs.
Respondents also suggested that cost burdens rose again in Scotland as a result of higher fuel, labour and raw materials costs.
To turn an honest centavo, businesses must cope with awful roads, high energy costs, archaic labour laws and a Byzantine bureaucracy.
For the majority of German workers, companies' growing willingness to shift production to wherever labour and capital costs are cheapest is a direct threat to their jobs.
The biggest threat for companies is that unit labour costs are growing faster than 5% a year.
Between 2000 and 2008 unit labour costs declined by 1.4% a year in Germany while rising by nearly 1% a year in France and Britain.
So now let us take a look at costs in the US. Given US labour costs, are we going to see Apple go the labour using route?
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