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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Monday, November 07, 2011 at 19:10:36 :
In Reply to: Re: Mechanical Engineers Question posted by Kaegi [24.16.253.154] on Monday, November 07, 2011 at 18:47:33 :
I hear you, but US shipyards (and that's probably who bids on this kind of thing because it involves big steel fabrications that have to be barged away from the yard) have priced themselves out of the market for everything except military ships and ferries, where the law says they have to give the contract to a US yard. The unions won't give an inch on either wages or (more importantly) work rules that mean very inefficient working. It probably wouldn't take much in the way of concessions to be competitive when you consider the cost of shipping from Asia and the difficulties of specifying something that will be built far away by people you don't know, but it seems like the unions would rather have 100% of nothing than 80% of something.
I don't know why the center section had to be built in the midwest (St Paul?) and trucked to Tacoma. Seems like some wasteful engineering there too. Why not design it in smaller piece that can go by rail, or if it has to be one big piece, make it a piece that a Puget Sound area fabricator can build? It's not like they were building a rocket to the moon.
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