Equipment movers in demand as factories shut

[Joanne98]

While his forklift crews removed tons of chip-production machinery from a shuttered factory in Hayward, trucker George Lawson bemoaned the fact that his company has been ripping out a lot of industrial equipment these days and shipping it - and the associated jobs - out of California.

"I call it my wrong-way business," said Lawson, 56, president of Lawson Drayage, a Hayward firm that specializes "in moving things of unusual size, weight and dimension."

Lawson is the third-generation head of a family business he runs with his brother, Robert.

As one of a handful of truckers with the equipment and know-how to move heavy machinery, Lawson has a bird's-eye view of the region's industrial landscape.

Dismantling factories
What he sees alarms him. Instead of moving machinery into the Bay Area, he said, firms like his are increasingly being hired to dismantle factories.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/03/BU491CO3TD.DTL#ixzz0kQxsjO3v

[HughMoran]

1. I've been complaining about this since I got here. I gave up complaining.

Nobody cares. I can tell you which equipment will run on 220V in China and which stuff isn't supposed to be exported (but was anyway.) Nobody cares.