Sorry to threadcrap, but I couldn't resist. Friends don't let friends buy monster cable (or Bose).
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/12/17/18338281.php
Ho Ho Ho? My vote for the Grinch of year is Noel Lee the Hillsborough Multimillionaire and owner of Monster Cable which laid off some 120 workers just before the holiday season and has contracted out the work to factories in China. Lee had donated $6 million for the naming rights of our beloved SF 49'ers Candlestick Park, now called 'Monster Park' but refuses to meet with or offer a fair settlement with workers that have made his company so profitable over the years.
http://www.insidebayarea.com/sanmateocountytimes/localnews/ci_4802573
BRISBANE ? Noel Lee is living the American dream. Lee's father, Chin-San, was a news correspondent whose work brought him and his wife, Sarah, to San Francisco from China two months before Noel was born.
Fifty-seven years later,
Noel Lee resides in Hillsborough and is head of Monster Cable Products, based in Brisbane, and earning more than a $100 million annually as recently as two years ago.
These days, though, the company Lee founded while tinkering with audio cables in his parents' garage has taken some tough belt-tightening measures because of cheap overseas competition. In October, the firm laid off 120 manufacturing workers, most of them Chinese, Latino and Vietnamese immigrants. Lee said in a press conference Thursday that the jobs ironically could end up in Mexico or in China, where Monster has contracted out assembly work for years.
"Our revenue figures are flat," he said at the company's headquarters in Crocker Industrial Park. "We need to focus on the 85 percent of the people who are still here. This is an economic decision we had to make."
Lee told the English- and Mandarin-speaking reporters that Monster is one of the few local manufacturing employers left. Hourly wages for assembly jobs in China are less than a dollar an hour, and wages in Mexico are less than $3, he said ? numbers that jibe with U.S. Federal Reserve estimates.
The figures are little comfort to the workers who were let go as part of the company's top-to-bottom cost-cutting,
especially since Monster paid more than $6 million for the naming rights to Candlestick Park through next year.