Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!
During the last Presidential election, the biggest theme of the campaign was jobs. Both President Obama and Governor Romney pushed the idea of supporting manufacturing jobs by promoting “Made In America”. By the time election day finally arrived, more than one million ads had been created about “adding jobs to our struggling economy.”
What happened to that laser-like focus on “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!”? (Congress still hasn’t passed a jobs bill.)
For decades now, US “free-trade” policies and offshoring of jobs has reduced our manufacturing base. According to Scott Paul, President of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, U.S. manufacturing has “fallen to 12% of our national economy.” Scott notes that this has turned the United States from a “creditor nation” to a “debtor nation”.
All you have to do is look at the city of Detroit. Up until the 1980s, Detroit was a shining example of American manufacturing. Dave Johnson from the Campaign for America’s Future describes what has happened: Detroit, which ‘used to exemplify American prosperity, now is a wasteland of crumbling buildings, homes, and people.”
There are many reasons corporations ship their jobs overseas; most revolve around the public policies created in Washington. Policies like NAFTA and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership are removing the advantages to manufacturing here at home.
Rebuilding our manufacturing base is the key to rebuilding our economy and putting millions of people back to work in good middle class jobs. In an effort to bring awareness to the need for American manufacturing, the Alliance for American Manufacturing has published a new book called “ReMaking America”. The book features an all-star cast of experts discussing America’s manufacturing potential and potential pitfalls.
“This new volume illustrates that American manufacturing is rising from the ashes,” Paul said. “But it will take political insight and courage among our nation’s leaders to seize on this moment of great opportunity – before our global competitors out-innovate, out-invest, and out-build us. The cost of not acting will be great.” (AAM)
In a recent phone interview, Paul and Carl Pope (Former Director of the Sierra Club) explained some of the opportunities that we must seize if we have any chance of “Remaking America”.
Paul highlighted the promise made to America by President Obama to add one million new manufacturing jobs in the United States by 2017. Paul said that so far we have added “24,000 new jobs.” He said, “This is well below the number of monthly new jobs needed to meet this goal.” (You can follow the one million jobs progress at AAMeter.) This does not mean we should abandon all hope, it means we need to change our policies and invest in new technologies like renewable energy.
Paul described the book as a “hopeful message for American manufacturing”. He contributed a chapter to the book, focusing on simple public policy changes that could revive our manufacturing base. “There is a role for public policy in manufacturing and it is a key part of this discussion,” he said.
Pope, a well-known environmentalist, is another contributing author. People have asked him, why is he involved with manufacturing as an environmentalist? In the phone interview, he explained that “the energy sector is a prime example of how we could rebuild our manufacturing base. By 2050, we are going to need to rebuild, renovate, and reconstruct pretty much everything we have built in the U.S. over the last 200 years. This is something we cannot offshore to Shanghai.”
Pope goes into great detail in the book about how right now we have a significant economic advantage over the rest of the world in liquid natural gas prices. He said, “The United States can buy LNG for around $4 per cubic foot, while Europe buys their LNG for around $10 from Russia. China and Japan have to pay upwards of $18 per cubic foot for LNG.” This is an enormous opportunity for America manufacturing. Some states are already taking advantage of this by converting antiquated coal power plants to more efficient and economic LNG plants. To reconstruct or convert these power plants is going to take large amounts of construction materials like manufactured steel.
Pope believes that the connection between manufacturing and renewable energy could revive our economy. He believes in this so much that he teamed up with Leo Gerard, President of the United Steel Workers, to create the Blue-Green Alliance. The Blue-Green Alliance is focused on rebuilding our infrastructure while creating new jobs and cleaning up our environment.
ReMaking America is a guide for simple common sense solutions to rebuilding our economy, making our environment cleaner, and putting millions of people back to work in good paying manufacturing jobs. In their interview, Pope and Paul only scratched the surface of the issues covered in the book. Other contributing authors include:
- Richard McCormack, Editor of Manufacturing & Technology News.
- Leo Hindery, Chair of the U.S. Economy / Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation and former CEO of AT&T Broadband.
- Eric Garfinkel, Member of the Adjunct Faculty at the University of Colorado Law School and former Chief Council for China Trade in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
- Harry Moser, Founder of the Reshoring Initiative and Chairman Emeritus of Charmilles Technologies Corp.
- Harold Meyerson, Executive Editor of the American Prospect and columnist for the Washington Post.
- Irene Petrick, Director of the Enterprise Informatics and Integration Center at Pennsylvania State University.
- Sridhar Kota, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan and former Assistant Director for Advanced Manufacturing at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
- Stacey Jarrett Wagner, Manager of Workforce Systems Development at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership.
If you need a few more reasons why you must read this book, here are a couple of excerpts.
Richard McCormack: “We can’t have a strong robust economy without making things, creating wealth.” “Look at the talk about resourcing, there is not much evidence other than anecdotal stories. The economy is stagnant, the trade deficit is going up not down.”
Harold Meyerson: “A large growing number of American workers in well-paid manufacturing jobs are now hired on to low-paying jobs, partly due to lower-wage and anti-union states.” A study by Boston Consulting Group noted wage stagnation in the US and wage increases in China. “A leading example of higher pay and benefits is Germany. Their companies have preserved the highest level of manufacturing in home markets, have offshored less-skilled jobs. There is an increasing tendency for German companies to locate jobs here in the South for cheap labor. This is not realizing the promise of manufacturing.”
Click the links for more information on ReMaking America, Campaign for America’s Future, the Alliance for American Manufacturing, and the Blue-Green Alliance.