Essay: Manufacturing Stress - 9/8/2008

Speaking of manufacturing, I remember seeing a very funny episode of the Washingtoon comic strip during the 1992 presidential campaign. In it, a group of presidential candidates were reassuring the voters that we don’t have to worry about the fact that America is losing manufacturing jobs.

No, they have a solution: We will all get rich selling success kits to each other! That was so absurd it was funny, back then.

What I never imagined is that this would become official policy, more or less. Actually, it seems that Washington’s solution to the end of the manufacturing sector is to suggest that all of us become software designers. If we aren’t up for that, well, we can work at McDonalds or perhaps run a cash register at WalMart.

We have all heard stories about men and women losing their jobs through no fault of their own. But when you look at the statistics, it is enough to make your hair stand on end. In 1965, manufacturing accounted for 53 percent of our entire Gross National Product.

Four years ago, that had fallen to nine percent. Nine percent! And with what’s happened to the auto industry lately, I have to believe that number is even smaller today.

According to the Alliance for American Manufacturing, another sixty-one thousand manufacturing workers were laid off last month, many of them from jobs that have disappeared forever.

We know how to measure these things. But … how do you bring them back? How do you persuade employers not to move their factories beyond our borders when they can pay foreign workers a fraction of what they’d have to pay Americans?

Appeal to their patriotism? Well, that might work in an odd case or two, but what if all your competitors are moving off shore? That’s what happened with Electrolux a few years ago, when they closed their refrigerator-making plant in Greenville.

In one way, you can’t blame the people running these companies. But over the long run – how will it help them if workers in their home country can no longer afford to buy their products?

What’s baffling to me is that neither presidential candidate is talking very much about the fact that the force that made this country wealthy and strong, the manufacturing sector of our economy, is dribbling away to places like Mexico and the People’s Republic of China. Imagine what would have happened if any American politician had proposed doing this as official policy back in the 1970s.

They would almost certainly have been accused of treason. But this is what the policies we have been following have meant. Smart people, especially Republicans, still sneer when and if anyone is brave enough to suggest we have a national economic policy.

Why, that sounds like Stalinism, they snort.

That’s been enough to frighten anybody away from doing the rational and right thing. But maybe, just maybe, we might want to rethink this while we still have an economy left to defend.

Those success kits are getting harder and harder to sell.

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Comments

[Gordon Alderink]

As I listened to your essay I was thinking about Marx's predictions with regard to capitalism. I think Marx got it mostly right ... the crisis (loss of manufacturing, financial crises, etc) that the US is experiencing was inevitable! China, India, and the rest will experience the same when capitalism matures in those countries.

Although the Industrial Revolution began the manufacturing mecca in the US that lasted for decades it also brought significant ecological destruction, never-ending levels of unemployment and poverty, wars about resources, etc. Instead of mourning the loss of manufacturing and the global markets we should be thinking of better ways to generate new, LOCAL economies that will always keep jobs in the US and sustain the communities we live in.

It does not take an Einstein to know what to do...read Wendall Berry because he has given us the answers for at least 35 years.

[Anonymous]

Scott Paul and the Alliance for American Manufacturing claim a "non-partisan" approach. (Mr. Paul, a former union lobbyist, has a solidly "blue" resume, but it is not my purpose here to criticize him, for having doen nothing but answer Mr. Lessenberry's questions.)

That didn't stop Jack Lessenberry from using this platform to try to wheedle out some more pro-Obama, and anti-McCain, agitprop.

So it bears noting that while Mr. Lessenberry has introduced his audience to the "Alliance for American Manufacturing," there is another association of manufacturers, that is older, bigger, and more important to national policy. It is the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). And its CEO is our former three-term Michigan Governor, John Engler. The NAM promotes a broad-based agenda for U.S. competitiveness by addressing unnecessary regulatory burdens on manufacturing; by exposing excessive taxation; and by attacking the high costs of health care, expensive litigation, and soaring energy prices. And perhaps more than any other trade group of its kind, the NAM promotes opening of foreign markets.

However, because of Mr. Lessenberry's antipathy toward anything "Republican," we'll never hear about any of that on his program. Tomorrow's epsiode of "promoting Barack Obama" will feature...