America long was known throughout the world as a manufacturing powerhouse. What’s more, these types of jobs didn’t require a college diploma, yet paid reasonably well, offering the workers within it the chance to give their families a middle-class income.
But recent years have seen manufacturing decline considerably, even before the recent Great Recession (and the recession has seen cut backs in manufacturing positions grow ever more deep).
In fact, a recent book by Harvard management professors Gary P. Pisano and Willy C. Shih, Producing Prosperity: Why America Needs a Manufacturing Renaissance, argues that a nation that loses its manufacturing sector also loses its ability to innovate.
Another book, 1999’s In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity, by Eamonn Fingleton, a former editor of Forbes and the Financial Times, makes three points:
- The manufacturing sector creates a better mix of jobs than do advanced services. Why, because manufacturing employees a wide variety of educational backgrounds, from high school graduates to college-educated engineers, to scientists holding PhDs.
- Manufacturing needs sophisticated machinery. Which leverages each worker’s productivity, thus allowing employers to pay high wages. In addition, according to Fingleton, “[a]dvanced manufacturers moreover require great accumulations of secret production knowhow – typically knowhow acquired over generations of “learning by doing” – and this powerfully shields them from low-wage foreign competition.”
- Exports, or as Fingleton writes: “I have calculated that, per unit of output, manufacturing businesses are nearly ten times stronger exporters on average than services. Thus America’s investment in postindustrial activities (such as computer software, internet development, finance, and legal services) cannot hope to bridge the trade gap opened up by the decline of manufacturing.”
If you manage or own a manufacturing business, what’s your take on the status of manufacturing in the U.S.? Leave a comment for us here.
Meantime, if you’re a San Bernardino or Redlands manufacturer needing skilled and reliable temporary or direct-hire workers, contact a recruiter at Arrow Staffing. We look forward to hearing from you.