Hail the working man. Another Labor Day is upon us/has come and gone. But are we still celebrating a blue-collar, industrial work force that barely exists anymore? Lots of people think so, but not city guru Joel Kotkin. As he wrote earlier this month in The Wall Street Journal, the death of manufacturing in America is a myth. In fact, in parts of the South, the Great Plains and Pacific Northwest, high-skilled workers are fueling vibrant local economies and helping America make $1.6 trillion worth of industrial stuff -- 42 percent more than in 1982. I talked to Kotkin (joelkotkin.com) Aug. 29 by phone from his home in the Los Angeles area.
Q: So America’s manufacturing work force is not gone?
A: No. It’s still there. But it’s getting smaller. A lot of it isn’t unionized. And it’s increasingly not located in what we would call the key industrial belt.
Q: And America’s manufacturing sector is not in a long-term decline?
A: Not if you take a look at what’s being produced -- and particularly the skilled-job numbers are quite impressive. I have to tell you, almost every place I go in this country, particularly where the economy is growing, if you ask business people what is it that would really help them, they say “skills.” Machinists. Welders. It’s not like there’s a Ph. D. shortage, generally speaking. But there is a welder shortage, there’s a plumber shortage, there’s a machinist shortage. But nobody wants to talk about this. Cities that have lost their industrial base don’t want to talk about it, and many cities that still have it are almost ashamed of it. In one of the great historical ironies, the places where they are not ashamed of manufacturing are places like Houston and Charleston and Charlotte. But the places with the great industrial traditions, it’s almost as if they are ashamed of their lineage.
Q: Why is manufacturing prospering in places like Dubuque, Houston and Seattle?
A: Sometimes it’s just historical circumstances -- the right industry at the right time. But I think the reason that manufacturing -- particularly at the higher end, which is more and more what is there -- is so important is that -- going back to Jane Jacobs -- it is a classic export industry. If you are in Seattle and you are assembling planes, or if you are in Dubuque and you are assembling and building systems for building roads around the world, you are taking money from other parts of the country or the world and you're bringing that money in to your town. Most of the stuff that has been growing isn’t doing that -- it’s retail; it’s health care, which is basically serving your own people. ... It doesn’t have to be manufacturing, but manufacturing is one part of what you have to offer. Manufacturing also has an important sociological impact, which is it provides jobs and opportunities for people who otherwise would be stuck in a job with no upward future. One of the women I interviewed in Charleston had been working in retail making under $10 an hour. Now she’s working in manufacturing and she’s gone up to $15 or $16 an hour. She’s got some health care benefits. She’s got a skill. She feels she’s got a future.
Q: The U.S. has lost about 5 million industrial jobs since 1970 -- most of them low-skill.
A: What you have today -- at least what that Federal Reserve report showed -- is that a higher percentage are high-skilled workers and high-skilled jobs have increased significantly. We have to look at manufacturing in a somewhat different way than we have. Even somebody who’s going to work in, let's say, an auto plant today, going forward is going to be more skilled because you’re going to have more robots; it’s going to be more computerized. So it’s kind of misleading to look at manufacturing as a low-skilled industry. There are pockets of that. But those are the industries that are either being automated or they are really having a hard time holding on. They’re holding on to some extent in parts of the garment industry, parts of the textile industry and some food processing, though over time I think a lot of that will get more automated. That’s where you’ve seen a lot of job losses. But fundamentally, this is part of what an economy should be looking to promote. When I look at a place like Pittsburgh, which has this magnificent history, it seems to be -- maybe I’m wrong -- ashamed of it.
Q: What is going on in manufacturing is what happened to farming over the last 220 years -- we're producing more with fewer and fewer people.
A: That’s exactly right. And the geography of that change is very interesting because it’s moved increasingly to the South and West. But there are pockets in the Great Plains that also are doing very well, which is very interesting. It’s much more the Dakotas, Iowa, out toward the Great Plains, than a great revival taking place in Michigan. Some of that may be because of politics. Some of that may be because of culture. States in the Upper Plains have basically fairly high education levels. A high school graduate in Iowa or the Dakotas is generally much more literate than a high school graduate in the Northeast or California.
Q: Is there a secret to attracting new manufacturing or nurturing the old manufacturing bases?
A: I think what you are talking about is nurturing new manufacturing that may be growing out of the old manufacturing. What I hear over and over again is the need for skills, the need for a reliable work force. That has probably more to do with companies’ decisions to move than almost anything else. They can’t find the skilled workers they want. I remember talking to a guy whose company was just going gangbusters up in Bellingham, Washington, and he couldn’t find welders. In Bellingham, Washington, you ride into town and “Welders wanted” is the first thing you see. Everyone talks about how we’re becoming a society of low-end service workers and high-end information workers. But here’s something in between -- basically the logistics and manufacturing industry -- and nobody seems to be focused on it.
Q: What can governments do? Continued... |