Want to create a manufacturing renaissance in your
city or region? Bring back just 20
percent of the 1.2 million jobs exported to Asia by the Apples,
Hewlitt-Packards and Intels and you will have potentially 240,000 new jobs for
the U. S. which is now in the grips of its fourth year of 15 percent unemployment
(counting discouraged and involuntarily part time workers).
Allocate those returned jobs among your five
favorite urban areas with official high and outrageous unemployment—let’s say Elizabeth,
NJ (12.5), Newark, NJ (14.6) , La/Long Beach CA (12/2), Philadelphia (10.1) and
Atlanta (11). That would give each area 48,000 jobs!
Add to those jobs the new ones supplier businesses would
develop. Then add a refreshed network of community colleges like the Austin Polytechnic
institute in Chicago where a Manufacturing Renaissance Council is linking young
trainees to that cities skilled jobs requirements.
Too fanciful? Not so, as in Smyrna, Tennessee where Nissan has built an automobile manufacturing colossus: As reported in the New York Times last Sunday (8/5/12)
“The dairy farms that once draped the countryside
here were paved over so the Japanese carmaker Nissan could build its first
American assembly plant. Eighty miles to the south, another green pasture was
replaced by a Nissan engine factory, and across Tennessee about 100 Nissan
suppliers dot the landscape, making steel in Murfreesboro, air conditioning
units in Lewisburg, transmission parts in Portland.”
Tennessee now counts 60,000
auto-related jobs in the state. In this dramatic
story the Times reports on a manufacturing transformation of the very kind Silicon
Valley leaders claim can’t be done. They have wagered all future bets on
technological innovation and the magic word, entrepreneurship. Tens of
thousands of low income Latino and Asian people mow their lawns and clean their
homes, but given the tech industry's export of hundreds of thousands of jobs they are workers and families without a future and no access to one.
Notes the Times:
Companies
like Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, which rely on huge
Asian factories, assert that many types of manufacturing would be too costly
and inefficient in America. Only overseas, they have said, can they find an
abundance of educated midlevel engineers, low-wage workers and at-the-ready
suppliers.
These same assumptions were made when Nissan first decided
to contend with the realities of the workforce in Tennessee. But a combination
of tax incentives, training strategies and congressional pressure supported the
huge transition of a rural agricultural region into a manufacturing area whose
people now have real futures for themselves and their children. “If Apple or Congress wanted to make the
valuable parts of the iPhone in
America, it wouldn’t be hard,” said Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr., a senior
trade official in the Reagan administration who helped negotiate with Japan in
the 1980s.”
The
government could also encourage domestic production of technologies, including
display manufacturing and advanced semiconductor fabrication, that would
nurture new industries. “Instead, we let those jobs go to Asia, and then the
supply chains follow, and then R&D follows, and soon it makes sense to
build everything overseas.”
Under current political conditions only citizen
outcry can give Silicon Valley a new sense of what could be accomplished for
the common good, not for entrepreneurs, but for the people cleaning their
bathrooms.
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To read the full report
in the NY Times go to http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/business/the-ieconomy-nissans-move-to-us-offers-lessons-for-tech-industry.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
