Tuesday, August 7, 2012

The Twenty Percent Solution: a New Citizen Project



     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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