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There's a new player in American manufacturing
April 26, 2007

1. New manufacturing advocacy group: The newly-formed Alliance for American Manufacturing is pushing for trade and health care reform to bolster American manufacturing’s place in the changing world. The Alliance includes several major steelmakers and the United Steelworkers union, giving the group a stronger labor-management tie.

It has also come out of the gate swinging, taking shots at what they said are failures in trade policies. A New York Times story quoted Leo Gerard, president of United Steelworkers, as claiming the National Association of Manufacturers hasn’t done enough on trade and currency issues, a charge NAM denied.

AAM has its own blog, manufacturethis.org. It’s a fairly provocative name and a fairly provocative start for the new organization. Where this will get interesting is in how the Alliance plans to push its lobbying effort on trade and currency issues, what kind of a reception they will receive in a Democratically-controlled Congress, whether those issues will overshadow what I see as a more pivotal issue of rebuilding confidence in manufacturing as a career and innovation as an outgrowth of that career, and whether the conflicts in manufacturing (note the Clyde Prestowitz “civil war” quote in the Times story) keep all parties from wrestling with the areas of agreement.

2. Finding the right issues: Two numbers quoted by AAM in their initial release:

a) American manufacturing is the largest single contributor to the U.S. economy.

b) Since 2000, the U.S. has lost 3.2 million manufacturing jobs and seen more than 40,000 facilities close.

Those two pieces of data exist in conflict with each other. What also is happening, and gets under-reported, is the manufacturing growth needed to support emerging foreign markets, and the continuing reinvestment by foreign-based manufacturers in U.S. manufacturing sites. Yes, China’s trade and currency policies need to be aligned with the rest of the world, but that will happen at the end of the conference table, not at the end of a threat. And China is hardly the ONLY threat in this area.

As a suggested way for AAM to get started -- engage the manufacturing workers of today in demonstrating to the manufacturing workers of tomorrow about why this is still a great career. Today's workers aren't as concerned with global currency issues as they are with their own currency issues. And the solutions aren't all found by looking across the Pacific. Sometimes, there's a huge success story close to home that helps you understand that we get out of this through innovation and engineering, not politics.

3. Escape from New York: The Interphex show once again exceeded expectations. Pharma manufacturing is learning a great deal from mainstream manufacturers as FDA regulatory reform has allowed pharma to pick up the pace on managing the manufacturing process. But they also have much to teach. Listen to this conversation with two Emerson executives on how they have approached emerging issues in this space.

4. Process information: The process manufacturing industry is undergoing change at a high pace, and many suppliers I saw at the show-- ABB, Invensys, Johnson Controls, Siemens – are talking about existing solutions that are being customized for the pharmaceutical and life science manufacturing space. We wrote about this space last year, and it continues to grow. It’s growth, in fact, outpaces much of the rest of manufacturing.

5. I HEART NY: New York is my second favorite place to visit each year – Las Vegas is the first. If you’ve been to Times Square, you stand there and realize – it’s Las Vegas’ grandfather. The infrastructure is aging, the building don’t glisten, but there are a billion lights and a symphony of sound everywhere you turn.

The other thing I love about New York is that you can walk anywhere in Manhattan because – and I mean this in the nicest possible way – New Yorkers don’t care about you. They care only about themselves, but never in an arrogant way. It’s how 7 million people made up of every imaginable group on the planet can get through each day.

Posted by Bob Vavra on April 26, 2007 | Comments (4)