Call it what you will—reshoring, insourcing, repatriating, onshoring—the movement toward manufacturers expanding production on U.S. soil has established itself as a trend, according to a survey by MFG.com and Reuters. MOJO, the MFG.com blog, reported: Forty percent of...
Manufacturing
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German Giant Says Skills Gap Results from Education Weaknesses
On Monday, the Financial Times ran a story about the skills gap, provocatively titled "German Giant Says US Workers Lack Skills." Eric Spiegel, chief executive in the US for Siemens, the German engineering group, said the problem exposed weaknesses in education and...
Energy and skill we can “ill afford to lose”
At nine o'clock on Sunday morning, I was dashing down a hallway at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Home in Hyde Park, NY on my way to deliver a lecture for SUNY's Empire State College when a painting on the wall stopped me in my tracks. "Art of the New Deal" celebrates the...
Change Is a Group Sport: Growing Manufacturing in the US
Did you catch Howard Wial's recent piece in The Atlantic? In it he outlines "four things [beyond trade policy] federal and state governments should do to encourage more U.S. manufacturing that is innovative and provides good jobs for less educated workers." In...
What We Invent and What We Build
Finally, some new attention paid to the crucial role that making things and hands-on work have played, and must continue to play, in a sustainable U.S. economy... On Friday, President Obama spoke from a G.E. plant in Schenectady, NY. “Our challenge,” he said, “is to...
“America needs an industrial policy” says brooklynbadboy on Daily Kos
My dad is a mechanic specializing in Porsches, and I grew up hearing him rave about the German car maker's fine craftsmanship and engineering. Could that be part of why I liked brooklynbadboy's Daily Kos post "America needs an industrial policy" so much? After a brief...
Making things with metal
The intro and the music might be a little cheesy, but I do love this video, Elements in Action, about the uses of iron, carbon, nickel, and aluminum that was produced by the Metals Service Center Institute, a 100 year-old trade association supporting the North...
Joel Kotkin’s The Next Hundred Million
Here's Joel Kotkin talking about his new book The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 on WNYC: "We send too many people to four-year colleges and we don't teach people skills that are useful in the economy ... The system is tilted toward the financial...
US manufacturing is recovering, reaches a 2004 high
Looks like manufacturing is off to a good start in 2010, especially in apparel, textile machinery and transportation equipment industries. A report based on a private survey indicates strong current and future performance in manufacturing. "The US...