Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Manufacturing Lies
Photo by stu_spivack, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The line between buzzwords & platitudes and outright lies is never thinner, fuzzier, or more traversed than when it comes to American politicians telling manufacturing lies. While not being fully sure what Ciss Jami has in mind when he quipped “when a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie” but it sure does apply to politically unpopular truths.
Our current president is not the first and will not be the last to spout manufacturing lies as soundbite fodder. To be fair to President Biden, 50 years into his political career, saying “we’re bringing back manufacturing” or some adjacent sentiment comes out as easy as the “God love you” and “My father always told me, Joey” staples of his rhetorical repertoire. Back in September of 2022, The Washington Post bestowed two Pinocchio’s onto the President’s “flimsy claim he has the ‘strongest’ manufacturing jobs record,” mitigating further Pinocchio’s with extra credit for a “mitigating…but still misleading metric.” The latest version via President Biden’s official Twitter feed:
It’s about time we bring innovation and industry back to America.
Our manufacturing investments are making it happen. pic.twitter.com/QBARmZfZJm
— President Biden (@POTUS) April 5, 2023
Innovation is what has always changed manufacturing in America. The lack of innovation and investment during the post World War 2 boom led to heavy manufacturing like the steel industries precipitous and shocking-to-the-public failures in the 1970s and onwards. The off shoring of industry and manufacturing throughout the end of the last millennium and into this one charts as a long, declining metric for American manufacturing. Conversely, with that decline came the increase of manufacturing lies by politicians who always said the right things about caring when the plants closed and the jobs moved elsewhere but did little to actually mitigate the damage left in the wake of moving industry. Lies and broken promises most knew were just words in the wind to appease the masses, giving hope to things they knew were not coming, and never really following up after the potential mob of angry voters were worn down by the inertia of inevitability.
President Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, worked in the manufacturing lies the way Picasso worked in oils. ““They’re all coming back…Don’t sell your house,” Trump bellowed to a packed Covelli Centre in Youngstown, Ohio in July of 2017. He was referring to manufacturing in general and the nearby Lordstown GM assembly plant in particular. The workers in attendance, many the children and grandchildren of workers who endured the Black Monday axing of 5k jobs at the Campbell Works and the thousands of jobs since then in the Mahoning Valley, roared in response. On a November Monday 14 months later, GM announced the permanent closing of Lordstown. Youngstown really hates Mondays, and is starting to, finally, figure out not to take politicians’ words for it when it comes to manufacturing lies.
The truth is manufacturing is now roughly 11% of the American economy while the countries broadly defined service sector is dominate. Now, that 11% is not all the story; it has an outsized influence on other parts of the economy, while also being far more automated and thus far less labor intensive as it used to be. And the type of manufacturing is also important context, with experts rightfully pointing out that America is far behind in things like tooling and raw goods manufacturing that is mostly now imported for the manufacturing the United States is doing. Add in the global economy and myriad other factors, and the complex parts of manufacturing is far too much for a stump speech soundbite or social media post buzzword.
Thus, the not-so-little, not-so-white manufacturing lies of “bringing manufacturing back” continue to be the go-to line by politicians not wanting to pay the electoral price of telling the truth. Most can’t even bring themselves to point to former industrial and manufacturing areas like Pittsburgh and the Lehigh Valley that have started to remake themselves with tech and service sector, adapting to the American economy as it currently is. The rusting colossus of Bethlehem Steel isn’t firing its furnaces up again. While folks have images of hellscapes of fire and fury from the steelmaking of old, the modern steel plants are highly automated, computerized, and sanitized places you could just about eat off the floor of. Nor are the vast patches of bare grass where homes and businesses were in Detroit going to be sprouting up new ones by wishful thinking. The places that adapt to the new manufacturing reality will thrive, those that don’t, wont.
That’s too much harsh for most politicians. Easier for the comfortable words of empty manufacturing lies to wash down the rutted out mental trails of a dulled political mind, rolling off their numbed lips so used to lies any calling out of the process will be met with indignant denials and a listing of all the well-meaning manufacturing lies told before to show how much they care.
What a nice, tight little manufactured world such folks have created for themselves. Maybe someday the realization will dawn what a scam it all is, and the American people can manufacture up enough give a damn to make the lies stop. Hopefully that happens on a Monday. We’ve had enough Black Mondays. We could promise an Enlightened Monday where all are held accountable and swear to go forth in truth and reconciliations.
What a lie that would be.
Yeah Democrats have once again shot themselves in the foot trying to create an expectation that heavy manufacturing will onshore. Like taking their charts and graphs to the proverbial gun fight they can’t seem to help themselves.Report
Jeez, Andrew, next thing we know you’ll be telling West Virginians that coal mining is a dying industry.Report
There are more daily views on this site than miners working underground in WV todayReport
IIRC, there are now more jobs (and BTUs) in natural gas in WV than in coal. During the end of the Inflation Reduction Act negotiations, Manchin seemed to abandon the coal miners in exchange for getting better connections to markets for WV gas.Report
The US is the second-largest manufacturing country in the world behind China. Our manufacturing output per capita is double that of China. Only Ireland, Germany, South Korea, and Japan have larger per capita manufacturing output, at least among the major ones. (I knew Ireland was a powerhouse, but it’s ridiculous – they’re the 14th largest manufacturing producer, with only 5 million people.) So we don’t lack manufacturing; we just don’t have many single-industry towns anymore.Report
With every weird Irish economic statistic, I’m immediately suspicious that it isn’t actually Ireland at all, but Ireland for the purposes of tax accounting.Report
Putting Ireland aside, manufacturing makes up approximately nineteen percent of the German economy, so why is America’s eleven percent considered normal or a constraint? The difference btw/ Germany and the U.S. is policy. Germany enacts policies supporting manufacturing, and the U.S. supports the college lie, that the answer to long-term prosperity for every American is to go to college and get a great job, where you will be waited upon by those found lacking.
What I don’t see tied together in these occasional OT hit pieces on mfg. is that the higher productivity rate might mean fewer jobs created, but it also means a higher pay dividend for labor. That’s why states pay for manufacturing jobs to relocate there, they want to import a middle class. Germany has 20% employed in manufacturing (compared with 10% in the U.S.) making almost 30% more than their American counterparts.
(Germany’s manufacturing may have peaked with the Ukraine invasion, and what is likely to be a continuous energy crisis. That’s actually an advantage for the U.S. and not some harbinger)Report
It’s more than just policy though. Or at least policy not easily implemented in the US. The entire German system rests on a much more collaborative relationship between business and the trade unions to maintain global competitiveness. It’s hard for me to imagine that happening in America.Report
The “Unternehmen Revier” program in the Ruhr in Germany is something a lot of folks are looking at for places like the rust belt in America both in what to do, and what not to do, and what lessons can be taken from it.Report
Of course, it’s policy. German’s support a mixed economy with subsidies in one form or another, and the U.S. hasn’t for some time now. I wouldn’t expect a U.S. manufacturing policy to mirror Germany’s. Puerto Rico’s economy is 49% manufacturing. That’s the effect of U.S. policy.
I would also emphasize a distinction btw/ manufacturing and urbanization, manufacturing does not have to be in the brownfields of large cities and is unlikely to take root there again.Report
I guess the question then is what is the goal of US policy with regards to manufacturing? As we’ve seen with ripple effects from covid/rivalry with China there’s a national security argument to be made for on-shoring or at least friend-shoring certain kinds of manufacturing. The case for that though is really independent of what I think the OP is about, which is the loss of mass employment in low skill manufacturing jobs that compensated well enough for people with high school educations to have a middle class life. In that case it isn’t really about manufacturing, it’s about jobs.
Now in Germany the players, including labor itself, are all working together for outcomes that keep manufacturing jobs in Germany, but I think public policy is downstream of that more than upstream. You can find plenty of stories where the boss and workers get together in America, agree on benefit or pay cuts or whatever to keep jobs in the US and a couple years later the whole operation moves to Mexico anyway. Maybe we could change policies to implement enough protectionism in the US to prevent that. What I’m not sure of though is that the bones of our economy and culture are structured for it whereas I think Germany’s very much are. Some of the trade unions at the table have technically existed for hundreds of years and are older than the German state. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong but I believe they also have a system whereby most workers are in some way represented by one of the 8 or 10 big trade unions no matter what kind of work they do. Unlike labor in the US they’re representing a lot more than highly parochial, often highly localized interests and have official seats at the table of government.
None of that is to say it’s bad (really I find a lot to like about it) so much as that I think there’s some serious path dependence and I have no idea how we would get to anything like it from here.Report
America has a history of Fordism, its own policies of supporting business with expectations for business supporting workers. Obama gave voice to this. From at least 1860 to 1952, the Republican Party had as one of its primary constituents manufacturing capitalists (as opposed to finance capitalist, Democrats) and at least until 1920, most of the manufacturing growth was in small midwest communities which benefitted from Republican policies. I don’t think pro-manufacturing policies are against any sort of American cultural mainstream, the historic currents shifted temporarily with the Cold War, and that post-war consensus is disappearing more every time one turns around.
Until recently if there were stories dooming about manufacturing, newspapers and NPR would interview the President of the Illinois Manufacturing Association who would unload a number of statistics, some of it was simply to emphasize how many manufacturing jobs are in the state, because most of them are invisible. If they are not visible, they aren’t valued. He would also have the number of job openings anticipated in the next ten years or so — workers tend to stay at these jobs a long time, as they retire, replacements are needed, but the stability gives people the impression that jobs aren’t there. He would also discuss how much used to be spent on vocational programs in high schools versus today, while schools prepare all students for the SAT and expand advance placement and dual credit programs.
I think unions are largely irrelevant in the U.S. in terms of these policy issues, and that itself might be path dependence from how the Civil War was won and victory imposed. The initial understanding of “Southern Strategy” was to provide low-cost, low-benefit, non-unionized work forces to attract Northern businesses without actually integrating into the National economy. Any national program will have to deal with the possibility that manufacturing may still want to locate where unions are weak. (Part of the reason unions are weak is that they were successful in supporting legislation that benefited all employees)Report
…the modern steel plants are highly automated, computerized, and sanitized places you could just about eat off the floor of.
I wouldn’t go so far as the eating, but otherwise yeah. The plant down the road from me makes 300 different alloys/grades of steel, sometimes 50 of them in a given month. Some they sell, some they use in specialty products. Eg, they produce rail rated for safe use down to -60 °C where that’s required. Lots of BS/MS degreed folks doing quality control and design. Their starting point is almost all recycled steel. The US produces about 80% of the steel it uses. What the US doesn’t do much of anymore is high-volume low-margin basic steel production.
You could buy that mill now if you wanted. It’s indirectly majority-owned by a couple of Russian oligarchs who are worried about asset confiscation because of the war in Ukraine.Report