Madam President, I come to the floor again today to talk about good jobs and how we can work together in responsible and bipartisan way to create the kind of high-quality, lasting middle-class jobs that all of us hear from our home states they want us to work together to produce, for America today and America tomorrow.
As someone who worked for eight years for a manufacturing company in the private sector before going into public service, I can tell you we can win in manufacturing. We can learn from our competitors. We can strengthen our workforce. We can strengthen our access to foreign markets. We can strengthen our access to credit. All of these we can do, and we can compete and win in advanced manufacturing in the United States.
One of the things about my own experience in the private sector that has really stayed with me is that more of our manufacturing employment was in Germany than in any other single country and that often seems unlikely, given that Germany actually has higher labor costs, labor protections, environmental protections, and in many ways higher costs of doing business than almost any other advanced country.
So how is it possible that they are so successful? In fact, more than twice the percentage of their GDP is in manufacturing than is the case in the United States. Why would we fight for manufacturing jobs? Why would we fight to emulate Germany’s example?
Because manufacturing jobs are great jobs. As you know, as our colleague from Maine knows well, manufacturing jobs are high-skill, high-wage, high-benefit, and have a high positive impact on their surrounding community. But they also need something. They need ongoing R&D. They need cutting edge research. They need continuous improvement and innovation in order to remain at the cutting edge of productivity.
So what we’re going to talk about here on the floor today is a bill that learns from the lessons of our most successful European competitor, Germany, where they have more than 60 manufacturing hubs located all over Germany. And these manufacturing hubs are places where universities doing cutting-edge technical research, companies beginning to deploy these new technologies in manufacturing, and the workforce that needs to acquire the skills to be successful in these new areas of manufacturing all work in coordination. That’s something that we can, by working in a bipartisan way here in this Senate, advance and advance rapidly here in the United States.
So we’re going to talk together today, the Senator from Maine and I, about a bill, the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act, which has 14 cosponsors, an indication of its broad base of bipartisan support. It has long been led by Senators Brown of Ohio and Blunt of Missouri, a bipartisan team, and they’ve added to that great initial leadership team, Senator Stabenow, Senator Levin, Senator Reed, Senator Schumer, all Democrats, and Senator Graham, Senator Kirk, Senator Collins, Senator Wicker, Senator Boozman, all Republicans, and most recently our wonderful colleague, Senator Angus King of Maine, an Independent.
This is a bill that’s been endorsed by folks ranging from the National Association of Manufacturers to the US Conference of Mayors to the United Auto Workers, and many many more organizations at the national and local level. An indicator of just how diverse its support is from across the country across many different sectors.
This is bill that I have reason to hope can, not just get a lot of endorsements from the private sector, not just a lot of endorsements from cosponsors here in the Senate, but can actually move through regular order to be taken up and considered by the committee of jurisdiction to be then taken up and considered here on the floor and actually signed into law by the President of the United States. I am hopeful that that could happen – partly because this is good policy. There are already a number of hubs that have been established by federal agencies spending money that’s already been authorized and appropriated for specific research areas where the Department of Energy and Department of Defense need do work to develop cutting-edge manufacturing capacity in the United States.
But I think if this law gets taken up on a bipartisan basis – improved, refined, debated in committee and here on the floor, we actually have a shot at a process that will be wide open, that will allow elements of the federal government in partnership with the private sector to leverage cutting-edge research to deploy whole new technologies across this country.
I am excited by it and I know my colleague is as well.
Let me briefly introduce why Senator King is a great colleague to join all of us who have served as sponsors on this bill. He’s previously worked in the private sector on clean energy; he’s previously served as the Governor of the State of Maine, and has worked closely with the University of Maine and so has a sense of how publicly funded research at a cutting-edge university, investment in workforce skills, and the deployment of new and innovative technologies and clean energy can work together to grow manufacturing, to grow job opportunities and to grow an economy.
So I’d like to invite my colleague now if he would, to address his experience in Maine and why he’s joined this broad group of cosponsors on this promising, bipartisan manufacturing bill.
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I’d like to thank my colleague from Maine for sharing his personal experience both as Governor and his work in partnership with the University of Maine and their composite center and his understanding of the importance of a modern skilled work force in order to take advantage of the work we’re hoping to catalyze through this bill.
If I were to just summarize across three large areas, this bill if enacted would take advantage of linkages, leverage, and labor in a way that would grow lasting middle-class jobs.
All of us here want to work together to find a way to give American workers and families a fair shot, to give them a fair shot at the kind of middle-class quality of life that dominated over the last 50 years. And as my colleague said, it was because of the G.I. Bill and its investment in education; it was because of innovation and competitiveness; it was because of a skilled work force, that we were really able to dominate the world in manufacturing for much of the last 50 years and the last century.
If we are to seize this moment and regain our global leadership not just in the productivity of our manufacturing but also in the base, in the employment of our manufacturing, we have to do the sorts of things that this bill imagines. We have research being done in national labs, in federally funded national labs, fundamental research that’s wonderful. We’ve got applied research on things like composites being done at the University of Delaware and the University of Maine and every other state university that does higher research. And we’ve got manufacturers trying to take advantage of new technologies and new opportunities.
The main thing this bill would do is to link them all together. To create regional hubs that allow the researchers, the private sector, and the new employees to all come together. It also, as my colleague mentioned, leverages private-sector funds. Every one of the four hubs announced to date is a more than one-to-one match, two- or four-, or in one case, of eight-to-one match of private sector dollars to public sector dollars. And last, it invests heavily in training and in skills and in making sure the workforce is ready as these new technologies get out there.
I’d like to describe the reach of some of these linkages and partnerships for a moment.
Let me just take a second and take a walking tour if I could of the four hubs that have been finalized so far. For example, the one in Youngstown, Ohio, which deals with 3D manufacturing. This is a relatively new, cutting-edge technology that radically alters the scale of early stage manufacturing, what is possible in terms of prototyping, and then I think fairly soon what is possible in terms of customized unit-by-unit manufacturing. It has enormous promise.
But if we’re going to stay competitive globally in manufacturing, when there is something new invented in the United States we have to make sure it’s made in the United States. And so this is the sort of hub that makes that possible.
There are four hubs, and I’ll mention them briefly: one in Ohio, one in Raleigh, North Carolina, one in Detroit, one in Chicago. But they don’t just engage the universities and the work force and the companies right in that immediate community. They benefit from national networks. So, for example, General Dynamics and Honeywell are two of the very large national footprint firms partnering with the Youngstown hub.
Universities from Arizona State to Florida State are collaborating in the wide band gap semiconductor work in Raleigh, North Carolina. Researchers from the University of Kentucky, University of Tennessee, Notre Dame, and Ohio State are partners with the hub that’s in Detroit. And there are researchers from Boulder, Indiana, Notre Dame, Louisville, Iowa, Nebraska, U.T.-Austin, and Wisconsin who are partnering with the hub in Chicago.
So what are these hubs? Are they just some diffuse academic team that shares names and a little bit of data with each other? No, if there were, for example, to be a hub in Maine on composites you’d find researchers at the University of Delaware who have done great work on composites and companies doing work in composites partnering with the fundamental research being done, let’s say hypothetically at the University of Maine, and learning about how to deploy that new technology in ways that would benefit the local workforce and local manufacturers. That’s why there’s so much leverage coming out of these linkages.
That’s why the hubs have been so generative, so powerful in Germany’s experience. It is a way to harness our federal investment in research by the national labs and by state universities with the energy of the private sector and the capacity of our manufacturers to relentlessly innovate. We have a very broad menu of bipartisan manufacturing bills that have been taken up and discussed in this chamber. This one, this manufacturing hubs bill, has some of the broadest support and I think some of the best reasons for it to be considered in committee and taken up on this floor later this spring, and it is my real hope that our colleagues will join us in doing so. Let me yield back to my colleague from Maine.
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I’d like to thank my colleague for joining me in this colloquy on manufacturing more broadly and more specifically on this bill.
I’m grateful for the leadership that Senator Stabenow and Senator Graham, as the co-chairs of the Senate Manufacturing Caucus, have shown, and on this particular bill the passion and the perseverance that Senators Brown and Blunt have shown in bringing this great idea into legislative form and in advancing it.
There are so many other bills that we can and should take up that will bring strength and vitality to the American manufacturing sector, but it is my real hope that S. 1468, the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act will be the next in a series of important bipartisan manufacturing bills that we will take up to make sure that we’re doing our job to help grow high-quality American jobs.