Mr. President, I come to the floor once again to talk about manufacturing jobs. This week, under Senator Amy Klobuchar’s leadership, the Joint Economic Committee released a report that thoroughly and thoughtfully lays out why manufacturing jobs have such promise and how Congress can act to help spur manufacturing job creation now and into the future.
The report shows that today manufacturing jobs are high-quality jobs, that they pay better than jobs in any other sector in wages and benefits, and that they help create more local service sector jobs, that they contribute more to the local economy, and that manufacturers invest the most in private sector R&D of any sector in our country.
Manufacturing, as the Presiding Officer well knows, has long played an important role in our Nation’s economy, has served as our economic backbone, and has built the American middle class. But over the past 60 years, manufacturing in our country has changed, gradually and then dramatically. As our economy and the world have changed, so has the nature of manufacturing and the playing field on which we can and must compete.
Due to global competition and the worst recession since the Great Depression, we lost 6 million manufacturing jobs in the United States in the first decade of this century. We are now on our way back, but we are well short of where we were in 2000. We have gained 550,000 manufacturing jobs over the last 3 years, and that gives me real hope. In just the last 6 months, we have seen new signals that our manufacturing sector continues to be on the rebound.
A new report from the Institute for Supply Management shows the U.S. manufacturing sector grew last month at its fastest pace in 2 1/2 years, and hiring has reached an 18-month high. The value of our manufacturing exports has grown 38 percent in the last 4 years, and those exports now account for nearly 3 million jobs on American shores.
But, as the Presiding Officer and I well know and as many of our colleagues know, we need to invest more in that success and in that growth, in the private sector and in the public sector.
Overall, this is great news, about the slow, but real, steady recovery of our manufacturing sector. The reason we are coming back is the United States is actually poised to compete in advanced manufacturing, in the manufacturing economy of this century. In the 21st century, manufacturing is fundamentally different than it was in our past. Rather than repeating the same simple tasks over and over, workers must now carry out far more complex and varying tasks. They need to be critical thinkers and problem solvers. They have to do math and communicate with each other in writing and as a team and work in ways simply not expected 20 or 30 years ago. Crucially, they need to understand the entire manufacturing process in a way that wasn’t necessary before. Yes, there are machines doing a lot of work, but we need workers who can oversee them and understand them to keep our steady, growing benefits to increase productivity.
Manufacturers can’t rely on someone from outside our country to fix a problem every time there is one. Today they rely on their workers to troubleshoot on the fly. Our workers need to continue to be some of the most productive in the world and, to do that, they need to be more skilled than ever, particularly because they are overseeing highly complex operations.
The manufacturing floor today, as this report reminds us, is no longer the dirty, dingy, dangerous manufacturing workplace of 150 years ago. Today it is clean, high tech, highly productive, and it needs a highly skilled workforce. We can win by training our workers for these jobs.
While some nations engage in a race to the bottom on environmental labor and wage standards, this isn’t the playing field we can or should try to win. Fortunately, we already have the tools to lead the way in manufacturing, in an innovation-centered economy.
This Joint Economic Committee report outlines how low-energy costs, due to greatly expanded natural gas supplies, a highly skilled workforce relative to much of the rest of the world, and having still the world’s best universities, all in combination give us a real fighting chance. American manufacturing, I am convinced, is poised for a takeoff.
Now we have this report from the Joint Economic Committee which shows us just that. It shows why we should remain optimistic about American manufacturing, if we can simply in this body harness the will to act. This report frankly lays out a lot of why we have created Manufacturing Jobs for America.
Manufacturing Jobs for America is a campaign. It is a campaign to build support for good manufacturing legislation that Democrats and Republicans can agree on. So far, 26 Democratic Senators have come together to contribute 44 bills to a conversation; 31 of those bills have already been introduced in this body, and almost half of them have bipartisan cosponsors. We are actively seeking Republican cosponsors on the rest.
Our goal overall is to generate more and work more closely with Republicans to build consensus for bills that can pass the Senate, pass the House, and go to the White House to become law. We want to see manufacturing bills that can really help put Americans back to work.
I am grateful for the leadership of Senator Debbie Stabenow who, along with her cochair, Senator Lindsey Graham, led the bipartisan manufacturing caucus that is helping take great ideas and bills generated through this initiative and turn them into solid, bipartisan bills.
This Joint Economic Committee report emphasizes that there are four key areas where we have to focus to create manufacturing jobs now and in the future and they are exactly the areas that the Manufacturing Jobs for America initiative centers on as well.
First, we have to strengthen America’s workforce. Second, we have to fight for a more level global playing field so we can open markets abroad and compete successfully. Third, we need to make it easier for manufacturers–especially new and small businesses — to access capital, to invest in research and development as well as new equipment and products. Fourth, we can and should do more to ensure a coordinated, all-of-government effort in supporting manufacturing by insisting on a stronger, clearer national manufacturing strategy. Together, across these four areas, the bills in Manufacturing Jobs for America can have a real and substantial impact if they become law.
I believe in the power of this initiative because I have seen the potential of manufacturing up close. In my time in the private sector, I developed a fierce belief in how we can and must act here in Washington to support and spur American private sector manufacturing. Before I came here, much of my work in the private sector was at a manufacturing company, a materials-based science company that makes hundreds of products. At one point I was part of a site location team that had to decide where to locate a new state-of-the-art semiconductor chip packaging manufacturing plant.
What made the difference? In the ultimate decision it was first and foremost we needed a skilled and reliable workforce. Second, we wanted the State, county, and city governments to be responsive and have made investments in infrastructure. While we also of course considered tax credits and training grants, the first two really were the main factors–the skills and capabilities of the workforce at all levels and the responsiveness of the local government, the State government, and the Federal Government in investing in infrastructure.
This experience taught me two things: that the advanced manufacturing sector can thrive in the United States–that facility was located in America, not overseas; and there is a critical role for government to play. So if this Congress makes a concerted, across-the-board push to help create manufacturing jobs in America, I am convinced we can lay a strong foundation for growth today and tomorrow. The opportunity is there, just in front of us. We just need to stop the endless partisan struggles that have dominated this Congress in the last few years and seize the very real, very positive opportunity in front of us–to lay out a bipartisan path forward to strengthen the manufacturing sector in our country.
Together, we can keep our factories humming and lead the way in new industries in the future. We just need the political will to try. That is what this effort, Manufacturing Jobs for America, is all about.
I am so grateful to Senator Klobuchar and the Joint Economic Committee for the Manufacturing Jobs for The Future report and for the vision it lays out, and I appreciate the effort of all of my colleagues who contributed great and strong and clear ideas to this Manufacturing Jobs for America initiative.