The Jobs Skills Needed In The New Manufacturing - by Jerry Jasinowski
President Trump's promise to bring manufacturing jobs back to our country is encouraging and it can be done, but it will not be millions of blue collar workers toting lunch buckets into huge factories as in days of yore. Those low skills jobs are gone and are not coming back. They are, in fact, even fleeing China. No major industrialized country can afford to pay decent wages for low skill, repetitive factory jobs. Every nation that depends on them today is scrambling to move up the technology ladder as quickly as possible.
Which is what we have done and continue to do. We could and should have done it better - taking care to train displaced factory workers for new opportunities - but that is water under the bridge, gone like the runaway horses. Now we must contend with a President who is determined to bring back manufacturing though he clearly does not understand what is going on in manufacturing.
In reality, manufacturing never went away. In 2016 U.S. manufacturing hit an all-time high of production. In fact, today U.S. manufacturers produce 85 percent more goods than they did in 1987. But we are accomplishing this miracle of production with fewer people - only two-thirds of those working in 1987.
Some of those jobs were lost to foreign competition, most notably in Asia, but as a practical matter most of them were rendered obsolete by advancing technology, in particular robotics and digital technology. After many years of laborious development, robotics are coming into their own as the great new wave of the factory floor made possible by advances in digital technology.
To be sure, manufacturing remains a mainstay of the labor force employing almost 13 million people directly who in turn support another 5-6 million people in other sectors. That's a pretty good chunk of the labor force and it could be larger because there is an estimated shortage of some 500,000 manufacturing workers that is growing as an older generation passes from the scene. There is where President Trump can fulfill his promise to bring manufacturing jobs back.
The problem is that the new jobs are high skill positions that the older generation of displaced manufacturing workers cannot handle. Workers in modern manufacturing need solid backgrounds in math, science, computers and communications skills. There is no set criteria for all manufacturing, but as a rule manufacturing workers today have a two-year community college degree or a technical school equivalent.
I believe President Trump is serious about his determination to champion manufacturing and put people to work in manufacturing. To do that we need a serious commitment to education and training in advanced manufacturing skills. The new manufacturing is an integrated operation of services, digital conductivity and robotics. The most effective way for Trump to fulfill his promises to blue collar workers is to empower them to assume well-paying jobs. We need high performance workers to master evolving technology. We should commit to developing a new generation of high performance workers who can operate in the new digital manufacturing.
Jerry Jasinowski, an economist and author, served as President of the National Association of Manufacturers for 14 years and later The Manufacturing Institute. You can quote from this with attribution. Let me know if you would like to speak with Jerry. February 2017