A Manufacturing Industry To Be Proud Of

The American manufacturing industry and its employees are constantly told that they need to be better competitors in the global market, that they must increase the value they add. How are they doing on that?

Something that jumps out from data about the share of global manufacturing [1] had by the United States, China and five other industrialized nations, is that the US is about even with China. As of 2008 and according to UN figures, China's manufacturing accounts for 17.3 percent of world output in dollars (though this number is slightly inflated), while the US' share is 17.7 percent. All else is rarely equal, so this is about as close as you'll get in the real world.

From a Bureau of Labor Statistics report described here [2], "By the end of 2006, China's manufacturing employment had increased once again to 112.63 million, nearly eight times the level of manufacturing employment in the United States (14.16 million)." The numbers have surely changed since then, but probably not by an order of magnitude.

Those figures could imply many things, but what they seem immediately to suggest is that American workers are extremely productive. They can produce both a high volume and high value of goods, and they have done so without getting a real raise since 1974 [3].

Yet US manufacturing workers face higher unemployment rates [4] than the national average, and often have to accept lower paying work when their plants close down, which should be no surprise. At the advice of the finance industry [5], wages and benefits have been driven down [6], policy makers were encouraged not to worry about the decline of the industrial base, and the whole thing was papered over with a massive consumer credit bubble.

Though it seems to me that any 14 million people who can give any 112 million other people a run for their money are valuable and they should have good jobs. They've proven their worth. Preserving the capacity to usefully employ them is just good sense and a worthwhile hedge against supply chain interruptions.

In any war or serious national security emergency, our extended supply chain might become a bigger deal than it's comfortable to think about. For example, as John Markoff wrote this week in the New York Times, the "Pentagon now manufactures in secure facilities run by American companies [9] only about 2 percent of the more than $3.5 billion of integrated circuits bought annually for use in military gear." (Alternate link [10].) He says there's concern in the military and intelligence communities about Trojan horses being placed in the circuits, raising the possibility of failures in times of crisis.

That could sound paranoid, but the US itself has used such Trojan horses against other countries, either to tamper with military hardware or steal information. In other words, it's been thought of, done and printed in the paper for everyone to read about a long time since.

There are things that a country should ideally make for itself.

Next are the pollution issues. Many of the developing nations whose lower labor casts initially attract US companies have very low pollution standards.

Links to this photograph series entitled, "Pollution in China", has been making their horrifying rounds lately. The 40 images document not only the signs on the landscape, but the damage to China's people; the adults and children with cancer, the birth defects, disabilities, festering sores, faces and bodies permanently caked with coal dust.

Pollution controls may be so poor even on newly constructed or expanded facilities that they pose blatant and immediate threats to local residents. The region of Sichuan still recovering from last year's deadly quake is now being poisoned by an expanded aluminum production facility [11], its permanent rain of white dust is killing crops and irritating the skin of its workers. In central China's Henan province, more lead smelters have been found releasing so much pollution that nearby children had excessive blood levels of lead [12], 178 of them requiring hospitalization. Steel manufacturing in China comprises a third of world steel production [13], but half of all steel industry CO2 pollution.

At least part of China's environmental destruction is due to poor enforcement, with multinational and Chinese firms openly flouting [14] pollution disclosure requirements instituted in 2008.

So as China's global share of pollution increases [15] and shipping pollution [16] becomes a bigger issues, both the House and Senate support for border tariffs [17] is the sensible thing to do if your concern is either cutting emissions or protecting US jobs. Even if it may irritate trading partners [18].

American workers are capable and productive. They're an asset to their country and to a world that's looking to the United States to take responsibility for our share of global pollution.

Congressional leaders who told us all it was an imperative to save the banking industry, which caused our current recession, should remember the US workers struggling to survive it when they craft a solution to our climate challenges.